The banality of Bono

Bono is now an occasional columnist at the New York Times. By
choosing Bono, the Irish singer for which we cannot recall any particular song
attached to his group, U2, the NYTs and its captive audience reveals its entrapment
by Clinton era one-worldism. It is the curse of an arrested political
sensibility which craved rock stars and scorned wise advisers like John Kenneth
Galbraith; it is a curse to a great paper that is becoming a life style sheet.
If ever there was a tribute to an era which never really was — the phrase Cloud
Coukoo Land comes to mind — it is Bono.

Bono is his own Norway; his own Nobel Committee, our own
Great Auntie in Europe, self appointed to help us and bring us back when we go
astray as we so often do. He has this week ten recommendations for us for the new
year; ways in which we may become better.

But Bono’s world view is as thin as that amorphous mash of
unidentifiable rock music that they plague us with in grocery stores and drug
stores. In Bonoworld, everyone is an American by degree, even non-Americans like
Bono, and presumably anti-Americans like Osama bin Laden, who just doesn’t get
it yet. This was discovered to be delusional by Obama only last week in
Copenhagen. Sarko offered better advise earlier: He told us in fact that he
doesn’t like us that much. Germany first left the Bono/Clinton coalition in
taking its own path financially. France more recently has declared itself to be
European, not pseudo-American like Bono. Russia same as always. Japan declared
independence from Bonoworld months back and said it would link with Asia now
instead. Have a nice day. China now too with new friends everywhere, some which
hate us.

But Bono sees himself as avatar to almost all the world’s
people; the people who watch soccer. It would include us too if only we would
catch on. This world can be visualized as one of those big birthday cakes with
Bill and Hillary the little figurines at the top and Bono waving behind them in
his rosy glasses. A better picture is the doughnut: There are 2 billion
watching soccer and more playing on the edges. But the hole in the doughnut is
the center of the circle and there they play American football. These people
are different. The inside is not like the outside. They have different
histories, different desires, different creation myths and beginnings, different
responsibilities and karma.

It is better to live in the center — the center of the
world; the center of the doughnut — than to be left behind in the outlands, like
Bono and the Norwegians, pointing and braying. Ours is the place of beginnings,
ours is a new creation; theirs the place of long, slow endings and knock off
and imitation. Here in the center of the circle, if you want to become a biker
or join the Hari Khrishnas or the Mormons go ahead. Whatever we do is of new
beginnings and whatever we do will find imitators in the outlands as Elvis,
Carl Perkins, Hank Williams and Bo Diddley did when they invented Bono’s world
for him here in the Mississippi delta and Appalachian hollows 60 years ago.