Bono Read online

  Let’s say you’re his agent. How would you cast him? What sort of directors would you make him work with? What kind of partners and stories?

  Well, I think that all great actors are always themselves as well as the person they’re playing. It’s one of those great contradictions. Daniel Day-Lewis is one of my favorites. As he disappears into someone else, there’s always something that rings true, because it’s always him. So I think Larry will always have that quality going for him. The actor that he most reminds me of is David Carradine. There’s a sort of loner quality about all his roles, even when he’s in a crowd. And then, when he laughs, the whole room laughs, because something must be very funny. [bursts out laughing]

  What would be the breakout role for him?

  The highway patrolman in the middle of America. Somewhere like Aimes, Iowa. He would play the highway patrolman who is so distressed at his inability to sort out his local neighborhood, because the farms are closing down, and finally one day he cracks and starts to plan how he’s going to rob the local bank.

  And what should I be wary of about him?

  I’d say . . . don’t ask him to do Shakespeare! [laughs]

  And why is that?

  Because he’s not an “ac-TOR.” “Ac-TOR” is the man who likes the sound of his own voice. You know, the people in theaters. [puts on voice] “Hello-o, da-aa-rling . . .” The air kissing . . . He’s not an “ac-TOR,” he’s an “acteur.”

  And eventually, you, Bono, you’ve become a top insurance salesman in our company. We’re about to hire you as the head of our new venture in online insurance. Does that sound like a good idea to your fellow musicians and Paul McGuinness? What would they say?

  They would say: why should we buy insurance from somebody who had never taken any out?

  4. WHO’S THE ELVIS HERE?

  The next conversation is the third installment from that November afternoon we spent in Killiney in 2002. You’ll notice that the mood got heavier. Luckily, we had the MTV awards, pizza, Christina Aguilera, and a few glasses of Chablis to lighten things up.

  Your picture has recently appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the tag-line: “Can Bono save the world?” You have taken a part-time job as a world ambassador for the DATA organization (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa—but also Democracy, Accountability, and Transparency for Africa), a group you co-founded with Bobby Shriver. Before we discuss the roots of your involvement in humanitarian action, I have to ask: Don’t you ever feel like the world is just shit and nothing can be done about it?

  I do get depressed on occasion, a bit black about the uphill nature of this particular struggle. What we’re talking about, in DATA though, in the end, comes from a great tradition. It’s the journey of equality. Equality is an idea that was first really expressed by the Jews when God told them that everyone was equal in His eyes. A preposterous idea then and still hard to hang on to now. You can imagine these farmers standing there with sheep shit on their shoes in front of Pharaoh. And Pharaoh would say: “You are equal to me?” And they’d look in their book and they’d go: “That’s what it says here.” After a while, people accepted that, though not easily. Rich and poor were equal in God’s eyes. But not blacks! Black people can’t be equal. Not women! You’re not asking us to accept that?! You see, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, we have to accept this: it says that everyone is equal. Now most people accept that women, blacks, Irish, and Jews are equal, but only within these borders. I’m not sure we accept that Africans are equal.

  I’m not sure about what you’re saying either.

  Right now there is the biggest pandemic in the history of civilization, happening in the world now with AIDS. It’s bigger than the Black Death, which took a third of Europe in the Middle Ages. Sixty-five hundred Africans are dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease. And it is not a priority for the West: two 9/11s a day, eighteen jumbo jets of fathers, mothers, families falling out of the sky. No tears, no letters of condolence, no fifty-one-gun salutes. Why? Because we don’t put the same value on African life as we put on a European or an American life. God will not let us get away with this, history certainly won’t let us get away with our excuses. We say we can’t get these antiretroviral drugs to the farthest reaches of Africa, but we can get them our cold fizzy drinks. The tiniest village, you can find a bottle of Coke. Look, if we really thought that an African life was equal in value to an English, a French, or an Irish life, we wouldn’t let two and a half million Africans die every year for the stupidest of reasons: money. We just wouldn’t. And a very prominent head of state said to me: “It’s true. If these people weren’t Africans, we just couldn’t let it happen.” We don’t really deep down believe in their equality.

