Bono (21 page)

So you're optimistic about an end to “the Troubles”?

Yes. Years later, I would have the greatest honor of my life in Ireland when U2 played in support of the Good Friday Peace Agreement in the Waterfront Hall in Belfast in 1998. We got John Hume and David Trimble, the two opposing leaders in the conflict, to shake hands onstage in front of a U2 and Ash audience. People tell me that rock concert and that staged photograph pushed the people into ratifying the peace agreement. I'd like to think that's true. I'd like to think that the extreme Unionists and the extreme Republicans now have the courage to put down their guns. Because it takes courage to trust in the peace process and to return to civilian life. Both sides have suffered too much. It's easy for me to proffer my opinions. I'm not living next door or across the road or across the town from a painful memory. I live in Dublin in a house beside the sea.

This conversation happened on the phone, only ten days after the previous one, in mid-February. The man was still in his home in the south of France with family, most of them gathered in the bedroom.

[jocular]
Michka!

Oui, c'est moi!

[conscientiously articulating in French]
Comment allez-vous?

Fort bien et vous-même? First lesson.
[laughs]

Very good . . .

Got a better voice than last time.

Really?

Did you get a good night's sleep? Now I'm really playing it like a doctor . . .

[laughing]
I wrote this thing this morning about Elvis Presley for
Rolling Stone
magazine. They're doing a special issue on pop stars, I guess. So, mine's called “Elvis Ate America Before America Ate Him.” So I've been up and out, and I'm trying to get rid of those two punk rockers and their mother, lying on the bed here beside me. But they're slowly getting up. Jojo [his elder daughter, Jordan] is fighting off revising for her mock junior's first exams, and Eve is lying down pretending she's ill.

That sounds like a dysfunctional family.

Yes. Hollywood and Holly-weird.

You mean like the Osbournes.

It's very Osbourne in our house. The girls, if I'm very tired, if I had a very late night, they see me shuffling. They say: “You're shuffling like Ozzy.” And I say
[Ozzy's voice]:
“Fuck off! Fuck off!” No, I don't swear at my children in my own voice, only in Ozzy's. That's what's great about Ozzy. I get to swear at my children in his voice.

That's a good excuse.

I love the Osbournes. They're a very rare thing: they're a family that loves each other. Also I like his voice when he sings “Iron Man,” because he has a voice, in a way, like a machine. It doesn't sound human at all.

Have you ever met him?

I met him once in a lift. It wasn't much of a conversation. “Going up?” was, I think, the remark.
[laughs]
He was getting out at the fifth, and I was getting out at the seventh floor. I didn't have time to explain that I had bought
Paranoid
. And I think it's one of the greatest rock records. He invented heavy metal. God-like genius . . .
Paranoid
is heavy in the nuclear sense.

It's so funny that Black Sabbath came back into style with Nirvana. I thought that heavy metal had been wiped off the map once and for all in the eighties. And then it came back with a vengeance with those grunge bands.

It's visceral. It's boys' music, but it's for a time when being male is a lot more elusive than you think. In your teenage years, music has a lot to do with who you want to be and how your hormones are describing that. And I think that's why hip-hop—
[getting interrupted]
Oh God, that's Elijah now who's coming. Out, you little dwarf! No, that's me.

Now, that's your real personality showing. Not the nice guy I know.

Isn't that true that hip-hop and hard rock, it's very male music? What are you listening to these days, Michka?

Presently? You . . . And on that subject, you know, these phone calls are great, because for me it's like expecting the next installment of a serial.
[Bono keeps on laughing his devilish laugh]
So let me go back to what you said last time. I'm quoting you here: “We only discovered we were Irish when we went to America.” You took your first political stand against the Provisional IRA and the armed struggle. Isn't it strange that you somehow got involved in the civil war in El Salvador and Nicaragua after that? How did you find out about what was going on those
countries, which to a lot of people didn't mean more than a T-shirt or the name of a Clash album?
*

