Bono (12 page)

So you became an insider in the political world. I'm sure you had preconceived notions about politicians. Were those proven wrong or right?

Well, as you get older, your idea of good guys and bad guys changes. As we moved from the eighties to the nineties, I stopped throwing rocks at the obvious symbols of power and the abuse of it. I started throwing rocks at my own hypocrisy. That's a part of what that work was about: owning up to one's ego. These characters in the songs like “The Fly” are owning up to one's hypocrisy in your heart, your duplicitous nature. There's a song called “Acrobat” that goes:
Don't believe what you hear, don't believe what you see /If you just close your eyes/ You can feel the enemy . . .
I can't remember it, but the point is: you start to see the world in a different way, and you're part of the problem, not just part of the solution!
[laughs]

It's probably the same when you start a band. You also have these preconceived notions about the corporate labels and corporate management. Once you get to the other side of the fence, maybe you begin to see things differently.

It is exactly analogous. So who's the devil here? Bureaucracy! It's like a Kafka story. The labyrinth of red tape that excuses inaction. But it's not an excuse, and you have to go through it. Even if a lot of them are not bad guys, even if they're just busy guys, they have to be held responsible and
accountable, because these people are in power. Like, Congressman Tom Lantos talks about, as a child, being put on a train to a Hungarian concentration camp and how crowds gathered to watch them being put on the trains, and how this haunted him later in life, not the mistreatment at these death camps, but the blank looks of the passersby, how he repeated the question often to himself: “Didn't anyone ask where those children are going?” I said to him: “Aren't we doing that now with AIDS? We have the drugs,
but . . .”
And he said: “Yeah, we are. This is exactly analogous. We are watching them being put on the trains.”

And what should be the response?

I want to find people who will lie across the tracks.

So, are the politicians the train conductors?

No, it's our indifference that should be on trial. As for politicians, I've got to meet and know quite a lot of them; I'm surprised by how much respect I have. They work a lot harder than I thought, they're not paid that well, the most talented of them would definitely make tons of cash in the commercial world, but stay in politics out of a sense of civic duty. People say power is their drug of choice, but in these days the CEO of a large corporation is the one with power. It's true that in the U.S. special interest ruins a lot of politics, and runs a lot of shows, that's the closest you can find to outright evil in politics. The National Rifle Association can buy their way in an argument. How many Americans think it's a good thing that you can buy a gun in a shop? Hardly any! But the ones that do have put so much money into the National Rifle Association that they can get their issue through Congress. It's amazing! Why can't we treat the people that live in wretched poverty with the kind of political muscle they have in the tobacco industry, who hire a bunch of lobbyists and go
surround Washington, D.C.? They don't just go, “Cigarette smoking is a fundamental human right. We want to smoke!” No. They fight tooth and nail for that piece of that pie and their customers, and I'm sometimes one of them . . .

So how does DATA “fight tooth and nail” for its clients, the poorest of the poor?

What we're trying to do at the moment, those of us who care about the wanton loss of life and the inequalities of the developing world, is to come together under one umbrella. In fact, we're calling it the One campaign—not a reference to the U2 song, but that'll come in handy. We have to stop doffing our caps and shyly begging for crumbs from the table of the rich countries. We've got to get organized. We have to be able to hurt people who harm us, who obstruct the necessary legislation to put things right. We want to be able to take out radio ads in the constituencies of obstructive politicians, and explain that it's not just money they're cutting off. It's lives, mothers, children dying, like I have seen with my own eyes in a hospital in Malawi—three to a bed, two on top and one underneath. The statistics have faces, they're living and breathing. That is until a decision in D.C., London, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin goes against them, then they stop breathing.

And has your strategy been working?

We've already done it in a small way with a congressman who should now remain nameless, who wanted to be famous for cutting foreign aid until he started to hear from every church and high school in his district that his obstruction was killing kids. We had ads all over the radio. In the end, to his credit, he apologized. You see, that's political muscle; that's what people can do if they work together and invest in a movement. Politicians are about “pig roasts”: it's what people are talking about when they're
barbecuing chicken that counts. It's what church people are saying, “soccer moms” as well as college students.

