Seshmeister
05-30-2005, 08:37 PM
From yesterdays Sunday Times.
I don't think you're gonna like this FORD...:)
The day the Pope stole my shades
Bono, rock star and champion of the poor, tellls Michka Assayas the secrets of his pursuit of the powerful
One question I always used to ask when I started wandering around the corridors of power in Washington was: “Who’s the Elvis here?” In whatever area I was, I wanted to know who’s the boss, who’s the capo di tutti capi.
“Who’s Elvis,” I used to ask, at banking? And they’d say: “Well, in development, it’s the World Bank, it’s Jim Wolfensohn, it’s the people running the International Monetary Fund.”
It’s Robert Rubin, who was the treasury secretary of the United States, his signature was on every dollar; it’s Paul Volcker, who was the legendary chairman of the Federal Reserve, the Alan Greenspan of his age. So I used to go and meet them.
It wasn’t enough just to talk to President Clinton. Oddly enough, Bill Clinton’s staff used to call him Elvis anyway.
You went from friend of Bill Clinton to flashing a peace sign in a photo op with George W Bush.
I was in a photo with President Bush because he’d put $10 billion over three years on the table in a breakthrough increase in foreign assistance called the Millennium Challenge. I had just got back from accompanying the president as he announced this at the Inter-American Development Bank.
I kept my face straight as we passed the press corps, but the peace sign was pretty funny. He thought so, too. Keeping his face straight, he whispered, “There goes a front page somewhere: Irish rock star with the Toxic Texan.”
I think the swagger and the cowboy boots come with some humour. He is a funny guy. Even on the way to the bank he was taking the piss. The bulletproof motorcade is speeding through the streets of the capital with people waving at the leader of the free world, and him waving back.
I say: “You’re pretty popular here!”
He goes: “It wasn’t always so . . .” — Oh really? — “Yeah. When I first came to this town, people used to wave at me with one finger. Now, they found another three fingers and a thumb.”
So you liked this man?
Yes. As a man, I believed him when he said he was moved to also do something about the Aids pandemic. I believed him. Listen, I couldn’t come from a more different place, politically, socially, geographically. I had to make a leap of faith to sit there. He didn’t have to have me there at all. But you don’t have to be harmonious on everything — just one thing — to get along with someone.
Harry Belafonte, one of my great heroes, an old-school leftist, told me a 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: “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.
“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 re-adjourn 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’.”
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.
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.”
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 rumour. Find the light in them, because that will further your cause.
What was your gut feeling the first time you came face to face with President Bush?
He was very funny and quick. Just quick-witted. With him, I got pretty quickly to the point, and the point was an unarguable one — that 6,500 people dying every day of a preventable and treatable disease [Aids] would not be acceptable anywhere else in the world other than Africa, and that before God and history this was a kind of racism that was unacceptable.
And he agreed: “Yeah, it’s unacceptable.” He said: “In fact, it’s a kind of genocide.”
He used the word “genocide”, which I took to imply our complicity in this, which I absolutely agree with. Later, his staff tried to take the edge off the word. But in the Rose Garden there was press, and I already had used the word.
He really helped us in using that word. He knew it was hyperbole, but it was effective. We get on very well. I couldn’t come from a more different place. We disagree on so many things. But he was moved by my account of what was happening in Africa. He was engaged.
I think, when I’m sitting two feet from someone, I could tell if this was just politics. This was personal. I think, for all the swagger, this Texan thing, he has a religious instinct that keeps him humble.
You mean that right-wing fundamentalist neocon scary stuff?[/i][/b]
Actually, he’s a Methodist. It has to be said that most of the people in the cabinet are not religious extremists.
But you must have disagreed with him at some point.
He banged the table at me once, when I was ranting at him about the ARVs [Aids drugs] not getting out quick enough. I’m Irish. When we get excited we don’t pause for breath, no full stops or commas. He banged the table to ask me to let him reply. He smilingly reminded me he was the president. It was a heated debate. I was very impressed that he could get so passionate. And, let’s face it, tolerating an Irish rock star is not a necessity of his office.
