It turns out quite a lot, if people would listen…

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — How can art influence life and make the world a better place?

One thing’s for sure. You can’t do it by being oblivious to what’s going on around you.

And what can an Irish rock star teach America about freedom?

It turns out quite a lot, if people will listen.

In 1976, when Larry Mullen, a 14-year-old student at Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Dublin, Ireland, posted a note on the school’s bulletin board in search of musicians for a new band, I was 18 and had moved out of the house in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama, where I grew up and was playing the drums on the road all over the South in a rock band called Backstreet.

Unfortunately, none of the musicians I grew up playing in bands with in the 1970s and early ’80s were nearly as smart as some of the players who responded to Mullen’s note. David Evans (“the Edge”) came to that first practice to play guitar, along with Adam Clayton on bass. Then in walked Paul Hewson (“Bono”) to audition as lead singer.

The rest, they say, is history. They’ve been together in one form or another ever since. Of course they didn’t jell as a band and become rock stars over night. None of them were particularly great musicians then. But they figured out a couple of things pretty early on.

Number one, you can keep the structure of the songs pretty simple and still have a rock ‘n’ roll band. It took a lot of hard work, practice and thought to become great.

The second thing they figured out (which most bands fail to do) is that you have to have a purpose and a message, a story to tell with your art. Something to say and even to stand for.

If you are unfamiliar with the band’s history and story, you can read all about it on Wikipedia.

The reason I’m interested enough to write about this today is because the band was honored the past week at the Kennedy Center in Washington, where I happen to live these days. Sean Penn handled the introduction, and it was close to brilliant whoever wrote it.

He called U2:

“Arguably the most heart-penetrating band on the planet for the last 40 years. The influence on music, on culture, on the world is incomparable.”

Wow. I happened to be watching this live on CBS at the time, and this made me stand up and take notice. I’ve listened to some of U2’s music over the years, but did not know the history and the full impact the band has had on the world. It is impressive.

U2 was, according to Penn, “A band forged on the violence of Ireland in the 1970s, a time of devastating conflict and division. As Bono once said, ‘Life is the creative act.’ And these guys somehow just always understood how you interact with the world and the art you put in it are intimately intwined.

“This isn’t something they grew into when they became famous. It’s been embedded in their DNA from the beginning,” he said. “From the opening drum roll of Sunday Bloody Sunday to the iconic sets at concerts like Live Aid, or performing in support of the Good Friday Agreement, and speaking out against violence and inequality every chance they get. They’ve always understood that art at its greatest truly moves the dial toward a care and uniquely human reflection that rhythmically thrills us with possibility, passion, prayer and pulsing percussion.

“It is so fitting at this time in human history that America tonight bestows its highest creative honor in the creative realm upon these four scrappy Dublin punks. The scrappiest band of musical poets ever to come down the right side drive pike to remind America and the world of its best self.”

You can see Sean Penn’s introduction here on YouTube, and find the rest of the program online too. I shared the key clips on Facebook and Twitter.

But that’s not the end of the story.

The next day, CBS aired a show recorded December 15 at the National Cathedral, when historian Jon Meacham interviewed Bono in part about his new memoir, Surrender. In cased you missed it, you can watch that here too, below.

If the event were not humbling enough for Bono, the room was the place where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his final sermon, four days before he was shot down in Memphis. In the sermon, King used the quote about “the arc of history is long but bends toward justice,” and interjected that it doesn’t work unless people influence it by making it “swerve.”

Martin Luther King’s Final Speech on Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution

Bono has certainly done his part in that regard.

Surrender: By Bono

But the mainstream historian, clearly not entirely comfortable in his role interviewing an Irish rock star, led off by asking about Bono’s “faith.” I suppose the Episcopalians who run the non-denominational cathedral were hoping for a Catholic sermon from Bono. But that’s not exactly what they got.

Later in the interview Bono says he would rather hang out with moral people these days who are atheists, since formalized religion has spawned such atrocities as war and pedophile priests.

But at the outset, he explains something I did not know about the band’s early history, when they asked themselves how they could make their music “useful … in this fractured, broken world we all know…”

“That’s a lot to ask for a three and a half minute pop song,” Bono admits, with a sideways glance and grin at the interviewer. “We asked function of our music, other than just joy, which is a little preposterous, but we did. So we were playing anti-Apartheid shows before we had a record deal. We were campaigning for condoms in Ireland … before condoms were legal in Ireland, while we were still teenagers.”

After the Joshua Tree album and tour in 1987, I had already left music and shifted to journalism, unable to find a musical home in my hometown. U2, on the other hand, became famous, he said, and the fame became a type of “currency,” that the band “wanted to spend” on an agenda involving social justice.

Leaving Home to Find It

Meacham quotes from Bono’s book, where he writes, “I’m leaving home to find home,” and asks him to explain.

This is where Bono explains something that I now realize is my own journey as well.

His grandfather died when he was 14, and then at his funeral, his mother suffers an aneurysm and later dies in the hospital. This leaves what was his “home” only a “house,” he says. So he went searching for home, in a band, in chasing girls, in his faith. He talks about being a “stray dog” or “a vagrant” who slept on people’s couches.

