The Powerful Living of A Boy From Dublin Town

Bono is on my short list of people (dead or alive) with whom I would like to have dinner and a chat about interesting things.  He's been a heart throb since July 13, 1985, when he burst on the stage at Live Aid.  There he is strutting his stuff, leaning into the audience with his swashbuckling tight leather trousers and heels.  He dances with the lucky girl he pulls from the crowds, he kisses her hand before sending her back.  He thrusts the mic into the crowd and they roar in response.  Bono and U2, the punk band from Dublin Town, have arrived.     

That was nearly 40 years ago and U2's still here, strutting and hammering out their raw distinctive sound and longings for redemption!   Bono has become a moral advocate, urging the world to notice the starving, the voiceless, and the suffering.   Over time, our - his and mine - relationship has grown from heart throb to a more chaste spiritual companionship!  Simply put, Bono is my hero.

Bono's autobiography, Surrender, 40 Songs, One Story, is written without the aid of a ghost writer.  His clear voice rings out on every page.  It's an eloquent, lyrical voice, reflective and honest.  He tells the story of falling in love with music and the enduring relationship with three lads, who in spite of different styles and temperaments, are his life long friends making astonishing music together.  He's the sum of many parts and a polarizing force, who can be very annoying.  It makes perfect sense to organize his story around the anthems that made U2 famous.

The lasting impact of his mother's death as a young boy, threads through the narrative.  The difficult relationship with his father to whom Bono is a constant disappointment, is the source of his desperate need for a family to belong to.  This longing for belonging is how he meets Ally, his wife and companion since forever, and might be the reason why U2, unlike other notable bands, has never fallen out or broken up.  They are bound together to quell the need to belong.

He grows up in Catholic Ireland during a time of sectarian violence.  And this is where our journeys first meet.  I lived in that Ireland in Dublin Town and I feel the kinship with him.  His voice gives flesh and bones to the conflicting and unspeakable memories.  The anthem, Bloody Sunday, is part of my musical lexicon.  It helps me to recall that day filled with explosive fear and emotion.  I remember the loneliness of being English and Protestant in an unforgiving society where both England and Protestantism stand for hate and violence, famine and cruelty.  I remember watching TV scenes in black and white, feeling ashamed without knowing why.  

Bono digs deep into his faith; it's a life-long journey.  And again, our experiences align.  Like Bono, I have walked away from organized religion to find my own spiritual way.  I am sickened by the justifications and religious excuses and the right or wrong mindset it engenders.   I can't bear the hypocrisy of the conservative religious right’s gag hold in our freedoms, represented by that man standing in front of a church holding the scriptures high in the face of an America reeling from the brutal murder of George Floyd.  This is my moment.  This is where I part company from a tired religion to create my own path to purpose and meaning.  Bono sums it up best: "Religion can be the enemy of God.  It's often what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building."   I recall the words of C.S. Lewis, "If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world," and this desire is at the heart of U2's music.  It's no accident; Bono put it there.  And through the musical narrative, you bear witness to the struggle for something better, somewhere better.  

Bono's activism, sparked at Live Aid, turns him into a spokesperson for the world's starving and most impoverished populations.  He makes some unlikely friendships to push his agenda - most notably with Sen. Jesse Helms and Condoleezza Rice, who couldn't have had more different political views.  He nags and wheedles funds to cancel debt, to address global hunger and to treat the tragic AIDs epidemic in Africa.  He becomes something of a superman, and it's a role he relishes.

But then, in a reflective moment, Bono realizes he's got it wrong.  The West can not "fix"  things that the West created through colonization.  Instead he begins to ask those on the ground, "What do you need from us?  How can we help you?"   A similar Ah ha moment is described in Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari, when he notices the white jeeps of the NGOs creeping along looking out through the darkened window at the suffering.  "Only Africans were capable of making a difference in Africa.  All the others, donors, volunteers and bankers, however idealistic, were simply agents of subversion."  Bono arrives in Africa with White Man Savior hubris and full of idealism for a quick fix. When Bono finally bears his soul to the continent, he leaves a part of his soul behind to haunt him at every step.   He leaves a changed man with a changed agenda.   There are no quick fixes and he's in it for the long haul. 

Perhaps I am serving as Bono's apologist and that this is less a book review and more a laudation of a man whom I consider a hero.  Yes, he is flawed human being.  His contradictions, his ego, his bravado, his persistent nagging and his Messiah complex to save the world are all part of this complicated man.  But he persists fueled by an outrage at the injustice of a world divided by so much and so little.  "Am I bugging you," he asks.  "I don't mean to bug ya."  Perhaps Surrender is a way to make peace with those he has "bugged" and with himself.  Either way, it is a beautiful narrative cast over 500 pages, and I come away still wanting to break bread with him.   

~Photo from the New York Times magazine, October 24, 2022.