You recently met Senator Jesse Helms, who as chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee in the Eighties did whatever he could to suppress the Sandinistas.
People said to me: this is the devil himself you’re going to meet, and his politics are just right of Attila the Hun. But I found him to be a beautiful man with convictions that I wouldn’t all agree with but had to accept that he believed in them passionately.
This is happening to me a lot. I am discovering how much respect I have for people who stay true to their convictions, no matter how unpopular. As you get older, your idea of good guys and bad guys changes.
Jesse Helms did me and everyone working on the global Aids emergency a great favour when he came out in our support. It was a great irony for me to find myself feeling such affection for this old cold warrior.
He did an incredible thing: he publicly repented for the way he had thought about HIV/Aids. Politicians rarely do that. He really changed the way people on the right thought about this disease.
What sort of vibe did you get when you saw Clinton for the first time?
It was a hot day in DC, and I hadn’t expected it to be. I was wearing a blue cashmere coat, which I thought was pretty smart.
But because it was so hot I had to take it off, leaving me with a T-shirt, combat pants and boots in the Oval Office. So I looked like a member of our road crew.
I thought that he looked more like a pop star than I did, because I really did look like I’d come out from under a car. His staff and he himself just burst out laughing.
We wrote many letters, we corresponded, we talked. But until after he left office I never knew how hard he had to fight for debt cancellation. I remember his chief economic adviser, Gene Sperling, told me just how frustrated the president was at not being able to further my proposal.
At one point I had sent him a letter. Gene was called up to the top cabin in Air Force One, and the president was screaming at him at the top of his voice, pointing at my letter, going: “Why aren’t we doing this?”
So, you know, that would give you faith that a person with so much on his mind and plate had not just an ear for the melody but a heart for the world’s poor, and be banging the table in frustration at his own civil service’s inability to work it through.
Did Germany’s Chancellor Gerhard Schröder catch on to a melody you sang to him?
I only met him a few times. We drank beer the first time. On other occasions he wasn’t so relaxed. I suppose it’s hard to relax when someone like me has their hand in your pocket.
Have you tried to put your hand in [President] Putin’s pocket? I hear he’s a black belt of karate.
He did ask me to go to work for him on Russia’s debt. He was joking, and I laughed, creating one of the worst moments for me ever captured in a photograph.
Tony Blair had introduced me and Bob Geldof to him. It was a G8 meeting in Genoa. The city looked like a war zone. A lot of people got hurt in riots. A young man lost his life to an Italian policeman, and I was documented the other side of the riot line, laughing with the politicians. I did not know about this tragedy at the time, but it is an example of how my glad-handing and discussion approach can be badly misinterpreted and how sometimes I’m not as smart as I think.
Putin was an expert. He was meticulously turned out, not a nose hair out of place, obviously a very big brain, and very charming. I wasn’t there to talk about Chechnya. Maybe I shouldn’t have been there at all.
Do you get a lot of flak from the aggressive left? In those moments you’re a long way from the barricades.
I know it would look much better for me to be standing handkerchief over my nose and a molotov cocktail in my hand. But my deepest conviction is that making our intellectual case rigorous and keeping our support broad by a large peaceful grassroots movement is the only way we’ll get this job done. It doesn’t belong to the left or right.
But isn’t the left more your friend than the right?
Not necessarily so. The left may offer more money to fight Aids or deal with the debt burden, but they scuttle off when we talk to them about trade reform. The CAP [common agricultural policy] — so supported by the left — denies African products access to our supermarket shelves while we flood them with subsidised produce.
So who’s your favourite politician?
It would have to be Gorbachev, a genuinely soulful man who, following the courage of his convictions, left himself so open to criticism in what was the USSR. Some people despise him for the dismantling of that old giant. But without him the 20th century might have had a very different end.
We talk every few months, even now. He came to Ireland once and I forgot to tell Ali [Mrs Bono] he might call. It was Sunday lunch. Sundays it’s like a train station in our house. People call over to sit around, eat lunch, drink wine. The front doorbell rang. Ali answered the door, not expecting to see the former head of the Soviet bloc standing with a giant teddy bear, his present for our baby John.