  Who said that?

  I can’t say . . . but it was a head of state who was ashamed. It actually scandalized him. We have written off Africans. So the next step in the journey of equality is to get to a place where we accept that you cannot choose your neighbor. In the Global Village, distance no longer decides who is your neighbor, and “Love thy neighbor” is not advice, it’s a command.

  You’re from the same country as Jonathan Swift. You know he had no hope in the human race . . .

  “Eat the rich” was a classic. What a great line!

  I read Gulliver’s Travels when I was fifteen, and I found it said a lot about mankind’s evil nature. But then, I’m much more of a pessimist than you are.

  But it looked impossible for African Americans to have emancipation from slavery! The idea that women would have a vote and run corporations and be prime minister of England, even fifty years ago, was a very hard thing to accept.

  I see your point. We’ve certainly witnessed changes, and maybe we’re more generous than our grandparents.

  I don’t know about that. But what we can say is that there has been in the areas of equality a lot of progress.

  My objection is that different civilizations don’t keep the same pace. That is what history shows. We in Western Europe and North America live in a postmodern world, whereas Africa lingers on in the Middle Age, or pre–Middle Age. So however well-intentioned we may be, there is an unbridgeable gap. So how do you think we can come to understand each other?

  But why is Africa pre–Middle Age? The answer to that question is historical. And let me illustrate this. [Bono abruptly gets up and calls out to his daughter] Jojo! Jordan! [He leaves the room and climbs up the stairs. He returns more than a minute later, bringing back a school manual. He sits down again and starts to leaf through it.] This is a fifteen-year-old’s geography textbook. I was looking at this today, and it tells about it exactly. [Eventually finds the passage and proceeds to read out] “Income gap. Two hundred years ago, it appears that very little difference existed in living standards between the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere. Today, a very wide income gap exists: the North is many times richer than the South. What brought about this gap? The answer seems to lie in colonialism, trade, and debt.” They’re explaining to this fifteen-year-old kid how the reason why Africa is still in the Middle Age is largely to do with us, and our exploitation through French and British colonialism, but also in their present exploitation of unfair trade agreements, or old debts. You can’t fix every problem. But the ones you can, you must. To the degree we are responsible, we must fix. When you ask me to just accept that civilizations are just at a different level, there is a reason why they are. That is my answer.

  OK. But let’s try this from a different angle. You know that colonialism in France, in the late nineteenth century, was considered a left-wing idea. It was championed by humanitarians.

  [laughs] You wanna ask the Africans! Did they feel it was humanitarian?

  I’m just telling you what the thinking was at the time in France.

  Some people wanted to bring wealth and development to those populations. It may sound unacceptable to our modern ears, because of the evils concealed or brought about. But if you read the literature from that time, you wo
uld see that some of the colonialists were actually idealists . . .

  What colonies did France have? Algeria, Côte-d’Ivoire . . . How many? Vietnam . . . France was very generous to a lot of countries there. [laughs]But there were many excuses for it! The missions . . . to bring Christianity to the Dark Continent.

  Sure, and to bring them the benefits of Western civilization. I’m not saying we have to endorse that today.

  But in return, they were robbed of their natural resources: gold, silver, and finally the right to rule themselves. So, however way it was coached or described, in the end, this movement set back that continent by hundreds and hundreds of years. Civilization did not come with colonialism. That’s patently clear.

  All noble ideas inevitably carry with them the weight of evil.

  Why?

  Well, look at communism, for instance. Or, you’re often telling people that the United States were a great idea, but look at all the wrongs it caused. I don’t think you can look at history in a black-and-white way. Every good thing has a dark side.

  Right.

