Does it surprise anyone that Bono is just like any other rich person?
No?
So what was he saying about America?
It's not even worth ranting about, really ...
Showing posts with label Bono. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bono. Show all posts
Friday, January 26, 2007
Friday, November 10, 2006
we get letters
OK -- I guess I'm unofficially off vacation since I have posted here more this week than all the sidekicks combined. I got this e-mail today from a presbyterian reader who axed me, "cent, I was watching this video on YouTube of Johnny Cash, and, um, what do you think of Johnny Cash?"
The first thing to say about the Man in Black is that he never pretended to be a theologian or a preacher, so he gets a lot of grace for being what he was and not what he thought he wanted to be. And that includes his charismatic/AOG leanings. You, the reader, can contrast that with, say, Bono, or me for that matter, and draw your own conclusions.
But the far more important thing to say about Cash is that because of his flaws, he had a genuine and fully-orbed Christian testimony. Now, what does that mean? Does it mean that because he wore his pain and suffering on his sleeve he made more sense to people? Oh please: one of the things I admire about Cash is that he did not wear his pain and suffering on his sleeve: he wore the redemption of Christ on his sleeve.
Let me give you a great example of that:
Listen: if you ever catch Bono talking like this, call me immediately. But it'll never happen -- because he thinks Jesus is about a political change on Earth. Now, the more erudite of you might say, "well, cent, Jesus does call for a political change on this Earth," and I might agree with you: Jesus calls for an eschatological change in this world. But it's not a change which puts the U.N. in charge of world affairs: it's a change which puts Christ in pre-eminence above all things.
Johnny Cash, sitting in a crowd of MTV zombies, preached the Gospel. When was the last time you put yourself on the line like that for Jesus?
So I think much of the drug addicted and adulterous Johnny Cash. He had real shame, and real hope -- which is more than we can say for a lot of people. God willing it is not more than we can say about ourselves.
UPDATED: This is the video our vigilant reader saw --
Let me say two things about that video:
[1] In the first place, I promise you that maybe one or two of the people who are seen in that video actually "get" what the words of this song are saying. Maybe.
[2] But in that, make sure you freeze the frame on the graffiti Bono paints on the handbill wall. It says, "Sinners make the best Saints. J.C. R.I.P."
Listen: if you need evidence that Bono is nothing like Cash, it's right there in Bono's handwriting. Jesus is not "R.I.P.". Jesus is Lord and Christ, and our proof is that he walked out of the grave. Jesus is not a Gandhi: Jesus is Lord and Christ. And if this song is about Jesus who is "R.I.P.", then it is meaningless -- but if it is about sin, and judgment, and the end of men who do not repent, then it is about men who will ultimately be judged by Christ.
Holy ... listen: use this video to preach the Gospel. It was sung to preach the Gospel -- use it that way. Don't let people like Kid Rock and Flea from RHCP and (pheh) Justin Timberlake co-opt the message of the Gospel for some kind of ludicrous popular gravitas. Pray for them that this song is used by God to change their hearts, and let them be cut down by God and then raised up in the likeness of His Son.
The first thing to say about the Man in Black is that he never pretended to be a theologian or a preacher, so he gets a lot of grace for being what he was and not what he thought he wanted to be. And that includes his charismatic/AOG leanings. You, the reader, can contrast that with, say, Bono, or me for that matter, and draw your own conclusions.
But the far more important thing to say about Cash is that because of his flaws, he had a genuine and fully-orbed Christian testimony. Now, what does that mean? Does it mean that because he wore his pain and suffering on his sleeve he made more sense to people? Oh please: one of the things I admire about Cash is that he did not wear his pain and suffering on his sleeve: he wore the redemption of Christ on his sleeve.
Let me give you a great example of that:
Listen: if you ever catch Bono talking like this, call me immediately. But it'll never happen -- because he thinks Jesus is about a political change on Earth. Now, the more erudite of you might say, "well, cent, Jesus does call for a political change on this Earth," and I might agree with you: Jesus calls for an eschatological change in this world. But it's not a change which puts the U.N. in charge of world affairs: it's a change which puts Christ in pre-eminence above all things.
Johnny Cash, sitting in a crowd of MTV zombies, preached the Gospel. When was the last time you put yourself on the line like that for Jesus?
So I think much of the drug addicted and adulterous Johnny Cash. He had real shame, and real hope -- which is more than we can say for a lot of people. God willing it is not more than we can say about ourselves.
UPDATED: This is the video our vigilant reader saw --
Let me say two things about that video:
[1] In the first place, I promise you that maybe one or two of the people who are seen in that video actually "get" what the words of this song are saying. Maybe.
[2] But in that, make sure you freeze the frame on the graffiti Bono paints on the handbill wall. It says, "Sinners make the best Saints. J.C. R.I.P."
Listen: if you need evidence that Bono is nothing like Cash, it's right there in Bono's handwriting. Jesus is not "R.I.P.". Jesus is Lord and Christ, and our proof is that he walked out of the grave. Jesus is not a Gandhi: Jesus is Lord and Christ. And if this song is about Jesus who is "R.I.P.", then it is meaningless -- but if it is about sin, and judgment, and the end of men who do not repent, then it is about men who will ultimately be judged by Christ.
