HARRY BROWNE is a lecturer in the School of Creative Arts and Media at Dublin Institute of Technology. His journalism has appeared in CounterPunch, the Dublin Review and many Irish newspapers. Born in Italy and raised in the United States, he has lived in Ireland since the mid-1980s. His previous book is Hammered by the Irish: How the Pitstop Ploughshares Disabled a US War-Plane – With Ireland’s Blessing.
COUNTERBLASTS is a series of short, polemical titles that aims to revive a tradition inaugurated by Puritan and Leveller pamphleteers in the seventeenth century, when, in the words of one of their number, Gerard Winstanley, the old world was ‘running up like parchment in the fire’. From 1640 to 1663, a leading bookseller and publisher, George Thomason, recorded that his collection alone contained over twenty thousand pamphlets. Such polemics reappeared both before and during the French, Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions of the last century.
In a period where politicians, media barons and their ideological hirelings rarely challenge the basis of existing society, it is time to revive the tradition. Verso’s Counterblasts will challenge the apologists of Empire and Capital.
The Frontman:
Bono (In the Name of Power)
Harry Browne
CONTENTS
Introduction: ‘This is not a rebel song’
‘What a thrill for four Irish boys from the northside of Dublin…’
Where the Cheats Have No Shame
Property Baron
After the Deluge
2 Africa
Do They Know It’s Christmas?
Bad
Into Ethiopia
‘I’m not a cheap date’
Hearing AIDS
Making History
Seeing (RED)
Editorial Control
More Baggage
Another Edun
3 The World
Beautiful Day
Wealth
Elevation
Zoorophilia
The Spiritual American
More War
Dreaming with Obama
Cui bono?
Grassroots
With or Without You
Acknowledgements
Notes
Copyright
INTRODUCTION: ‘THIS IS NOT A REBEL SONG’
Celebrity philanthropy comes in many guises, but perhaps no single figure better encapsulates its delusions, pretensions and misdirections than does the lead singer of rock band U2, Paul Hewson, aka Bono.
That’s because Bono is more than a mere giver of charity – indeed, his fame in this realm has nothing to do with the spending of his own considerable fortune on the needs of the poor. He is, instead, an ‘advocate’, and as such has become a symbol of the essentially benign character of the West’s rich elite, ever ready to help the world’s poor – just waiting for a little encouragement, and a few good ideas, to eliminate hunger and poverty forever. This makes him an ideal frontman for a system of imperial exploitation and war whose depredations and depravity remain as savage as ever.
Bono’s own description of what he does for a living is ‘travelling salesman’, latest in a line:
A lot of our family are traveling salesmen. And of course that is what I have become! I am very much a traveling salesman. And that, if you really want to know, is how I see myself. I sell songs from door to door, from town to town. I sell melodies and words. And for me, in my political work, I sell ideas. In the commercial world that I’m entering into, I’m also selling ideas. So I see myself in a long line of family sales people.1
He has certainly been a more-than-competent seller of his musical work, and of himself. In his own version of the metaphor, politically he travels the world selling ideas about how to help the world’s poor – selling them mainly to the powerful people and institutions that can turn those ideas into reality. This is at best a partial account, however: in reality the idea that he is most seriously engaged in selling is the one about how those powerful people and institutions are genuinely committed to making the world a more just and equitable place. And he’s selling that to us.
Bono is nothing if not cosmopolitan. As an Americanised Irishman who has conspicuously joined forces with the British government in the past and is linked in the public eye with the fate of Africa, Bono is among the most thoroughly transatlantic of elite figures. (Former Irish attorney-general Peter Sutherland, chairman of Goldman Sachs International, ex-chairman of BP, and