What will happen if your dialogues don't result in any real change?

When there are so many lives at stake, I think we will have to consider civil disobedience—certainly, taking to the streets in numbers that will surprise the status quo. There are more regular people than you can imagine who care about these issues and are ready to more than put themselves out to make poverty history.

You take a lot of moral positions in our conversations, but you're wise enough to know that it's not necessarily morality that will help your cause triumph.

The moral force, finally, I do believe in the weight of it. But the apparatus is not moral. The route through it is a very cynical one.

You said it was a labyrinth. Did you find your way through it?

There were ways you could gang up or surround difficult people. If a politician had a hard heart, maybe the person who organized his schedule would not. “Staffers” became allies. After all, they were the ones running the show. Proper politicians were older, but the people who ran their offices were my age or younger. So if they weren't U2 fans, they probably knew one. I found in a lot of cases their idealism still intact.

Sometimes we run into people who are the same age as us but who have made different choices. They'd say to you: “I'm standing on the same ground as you, but in my position I can't help because in my job I am stuck.” They tend to be schizophrenic. How do you confront that?

I have to say that I applied the same strategy that we did as a band. When we got to the United States, or France, or Germany, in the early eighties, you had all these people in their silk jackets with the radio stations on their back, just that glazed look in their eye. I used to ask them how they got into this, and the most jaded, hardened record executive would start saying: “Oh, I used to work in a college radio station,” or “I went to see Jimi Hendrix at the Fillmore,” “I saw the Rolling Stones with Brian Jones”—Really, how was it like? I would get them to remind themselves why they came to the party, because often they'd forgotten. It's the same for the politicians: a lot of them came for the right reasons, but just forgot. And of course politicians are a little like priests and cops. They're either there for the best or the worst reasons: to serve or to abuse their power!
[laughs]
But the latter are the few, not the many.

Just like politics, it seems like people enter the music business for either the best or the worst reasons. Have you had to deal with much corruption there?

U2 has had a pretty good time of it in the music business. Our manager, Paul McGuinness, protected us from so much, he really was a cut above the rest, and instilled in us a sense that we had to be awake to the business as we were to the art. Yeah, we have had to deal with some bullies at a corporate level in the music business, but in the end I don't have “Slave” written on my face, like Prince did in the early nineties. U2 is in charge of its own destiny. We own our master tapes, we own our copyrights, we run our own show, the music business does not own us.

You own your own stuff. That's almost unheard of, isn't it?

Well, there was a cost to that, as I told Prince when he asked me. We took a lower royalty rate, and on those big albums, we were paid less. But we own
it. I asked him: “Why are you wearing ‘Slave'? He said: “I don't own my stuff, they own it. They own me.” And then he asked me like you just did: “How did you pull that off?—Eh, lower royalty rates.” You know, most people want the money in their hand, not down the road. There's no excuse in the twentieth century for intelligent people signing a deal they don't understand. That said, Prince deserves the best deal in the world because he is the best in the world. He's Duke Ellington to me!

Back to politics for a second. Do you hear a lot of: “I would love to help you but I can't” from politicians?