I know Ali does a lot of work in Russia, “the Children of Chernobyl”.
She regularly drives convoys of supplies from Ireland to Russia, and they bring back sick children for holidays in Ireland. The really mad thing was one of her favourite children of Belarus, Anastasia, was staying with us at the time.
We were all sitting around the table, with President Gorbachev nursing an Irish whiskey, some old friends, when in walked on her calipers Anastasia. She was born without legs from the knees down, part of the problem of radioactive land where she grew up.
Gorbachev couldn’t believe what was happening to him when we explained who she was. He was visibly moved. He lifted her up onto his knee and told the table that he could divide his life into two halves: before and after Chernobyl. It was the moment he realised the Soviet Union couldn’t continue as it was.
That man had had his finger on the second-largest nuclear arsenal in the world.
I asked him about that: did he ever come close to opening that box? He looked at me straight in the eye and said there could and never would be an occasion to use that power, and that from a very young age he had known this was madness. I also asked him: did he believe in God? He said: “No, but I believe in the universe.”
And what do you believe in?
Well, I think I know what God is. God is love, and as much as I respond in allowing myself to be transformed by that love and acting in that love, that’s my religion.
Religion can be the enemy of God. It’s often what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building. A list of instructions where there was once was conviction; dogma where once people just did it; a congregation led by a man where once they were led by the Holy Spirit. Discipline replacing discipleship. Why are you chuckling?
I was wondering if you said all of that to the Pope the day you met him.
I was with a few great people: Jeff Sachs, the economist; Bob Geldof; Quincy Jones [the musician], who’s been a mentor to me — a deadly serious man, but he kept whispering to me to check out the Holy Father’s shoes: ox-blood loafers.
“These are some funky slippers,” he was saying.
There were some nervous giggles, but we all knew why we were there. The pontiff was about to make an important statement about the inhumanity and injustice of poor countries spending so much of their national income paying back old loans to rich countries. Serious business.
He was fighting hard against his Parkinson’s. It was clearly an act of will for him to be there. I was oddly moved . . . by his humility, and then by the incredible speech he made, even if it was in whispers.
During the preamble, he seemed to be staring at me. I wondered. Was it the fact that I was wearing my blue fly-shades? So I took them off in case I was causing some offence. When I was introduced to him he was still staring at them. He kept looking at them in my hand, so I offered them to him as a gift in return for the rosary he had just given me.
Not only did he put them on, he smiled the wickedest grin you could ever imagine. He was a comedian. His sense of humour was completely intact. Flashbulbs popped, and I thought: “Wow! The Drop the Debt campaign will have the Pope in my glasses on the
front page of every newspaper.”
I don’t remember seeing that photograph anywhere.
Nor did we. It seems his courtiers did not have the same sense of humour.
A few years ago, Q magazine ran a list of the most powerful people in the music business. And higher than Madonna or the chairman of Sony Music was Bono. So do you think you are one of the most powerful men in the world today?
I don’t have any real power, but the people I represent do. The reason why politicians let me in the door, and the reason why people will take my call, is because I represent quite a large constituency of people. I do not control that constituency, but I represent them in a certain sense, even without them asking me to, in the minds of the people whose doors I knock upon.
That constituency is a very powerful one, because it is a constituency of people from 18 to 30, who are the floating vote. They have not yet made their mind up which way they’re going to vote. They’re the most open-minded, and that’s why politicians pay attention to what’s going on in contemporary culture and what a rock star might have to do with all of this: because of the people I represent.
Now, outside of that, I represent a lot of people who have no voice at all. In the world’s order of things, they’re the people who count the least. There are 6,500 people who are dying every day of Aids in Africa for no good reason. I now represent them. They haven’t asked me either. It’s cheeky, but I hope they’re glad I do, and in God’s order of things, they’re the most important.
So I think that imbues you with a power way beyond anything that you might have an influence on, being in a pop band. It’s a certain moral authority that’s way beyond your own life and capabilities.