  Some would say the United States based itself on the killing and the extermination of native populations.

  Yes. I think most Americans would admit that America had a bloody beginning, not the founding fathers, but what came after. And the blood is still crying from the ground. Even today the level of violence and gun crime is extraordinary. You wonder if there isn’t some kind of relationship with its violent past. However, outside of that genocide, the peoples who made America their New World came to cling to the idea that everyone could be equal. They might have inherited some bad Karma from the abuse of native culture and peoples, but they were holding on to an idea very tightly as they arrived on the shore and ports of America, and it was equality. I guess politically it’s an idea that came from France originally, and it is still one of the hardest ideas to live up to. It’s a shame there was a layer before it got there, of abuse, but that does not contaminate the idea. The idea is pure. The place where it was executed may not have been.

  Napoleon was the product of noble ideals as well.

  [interrupting] I like little guys with big ideas! [laughs]

  But his campaigns killed hundreds of thousands of people! It’s the equivalent of a genocide. But Napoleon still had many supporters among the conquered peoples, because he was spreading the ideals of the French Revolution, like freedom over tyranny. Generous ideas quite often bring about bloody results. So often, the good and the bad are closely intertwined.

  I think you underestimate evil.

  Right, it’s true. Look: evil encroaches in tiny footsteps on every great idea. And evil can almost outrun most great ideas, but finally, in the end, there is light in the world. I accept God chooses to work with some pretty poor material. But I’m much more amazed by what people are capable of than I am by what they’re not capable of, which is to say evil doesn’t surprise me. The jungle is never far from the surface of our skin. No, I’m never surprised by evil, but I’m much more excited about what people are capable of. And we’re talking about the journey of equality here. Well, it’s ongoing. There’s been some incredible progress but, I’ll accept, just more than there has been terrible regression. You’re right. With science comes E=C2, out of which we have fusion. You know that famous quote from Oppenheimer? In July 1945, at the testing of the first nuclear experiment, in the desert of Alamogordo, in New Mexico, when he realized what his science had uncovered, he made the famous quote from the Bhagavad Gita, the Indian holy book: “I have become Death itself.”* So . . . Please, please, please! Don’t ever see me as a sort of wide-eyed idealist who only sees the good in people. Cockeyed, maybe.

  It’s a very important point.

  I do see the good in people, but I also see the bad—I see it in myself. I know what I’m capable of, good and bad. It’s very important that we make that clear. Just because I often find a way around the darkness doesn’t mean that I don’t know it’s there.

  How do you find your way through darkness? I guess, just like anyone, you stumble from time to time.

  I try to make the light brighter.

  And what does the trick for you? Give me an example.

  Harry Belafonte is one of my great heroes. He’s an old-school leftist and holds on to certain principles like others hold on to their life. He told me this story about Bobby Kennedy, which changed my life indeed, pointed me in the direction I am going now politically. Harry remembered a meeting with Martin Luther King when the civil rights movement had hit a wall in the early sixties: [impersonating croaky voice of Belafonte] “I tell you it was a depressing moment when Bobby Kennedy was made attorney general. It was a very bad day for the civil rights movement.” And I said: “Why was that?” He said: “Oh, you see, you forget. Bobby Kennedy was Irish. Those Irish were real racists; they didn’t like the black man. They were just one step above the black man on the social ladder, and they made us feel it. They were all the police, they were the people who broke our balls on a daily basis. Bobby at that time was famously not interested in the civil rights movement. We knew we were in deep trouble. We were crestfallen, in despair, talking to Martin, moaning and groaning about the turn of events, when Dr. King slammed his hand down and ordered us to stop the bitchin’: “Enough of this,” he said. “Is there nobody here who’s got something good to say about Bobby Kennedy?” We said: “Martin, that’s what we’re telling ya! There is no one. There is nothing good to say about him. The guy’s an Irish Catholic conservative badass, he’s bad news.” To which Martin replied: “Well, then, let’s call this meeting to a close. We will readjourn when somebody has found one thing redeeming to say about Bobby Kennedy, because that, my friends, is the door through which our movement will pass.” So he stopped the meeting and he made them all go home. He wouldn’t hear any more negativity about Bobby Kennedy. He knew there must be something positive. And if it was there, somebody could find it.