Meacham points out that there is another word for that.

“A pilgrim.”

My father died when I was 15, leaving me in a broken home with a single mom. I’ve been a pilgrim ever since, looking for home on the road wherever I can find a story to tell or a way to make a difference, and I’ve done it without faith, just my own strong moral compass.

Meacham asked about a line in the book where Bono says, “It takes great faith to have no faith.”

At that point Bono explains that some of the smartest and most moral people he has known in his life were atheists, one he called, “The most Christian person” he has ever known. He calls religion “absurd,” yet says he “believes in the absurd.”

He says he likes people who have “a strong moral compass, but can’t give that a name because they have been mistreated by religion.”

He talks about how the good Irish people have had a hard time because of pedophile priests in the Catholic Church.

“But there are pedophiles in all religions,” he says, and that includes the Southern Baptist church I grew up in, which by the way was just in the news of late.

He talks about how people who have been sexually abused “have a hard time going back there,” and the same is true of people who have been abused in their religious institutions.

“You grow up with a religious lunatic … it’s so hard to even enter that space … because Jesus came to you in the hands or on the voice of a maniac.”

He likes “incredible people who face their despair without the comfort of believing that there is an eternal self.”

“It’s so brave when people just say no, I just don’t believe this. This is fabulism … there to give you comfort.”

He likes people who say, “I’m too intellectually rigorous to run with this bullshit. They are the company I want to keep.”

The Ideal of America

“A country is a story we tell ourselves,” Meacham quotes Bono, and asks him to elaborate.

“Our politics is hostage to story telling, for sure,” Bono says. “That’s what we are living through now. And we really need to, in the free world, we need to become better story tellers, about what freedom offers.”

He objects to “evil, awful men” getting the title of populist, without calling out their names.

“Martin Luther King was a populist. A great communicator,” he says. “John Lennon,” etc…

He is cryptic in the way he describes it. In fact he is being politic, or being a politician — much like America’s founding fathers in the way they embraced a God in some language to get the churches and Christian soldiers on their side in the American Revolutionary War for Independence from England. We could not have won that war without them.

Bono says simple narratives have returned from the political right like Grimm’s fairy tales, because they are scary and effective.

As I was talking to a close friend about this before publication, I must interject that the reason so many people are falling for these fairy tales of propaganda is because that’s all they hear on the radio, and Fox News. They are not being told an alternative story.

So that’s why Bono goes onto say: “That’s why we have to tell the story of freedom a bit better,” he says. “It’s the most intoxicating word … the greatest word in the lexicon of America. Freedom is the promise of democracy. Democracy on a good day is the promise of freedom. They are bound up in each other. We’ve now got to demostrate what freedom looks like, what freedom acts like … walks like and talks like.”

He talked about his time in negotiating with the Bush administration for help with HIV/AIDs in Africa, and how world opinion about America was high at that time (after the lows during the Iraq war, which he failed to mention) and then he talks about the low opinion about America abroad after four years of Trump.

“China and Russia seek to extinguish free thinking,” Bono says. “And we must not let them.”

Meacham brings the conversation back around to Christianity, by claiming it’s “the oldest story” that goes all the way back to Genesis. It’s a story of “freedom versus power,” he says, “the strong versus the weak. The bet that the strong have to make is that they are going to be strong for a long time. Because they don’t want to forget that the history of the world is that the strong become the weak.”

Early in the presentation, they referred to this as a concept called “Reversal.” But that’s a bit opaque for our purposes here. Watch it for yourself, please.

But when in closing Meacham asks Bono for his advice, he goes on to talk about what’s happening in Ukraine, and basically says the world needs the idea of America, and never before as much as now.

I agree.

If you care about democracy and rock and roll, you have to take the time to watch this. Take a break from cable TV, from the Facebook and Twitter feeds, and watch this program.

Surrender An Evening with Bono in Conversation with Jon Meacham

Join Washington National Cathedral for an evening of conversation with legendary singer-songwriter, activist, and global humanitarian Bono to discuss his new memoir, Surrender, with Cathedral Canon Historian Jon Meacham. Surrender is the story of the remarkable life he’s lived, the challenges he’s faced, and the friends and family who have shaped and sustained him. In his unique voice, Bono takes us from his early days growing up in Dublin, including the sudden loss of his mother when he was fourteen, to U2’s unlikely journey to become one of the world’s most influential rock bands, to his more than 20 years of activism dedicated to the fight against AIDS and extreme poverty.

Then take some time and listen to the band’s signature songs. I did. And I became more enlightened because of it.

With Or Without You (Live From Milan)

Until The End Of The World (Live Video From Zoo TV tour)

U2 – I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (Official Music Video)

Sunday Bloody Sunday (Live From Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Colorado, USA / 1983

U2 – New Year’s Day (Official Music Video)

___

If you support truth in reporting with no paywall, and fearless writing with no popup ads or sponsored content, consider making a contribution today with GoFundMe or Patreon or PayPal.