The punch you throw is not your own. It has the force of a much bigger issue.
I don't think you're gonna like this FORD...:)
The day the Pope stole my shades
Bono, rock star and champion of the poor, tellls Michka Assayas the secrets of his pursuit of the powerful
One question I always used to ask when I started wandering around the corridors of power in Washington was: “Who’s the Elvis here?” In whatever area I was, I wanted to know who’s the boss, who’s the capo di tutti capi.
“Who’s Elvis,” I used to ask, at banking? And they’d say: “Well, in development, it’s the World Bank, it’s Jim Wolfensohn, it’s the people running the International Monetary Fund.”
It’s Robert Rubin, who was the treasury secretary of the United States, his signature was on every dollar; it’s Paul Volcker, who was the legendary chairman of the Federal Reserve, the Alan Greenspan of his age. So I used to go and meet them.
It wasn’t enough just to talk to President Clinton. Oddly enough, Bill Clinton’s staff used to call him Elvis anyway.
You went from friend of Bill Clinton to flashing a peace sign in a photo op with George W Bush.
I was in a photo with President Bush because he’d put $10 billion over three years on the table in a breakthrough increase in foreign assistance called the Millennium Challenge. I had just got back from accompanying the president as he announced this at the Inter-American Development Bank.
I kept my face straight as we passed the press corps, but the peace sign was pretty funny. He thought so, too. Keeping his face straight, he whispered, “There goes a front page somewhere: Irish rock star with the Toxic Texan.”
I think the swagger and the cowboy boots come with some humour. He is a funny guy. Even on the way to the bank he was taking the piss. The bulletproof motorcade is speeding through the streets of the capital with people waving at the leader of the free world, and him waving back.
I say: “You’re pretty popular here!”
He goes: “It wasn’t always so . . .” — Oh really? — “Yeah. When I first came to this town, people used to wave at me with one finger. Now, they found another three fingers and a thumb.”
So you liked this man?
Yes. As a man, I believed him when he said he was moved to also do something about the Aids pandemic. I believed him. Listen, I couldn’t come from a more different place, politically, socially, geographically. I had to make a leap of faith to sit there. He didn’t have to have me there at all. But you don’t have to be harmonious on everything — just one thing — to get along with someone.
Harry Belafonte, one of my great heroes, an old-school leftist, told me a 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: “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.
“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 re-adjourn 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’.”
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.
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.”
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 rumour. Find the light in them, because that will further your cause.
What was your gut feeling the first time you came face to face with President Bush?
He was very funny and quick. Just quick-witted. With him, I got pretty quickly to the point, and the point was an unarguable one — that 6,500 people dying every day of a preventable and treatable disease [Aids] would not be acceptable anywhere else in the world other than Africa, and that before God and history this was a kind of racism that was unacceptable.
And he agreed: “Yeah, it’s unacceptable.” He said: “In fact, it’s a kind of genocide.”
He used the word “genocide”, which I took to imply our complicity in this, which I absolutely agree with. Later, his staff tried to take the edge off the word. But in the Rose Garden there was press, and I already had used the word.
He really helped us in using that word. He knew it was hyperbole, but it was effective. We get on very well. I couldn’t come from a more different place. We disagree on so many things. But he was moved by my account of what was happening in Africa. He was engaged.
I think, when I’m sitting two feet from someone, I could tell if this was just politics. This was personal. I think, for all the swagger, this Texan thing, he has a religious instinct that keeps him humble.
You mean that right-wing fundamentalist neocon scary stuff?[/i][/b]
Actually, he’s a Methodist. It has to be said that most of the people in the cabinet are not religious extremists.
But you must have disagreed with him at some point.
He banged the table at me once, when I was ranting at him about the ARVs [Aids drugs] not getting out quick enough. I’m Irish. When we get excited we don’t pause for breath, no full stops or commas. He banged the table to ask me to let him reply. He smilingly reminded me he was the president. It was a heated debate. I was very impressed that he could get so passionate. And, let’s face it, tolerating an Irish rock star is not a necessity of his office.