One congressman wouldn't even look at me. He was in charge of yes-or-no'ing foreign appropriations. He was a big shot and a big problem. He would talk to me like almost through an interpreter. He was just kind of upset that he, a hard-working guy, had to talk to this rock star from Ireland. You know, I kind of agreed with him. He was saying: You're not gonna get this money, because I know where it's going. It's going down a rat hole, these guys have been ripping us off for years. Because Africa's first problem is not natural calamity, it's not their corrupt relationship with Europe and America. They're the second and third problems. The first problem is their own corrupt leadership. Eventually, we convinced him that the money would be well spent, and later, when I came back from Uganda, I took him pictures of a water hole. I said: “There's the money. It didn't go down a rat hole, it went down a water hole, Congressman!” I have a lot of respect for that guy now, but he was tough. He was a tough guy. In the end of course it wasn't me that persuaded him, it was the chorus of voices in the background—the movement. This unusual panoply of powerful voices from Church leaders like the Pope to sports leaders and student bodies, what Bill Clinton later referred to as a big tent.
[laughs and puts on Southern accent]
“When you've got the Pope hanging out with rock stars, that's what I call a big tent.” You see, Jubilee 2000 could get a crowd of forty
thousand people to surround the G8 summit in Cologne and hold hands. So it's not just, Let's have our little photo with Bono in here, and get him out of the room. You know, there is some firepower in the background.

Have you ever said to yourself: “This is more complicated than I thought. These people may be right, I may be wrong”?

Oh yeah. When it came to understanding the big issues—and outside that fantastic phrase: “I have met my enemy and he was partly right”—I realized that a lot of the aid for instance had been incredibly badly mishandled over the years, creating worse situations. It's not enough just to ask for money. I learnt that the skeptics and the cynics had a real point, and that without strict conditionalities, there was no point in giving. You're actually propping up sometimes the most evil despots by aid.

I think the most useful people are the ones who are out in the field, who work there and know the population. I don't count myself among the skeptics or the cynics, but . . .

. . . But you're pessimistic!

A couple of years ago, I was in Tuvalu, a tiny archipelago somewhere in the middle of the South Pacific. It's all sand, all flat. They can't grow anything there. And these people get help from the European community. I talked to an Italian civil servant who lived in Fiji. He'd regularly visit these small islands to make sure that the money was well spent. He said the islanders don't go fishing anymore—they eat junk food and they watch TV, and they lie asleep all day. Now that I'm mentioning it, it sounds like I'm describing life in some parts of Paris suburbia . . . Now they have been given money to build solar panels. And then they asked: will that make our washing machines work? He said: probably not. So they said: we won't assemble them. And then they said they wanted a
nuclear plant! And there are a whole bunch of civil servants there, benefiting from that aid, who obviously don't do much for their fellow men. So, without education, I'm afraid there is no point in giving aid.

That's the story of aid for the last thirty years, but this is no longer the story. That story has come to an end.

Money is not the only problem in those places.

Well, with AIDS, it is. And with some things, it is. But the waste of resources, the lack of good leadership is often the real problem.

When you discuss the problems of Africa, it seems like you think that idealism is the solution.

But I'm not dealing with idealism! None of my work is based on idealism. It's pragmatism. OK, maybe on debt cancellation, I'm arguing it as justice rather than charity. But in terms of dealing with Africa now, I'm looking for a Marshall-type plan for Africa.
*
That's pragmatic!

I can't help but remember what you said earlier: “At one time, it looked impossible for African Americans to be freed from slavery.” But it was not only Westerners who were responsible for slavery. It was also the Arabs and other Africans.

My reply to that is: yes, but we're not talking about Arabs or other Africans. We're talking about us, our inherited wealth from that exploitation.

But why are Westerners still trying to solve the problems of Africa? How come Africans aren't doing it by themselves?

If we see aid as investment, and the debt burden of these countries as unjust, and offer fairer trade conditions, Africa will be able to take charge of its own destiny. The reason for the T for Trade in DATA is, in the end, aid is not the way forward for the poorest people in the world. Trade is the way forward. We have to let the poorest of the poor trade with us. And, at the moment, we're not letting them trade fairly with us. So when you say, “Why can't Africans look after themselves?,” that is the only way forward for Africa: Africans taking charge of their continent. But at the moment, we won't let them! Even after twenty-three countries whose debts we've canceled now, there are still countries paying back to the World Bank and the IMF more money every year than they're spending on health and education. These are dignified people, and they wanna get up off their knees. But it's us that has them chained to the ground!