  Did they ever find anything redeeming about Bobby Kennedy?

  Well, it turned out that Bobby was very close with his bishop. So they befriended the one man who could get through to Bobby’s soul and turned him into their Trojan horse. They sort of ganged up on this bishop, the civil rights religious people, and got the bishop to speak to Bobby. Harry became emotional at the end of this tale: “When Bobby Kennedy lay dead on a Los Angeles pavement, there was no greater friend to the civil rights movement. There was no one we owed more of our progress to than that man,” which is what I always thought. I mean, Bobby Kennedy is still an inspiration to me. And whether he was exaggerating or not, that was a great lesson for me, because what Dr. King was saying was: Don’t respond to caricature—the Left, the Right, the Progressives, the Reactionary. Don’t take people on rumor. Find the light in them, because that will further your cause. And I’ve held on to that very tightly, that lesson. And so, don’t think that I don’t understand. I know what I’m up against. I just sometimes do not appear to.

  I think that someone in your position has the ability to do things that other people can’t. People who run relief agencies don’t get to talk to Tony Blair. Still, aren’t you in danger of being used by those politicians, who will in the end do what they have been elected to do, which sometimes isn’t a lot?

  I’m available to be used, that is the deal here. I’ll step out with anyone, but I’m not a cheap date. I know that I’m being used, and it’s just at what price.

  So what’s the price?

  Well, as an example, so far, from the work DATA has been involved in with others, we got in late 2002 an extra five billion dollars from the United States for the poorest of the poor, and a commitment for another twenty billion over the next few years in a combination of increased aid to countries tackling corruption and a historic AIDS initiative. From a conservative administration, that was unthinkable in the development community. Even a year ago [2004].

  Would it have been possible if you hadn’t represented that organization?

  A lot o
f people were involved, but I think most would agree that we helped dramatize in a new way as justice rather than charity, as something the Left and Right could work on together, getting radical student activists to work together with conservative church groups. We had rock stars, economists, popes, and politicians all singing off the same hymn sheet.

  Did this start with the Drop the Debt campaign?

  I was talking about DATA in the U.S., but you’re right, the model was formed by Jubilee 2000 in Europe in their campaign to eliminate Third World debt. In 1997, I was asked to help out in a campaign to use the occasion of the millennium to cancel the chronic debt burdens of the poorest countries on the planet to the richest. Politicians were looking for something dramatic to mark that moment. It would be the abolition of an economic slavery. Some of the countries like Tanzania or Zambia were spending twice as much of their national income servicing old Cold War loans than they were on the health and education of their populace. It was obscene.

  But what is it exactly that made them borrow so much in the first place?

  Well, you can say it was irresponsible borrowing, but it was also irresponsible lending. In the sixties and the seventies, the West was throwing money at any African country who wasn’t siding with the Communists. The Cold War was being fought in Africa. People like Mobutu, the dictator in what was then called Zaire, stashed this money in Swiss bank accounts and let his people starve to death. It is completely unacceptable to make the grandchildren of those bad decisions pay the price for that. As I say, this was not about charity, this was about justice.

  How much have you succeeded in canceling?

  About one-third of all such debts, which adds up to a hundred billion dollars’ worth.

  And you feel you were an important part of that success.

  In truth, I think the place where I had the most impact was the United States. The movement already had a lot of momentum in Europe and especially the U.K., but in the U.S., Jubilee 2000 had been a lot slower to catch on. We were running out of time to grow the grass roots. I had to go straight to the decision-makers, or at the very least the people who knew those decision-makers.