You recently met Senator Jesse Helms, who as chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee in the Eighties did whatever he could to suppress the Sandinistas.
People said to me: this is the devil himself you’re going to meet, and his politics are just right of Attila the Hun. But I found him to be a beautiful man with convictions that I wouldn’t all agree with but had to accept that he believed in them passionately.
This is happening to me a lot. I am discovering how much respect I have for people who stay true to their convictions, no matter how unpopular. As you get older, your idea of good guys and bad guys changes.
Jesse Helms did me and everyone working on the global Aids emergency a great favour when he came out in our support. It was a great irony for me to find myself feeling such affection for this old cold warrior.
He did an incredible thing: he publicly repented for the way he had thought about HIV/Aids. Politicians rarely do that. He really changed the way people on the right thought about this disease.
What sort of vibe did you get when you saw Clinton for the first time?
It was a hot day in DC, and I hadn’t expected it to be. I was wearing a blue cashmere coat, which I thought was pretty smart.
But because it was so hot I had to take it off, leaving me with a T-shirt, combat pants and boots in the Oval Office. So I looked like a member of our road crew.
I thought that he looked more like a pop star than I did, because I really did look like I’d come out from under a car. His staff and he himself just burst out laughing.
We wrote many letters, we corresponded, we talked. But until after he left office I never knew how hard he had to fight for debt cancellation. I remember his chief economic adviser, Gene Sperling, told me just how frustrated the president was at not being able to further my proposal.
At one point I had sent him a letter. Gene was called up to the top cabin in Air Force One, and the president was screaming at him at the top of his voice, pointing at my letter, going: “Why aren’t we doing this?”
So, you know, that would give you faith that a person with so much on his mind and plate had not just an ear for the melody but a heart for the world’s poor, and be banging the table in frustration at his own civil service’s inability to work it through.
Did Germany’s Chancellor Gerhard Schröder catch on to a melody you sang to him?
I only met him a few times. We drank beer the first time. On other occasions he wasn’t so relaxed. I suppose it’s hard to relax when someone like me has their hand in your pocket.
Have you tried to put your hand in [President] Putin’s pocket? I hear he’s a black belt of karate.
He did ask me to go to work for him on Russia’s debt. He was joking, and I laughed, creating one of the worst moments for me ever captured in a photograph.
Tony Blair had introduced me and Bob Geldof to him. It was a G8 meeting in Genoa. The city looked like a war zone. A lot of people got hurt in riots. A young man lost his life to an Italian policeman, and I was documented the other side of the riot line, laughing with the politicians. I did not know about this tragedy at the time, but it is an example of how my glad-handing and discussion approach can be badly misinterpreted and how sometimes I’m not as smart as I think.
Putin was an expert. He was meticulously turned out, not a nose hair out of place, obviously a very big brain, and very charming. I wasn’t there to talk about Chechnya. Maybe I shouldn’t have been there at all.
Do you get a lot of flak from the aggressive left? In those moments you’re a long way from the barricades.
I know it would look much better for me to be standing handkerchief over my nose and a molotov cocktail in my hand. But my deepest conviction is that making our intellectual case rigorous and keeping our support broad by a large peaceful grassroots movement is the only way we’ll get this job done. It doesn’t belong to the left or right.
But isn’t the left more your friend than the right?
Not necessarily so. The left may offer more money to fight Aids or deal with the debt burden, but they scuttle off when we talk to them about trade reform. The CAP [common agricultural policy] — so supported by the left — denies African products access to our supermarket shelves while we flood them with subsidised produce.
So who’s your favourite politician?
It would have to be Gorbachev, a genuinely soulful man who, following the courage of his convictions, left himself so open to criticism in what was the USSR. Some people despise him for the dismantling of that old giant. But without him the 20th century might have had a very different end.
We talk every few months, even now. He came to Ireland once and I forgot to tell Ali [Mrs Bono] he might call. It was Sunday lunch. Sundays it’s like a train station in our house. People call over to sit around, eat lunch, drink wine. The front doorbell rang. Ali answered the door, not expecting to see the former head of the Soviet bloc standing with a giant teddy bear, his present for our baby John.
