Bono: Mascot of Neoliberalism

From CounterPunch, the venerable and venom tongued rock critic Dave Marsh champions a book that may be something of a Rosetta Stone for understanding the failures of liberalism:

Bono may be the personification of all that’s evil about contemporary celebrity culture and all that’s worse than bankrupt about liberal capitalism (and liberal capitalists) but there’s also a real person in there, and he’s spent most of a lifetime making himself what history must surely judge—perhaps not with as much restraint as the author—as a fool.

Does this make Harry Browne’s Bono less easy to despise? Probably but it also makes him easier to understand. Here, Bono becomes less the many-sided symbolic figure and more a fallible (sometimes likable, sometimes detestable) human. Think of the former Paul Hewson as the first self-created one dimensional man (all front, no back). Browne’s dug past the PR and the rhetoric and found…a Mad Men cliché for our times.

But that’s not why you need to read The Front Man. You do need to. Not because you want to better understand Bono, let alone empathize with his plight, but because what topples is not only Bono’s stature but the excuses his chosen trade, liberal philanthropic paternalism, makes for itself. Langston Hughes wrote that the animal that should be chosen to represent liberals is not a donkey or an elephant but an ostrich. This book could be subtitled Bono (With His Head in the Sand).  

And

So I didn’t start writing about Bono—not U2, Bono– and talking about him on the radio because he seems charismatic.  (Too desperate for attention and adulation for that.) Bono proves a useful tool for understanding the forces around him because his behavior exemplifies the way that liberals, especially neoliberals from Clinton and Blair to Obama, not only played into the hands of reactionaries but vanished every time they got a chance to act like liberals are supposed to act.

More here.

Journalist Chris Hedges has asserted convincingly many times that contemporary institutional American liberalism has become a bankrupt shell of itself, now totally emasculated and in the service of wealth.  Bono, a wealthy and extremely prominent liberal, truly personifies this concept.  

Now, don't get me wrong.  I've been something of a U2 fan for many, many years.  I've seen them play three times, and two of those shows were among the best I've ever seen.  Bono really does have amazing ability as a showman, and takes his audience with him, without effort, wherever he wants to go, and it's usually in an uplifting, joyous, and positive direction.  So he's definitely one of the great rock stars of all time.  

But as an activist, he leaves much to be desired.  Indeed, even though his hobnobbing with politicians and billionaires has over the years had the veneer of coming together, good vibes, and all that other Aquarius shit, there's also been something a bit unseemly about his approaching the power elite and begging them to change their ways.  I mean, I like the inherent admission that political power resides within an elite circle of super wealthy men, but I hate the inherent conclusion that we are to petition that elite circle in hopes of attaining justice.  That is, the greatest injustice of all is that the world is run as a plutocracy, instead of by its people.  I suppose Bono is blinded by the fact that he, too, is a wealthy man, but that in no way changes the underlying dynamic: the aging U2 front man apparently supports the notion of rule-by-wealth.

Needless to say, an actual liberal should be rabble-rousing, inspiring people to take control of their own lives and nations, condemning a global economic system that is about squeezing every last drop of blood from humanity in order to line the pockets of the elite who preside over that system.  Instead, Bono blesses the plutocracy, bowing down to it, either too stupid or too blind to understand that without systemic change, the suffering he claims to abhor will continue forever.  This is a double shame because he is so profoundly gifted with his ability to move the masses, but that's not what he has chosen to do.

So Bono's liberalism is a joke, all style without any substance of which to speak.  Indeed, his philanthropy does nothing but give the elite some propagandistic photo ops, an opportunity for them to tell the world that rule by rich men isn't so bad.  He's a tool.  And he makes me despair for rock and roll.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$