Well, the difference between the Sandinistas and the Provisional IRA was that the Sandinistas represented a majority of their country. And so, as ugly an armed struggle as it was, it at least had that behind it. It's true, I heard about the Sandinistas from the Clash. But the more I read about the Sandinistas, the more I became fascinated by their modus operandi, because here was liberation theology in action. When I visited Nicaragua, I was shocked to see how much the people's religion had inspired their revolt. Here was revolution rooted in something other than materialism. There was a spiritual coefficient. The reason the Nicaraguan revolution had to be put down was because it had caught fire. That was terrifying for the Americas. It could have spread all through Mexico, and up north. There was one church I remember going to, where they had these murals all around the walls of the church, of scenes from the Holy Scriptures, like “The Children of Israel escaping from Pharaoh.” But Pharaoh would have Ronald Reagan's head on him!
[laughs]

Really? Where did you see that?

In Managua. I remember just being amazed at how the populace were being taught revolution through Bible stories. All over they were being taught that Jesus preached the Gospels for the poor, which he did. But Jesus did not take up arms.

Exactly, that was my point. I mean, you had just made very clear that you did not want to support the armed struggle in Ireland.

I wasn't writing a love song for the armed struggle. I saw it as a disappoint-

ing outcome of the reading of the Scriptures. But I was inspired by the application of the Scriptures into people's real life. I remember I had a meeting with the minister of culture, Ernesto Cardenal. I remember him saying that the poetry of their revolution—and indeed a lot of the Sandinista ideologies—were inspired by the Irish uprising in 1916 and Irish poets like Patrick Pearse. He himself had been taught by Irish Jesuit priests, expert in sowing the seeds of revolt. It's true. I'm telling you: wherever you go in the developing world, you'll find the Irish nuns and priests jumping out from behind bushes! It's amazing: we exported revolution through the clergy. We were very good at it, and it traveled very well. I remember saying to the minister: “But there's nothing glorious about people losing their lives, and bloodletting.” You may be able to argue for it, facing no other escape route, but it's never glorious. In Irish folklore, even Yeats talked about “the rose that is made red by the blood of the martyrs, that's dripped to the ground.” I hate all that stuff.

I think it's nineteenth-century Europe, actually. As a teenager in France in the seventies, I was marked by that mythology. We had the insurrection of May 1968 and what they called the “Leftist movement” thereafter: a fanatical bunch of young people, often the bravest and most ambitious of their generation, who devoted themselves to the idea of revolution. It certainly was glamorous. It went back to the glorious army of the French Revolution, the nineteenth-century insurrections, and then, of course, the Bolsheviks, the Trotskyist uprising, the Maoist Guerrilla, up to the guerrillas in Cuba and Vietnam. It occurred at a sort of junction of Romanticism and Revolution. I realized that the so-called heroic People's Guerrillas were mostly glorified on an aesthetic and idealistic basis, that their supporters had deliberately turned a blind eye to planned starvation and concentration camps in Russia and China, not to mention the massacres in Kampuchea by Pol Pot. The whole point was anti-Americanism, which made perfect sense in Europe. But those causes were excuses and fantasies. Dismal fantasies, actually.

It's not that I couldn't understand where the Provisional Army were coming from, and it's not that I don't understand violence myself, personally. I was just trying to figure out: was there ever any reason to take up arms? On the one hand, you had Martin Luther King saying “Never,” Gandhi saying “Never,” Jesus Christ, both their inspirations in this, saying “Never.” On the other hand, here were the Sandinistas saying “We have to look after the poor, we have to defend the poor.” That position had to be studied from my point of view, even if I didn't buy it. I wanted to know more about liberation theology and the Sandinistas. I was very moved by them when I was there. They suffered a lot. Their revolution was very costly, and it didn't turn out their way in the end. Same with the French Revolution. Ironically, it was the French Revolution that inspired America.

We have all heard that dreadful phrase: “You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

I know. In the end, ideas are not worth as much as people. Whenever you meet a philosophy where that is not true, and where ideas are worth more than people, you have to be on your guard. A dangerous idea that almost makes sense is a very compelling thing. In a way, when the devil gets it right, it's usually not a wrong fighting with a right, it's usually two half-truths fighting it out. It'll do the most damage. Marxism-Leninism was an extraordinary idea to lead mankind out of its squalor. It was a dangerous idea that almost made sense. There are many.