I know Ali does a lot of work in Russia, “the Children of Chernobyl”.
She regularly drives convoys of supplies from Ireland to Russia, and they bring back sick children for holidays in Ireland. The really mad thing was one of her favourite children of Belarus, Anastasia, was staying with us at the time.
We were all sitting around the table, with President Gorbachev nursing an Irish whiskey, some old friends, when in walked on her calipers Anastasia. She was born without legs from the knees down, part of the problem of radioactive land where she grew up.
Gorbachev couldn’t believe what was happening to him when we explained who she was. He was visibly moved. He lifted her up onto his knee and told the table that he could divide his life into two halves: before and after Chernobyl. It was the moment he realised the Soviet Union couldn’t continue as it was.
That man had had his finger on the second-largest nuclear arsenal in the world.
I asked him about that: did he ever come close to opening that box? He looked at me straight in the eye and said there could and never would be an occasion to use that power, and that from a very young age he had known this was madness. I also asked him: did he believe in God? He said: “No, but I believe in the universe.”
And what do you believe in?
Well, I think I know what God is. God is love, and as much as I respond in allowing myself to be transformed by that love and acting in that love, that’s my religion.
Religion can be the enemy of God. It’s often what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building. A list of instructions where there was once was conviction; dogma where once people just did it; a congregation led by a man where once they were led by the Holy Spirit. Discipline replacing discipleship. Why are you chuckling?
I was wondering if you said all of that to the Pope the day you met him.
I was with a few great people: Jeff Sachs, the economist; Bob Geldof; Quincy Jones [the musician], who’s been a mentor to me — a deadly serious man, but he kept whispering to me to check out the Holy Father’s shoes: ox-blood loafers.
“These are some funky slippers,” he was saying.
There were some nervous giggles, but we all knew why we were there. The pontiff was about to make an important statement about the inhumanity and injustice of poor countries spending so much of their national income paying back old loans to rich countries. Serious business.
He was fighting hard against his Parkinson’s. It was clearly an act of will for him to be there. I was oddly moved . . . by his humility, and then by the incredible speech he made, even if it was in whispers.
During the preamble, he seemed to be staring at me. I wondered. Was it the fact that I was wearing my blue fly-shades? So I took them off in case I was causing some offence. When I was introduced to him he was still staring at them. He kept looking at them in my hand, so I offered them to him as a gift in return for the rosary he had just given me.
Not only did he put them on, he smiled the wickedest grin you could ever imagine. He was a comedian. His sense of humour was completely intact. Flashbulbs popped, and I thought: “Wow! The Drop the Debt campaign will have the Pope in my glasses on the
front page of every newspaper.”
I don’t remember seeing that photograph anywhere.
Nor did we. It seems his courtiers did not have the same sense of humour.
A few years ago, Q magazine ran a list of the most powerful people in the music business. And higher than Madonna or the chairman of Sony Music was Bono. So do you think you are one of the most powerful men in the world today?
I don’t have any real power, but the people I represent do. The reason why politicians let me in the door, and the reason why people will take my call, is because I represent quite a large constituency of people. I do not control that constituency, but I represent them in a certain sense, even without them asking me to, in the minds of the people whose doors I knock upon.
That constituency is a very powerful one, because it is a constituency of people from 18 to 30, who are the floating vote. They have not yet made their mind up which way they’re going to vote. They’re the most open-minded, and that’s why politicians pay attention to what’s going on in contemporary culture and what a rock star might have to do with all of this: because of the people I represent.
Now, outside of that, I represent a lot of people who have no voice at all. In the world’s order of things, they’re the people who count the least. There are 6,500 people who are dying every day of Aids in Africa for no good reason. I now represent them. They haven’t asked me either. It’s cheeky, but I hope they’re glad I do, and in God’s order of things, they’re the most important.
So I think that imbues you with a power way beyond anything that you might have an influence on, being in a pop band. It’s a certain moral authority that’s way beyond your own life and capabilities.
The punch you throw is not your own. It has the force of a much bigger issue.