Just after we ended our last conversation, I remember you told me you had recently met Senator Jesse Helms to discuss the AIDS in Africa issue. You came out of the meeting with a lot of respect for him. You mentioned that it was a disturbing experience for you, since as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the early eighties, he had done whatever he could to suppress the Sandinistas.

Well, you know. Wandering around Nicaragua, seeing their supermarkets empty—nothing on the shelves—seeing their people starving because of the blockade the United States had put on it, seeing the lives lost, as these people tried to escape from the tyranny of the landowners. One percent of landowners owned more than forty percent of the land before the revolution. I remember one very moving Mass they gave out to the people. At the end of the Mass, the priest then picked up a list of the dead. And he called each one of them by name: “Rodrigo Omares!” and all the congregation went: “
Presente!” [making it sound like a sort of smothered roar] “
Maria Gonzalez!
—Presente!
” And they were calling out a roll of the dead and the congregation replied:
“Presente!”—
they're present with us. You could see in the eyes of all around me. I could see the cost. This was the other side of America as far as I was concerned at that time: America, the neighborhood bully. And one of the architects on the Right at that time was Senator Jesse Helms, who later did me and everyone working on the Global AIDS Emergency a great favor when he came out in our support. It was a great irony for me, to find myself twenty years later feeling such affection for this old Cold Warrior.

Did you mention what you thought about the past when you spoke to him?

I never brought it up. I took my time with him to press ahead with our work in the AIDS emergency. 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. People said to me: this is the devil himself you're going to meet, and his politics are just right of Attila the Hun. He had personally dismantled the National Endowment for the Arts in America. Todd Rundgren had written a song about him: “Fuck You, Jesse Helms.” 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.

OK, now imagine we're trying to write a script about your adventures in Central America. Now, the credits have rolled and the camera pans over a bird's-eye view of a landscape with forests and hills. What scene would come next?

So . . . Walking in the hills, about a hundred miles from the main city of Salvador.

First, what are you doing there?

I'm walking with a friend who has a group called “Sanctuary” that smuggles people whose lives are in danger, out from enemy territory, and brings them to America as kind of refugees. And he has a few programs to help with the poor in El Salvador, and I—myself and Ali—are both involved in one of those programs, working with the campesinos, the peasant farmers. So, we're going to see the project, but it is in rebel-controlled areas.

Who are you walking with? And what do they look like?

Well, there's an American fellow. His name is Dave Bedstone, he's a sort of a Harrison Ford in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
character: adventurer, intellectually and spiritually, and indeed in rough physical terrain. And there's his girlfriend, Wendy, who is from San Francisco: curly hair, keeping everyone's spirits up. And then there's Howard Jules Hoyle, who has driven from San Francisco to El Salvador with a surfboard on his roof. It is “Surf's up, Captain”—if you've seen
Apocalypse Now,
the character of Robert Duvall. He likes to surf. He's very funny, there's comedy in every piece of his body
language. Ali, who keeps looking at me with those eyes that say, “Why exactly are we here again?”
[laughs]

So what project brought you there?

It's a small farm, a co-operative, and I'm just helping out with that financially. Then there's a local guide. It's extraordinary, because as I was walking through this sort of thick green rainforesty terrain, some of the rebels pass us on the road. They're like fifteen-year-old girls, beautiful girls, carrying rifles, and you dare not look at them with anything other than respect.
[laughs]
Then we pass a wall on which is written:
FUCK JESUS
. So I'm a little taken aback and I go: “Wow! I thought this was the home of liberation theology. What's going on here?” To which our guide replied: “No, no, that's not Jesus Christ. It's
Hay-zoos
, he lives around here. No one likes him. He's working for the other side.”
[laughs]
So we continue on along this path, and as we're crossing a road, we see some government troops. They look a little worried, and just as we cross the road, there's a dead sort of
pop-pop-pop
, a sort of dull—couldn't be further from the sound of gunfire in the movies—type sound, because it's so flat, and it whips over our heads. And we just freeze on the road. We don't know what's gonna happen, whether we should take for cover or we should stand still. There's silence, big silence . . . We can hear each other's hearts beating, then laughing from the government troops who were just letting us know that they don't like us and they could take our life if they really wanted to.