Holy ... listen: use this video to preach the Gospel. It was sung to preach the Gospel -- use it that way. Don't let people like Kid Rock and Flea from RHCP and (pheh) Justin Timberlake co-opt the message of the Gospel for some kind of ludicrous popular gravitas. Pray for them that this song is used by God to change their hearts, and let them be cut down by God and then raised up in the likeness of His Son.
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
[*] 20-year-old Beef (skimpy main course)
OK – I still have the loose end of complaining about Brian Mattson’s review of U2’s last CD, and after all the hoopla I’m not going to make too big a deal out of this. My opinion is that I covered the nuts-and-bolts of Bono’s use of words when I briefly reviewed his conversation with Michka Assayas.
Here’s my upside of this CD: it really does rock. If that’s all you care about, rock on.
But Mattson takes too much for granted. He summarizes Part One of his review by saying:
In taking too much for granted, Mattson gives Bono all the benefit of the doubt. For example, in listening to “Vertigo”, Mattson says
Maybe Bono was careless in naming the song, and this song really does hinge on the phrase, “I can feel your love teaching me how / Your love is teaching me how, how to kneel, kneel”. I find it difficult to get to Mattson’s conclusions, however, because like the rest of Bono’s vocabulary the terms are all ambiguous. Some people may say that this is the definition of poetry, the heart of artistic work in literature, but that is simply an uninformed view. You cannot find this kind of ambiguity in great poetry (cf. Williams, Stevens, Whitman, Elliot), but you can certainly find it in pop music.
Let’s consider, however, that I am still holding a grudge against Bono and that this song ought to be read in the context that the song “Yahweh” on this same CD – which is obviously using the covenant name of God for some purpose. In defense of Mattson’s view of this particular song, the first half certainly is, as he says, evidence that Bono has read the book of Psalms – and perhaps a little Isaiah as well. The whole matter of taking our ashes and turning them into something beautiful – to the very end, where Bono pleads “Take this heart/And make it break” – is classically biblical.
Yet here is the centerpiece of the song:
But if we hop ahead and do that, we have a problem: the dawn is already “something better”. So is “something better” coming than God’s love? Or is God’s love in need of something more? This is question is amplified by the singer’s question “tell me now/why the dark before the dawn?” The easy way out is to say, “all of it is God’s love, cent. The dawn, the drop, the ocean.” And anyone is welcome to say that – but find a way to make the passage make sense if that is true. The singer is waiting for the dawn, and here comes the dawn, and the dawn is on the ocean, and the ocean is God’s love, so God’s love is enlightening God’s love ... ?
It seems to me that this bridge is instead saying, “I can see the dawn coming up on the ocean, but this love (the dawn) is like a drop in the ocean – that is, the problem looks bigger than the solution.” That makes sense especially in the context that the idiom “that’s just a drop in the ocean” is not an idiom which expresses surplus but one which expresses insignificance or inadequancy –- consider the Michelle branch lyric “Drop in the Ocean” or Mother Theresa’s classic quote, “We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean, but if that drop were not in the ocean,… the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.”
As I listen to this song, I want to hear what Mattson has expounded – but I hear something different, which is the confusion Bono has over the work of God and the role of man. Sure: he has this idea, as demonstrated in the book review post, that love came down in a humble way in the dung and the straw. But it is confused by a lot of things – like failing to connect suffering in this life to man’s actual guilt and also to Christ’s redemptive suffering (which are two different classes of suffering, to be sure).
In that way, to extol this song as a modern psalm (aside from the hubris of saying such a thing) is to overlook the shortcomings in its view of God’s relationship to man.
So, in the end, I think Mattson’s review is confused. And that’s a shame because I think he’s a bright guy. So if you’re looking for rock and roll, go ahead and buy U2’s last CD – but let’s not confuse it with something that deserves a theological 4-star rating.
Here’s my upside of this CD: it really does rock. If that’s all you care about, rock on.
But Mattson takes too much for granted. He summarizes Part One of his review by saying:
In part one of this review, I rehearsed some of the background of U2's life and music, particularly the evidence of a spiritual journey over the course of their many albums. I pointed out that they seem to have traversed the territory between a cynical approach to suffering, characterized by accusing God of screwing up the world, to an approach of faith and hope, characterized by humility and "bended knees."Ironically, I would agree with about 81% of this assessment, but the rub lies in equating “a spiritual journey” with “faith, hope, … humility and bended knee”, particularly in the matter of faith. Not all “spiritual journeys” are ones which lead to saving faith, unfortunately, and it is in the best case it is not determinate what the results of Bono’s spiritual journey is.
In taking too much for granted, Mattson gives Bono all the benefit of the doubt. For example, in listening to “Vertigo”, Mattson says
The source of satisfaction, the antidote to "Vertigo," is God teaching one how to kneel.Let’s remember that Bono is not a careless person when it comes to choosing his words, so in calling this song “Vertigo”, we have to believe that he knew that “vertigo” means “An illusion of movement, a sensation as if the external world were revolving around the subject”. (an interesting note is that a common error to believe that vertigo is merely any kind of dizziness) Thus when Mattson offers the conclusion that this song is about an antidote to personal vertigo, he seems to overlook that the majority of the song is actually about the whirling about of the world – and that the last words of the song are “die young”.
Maybe Bono was careless in naming the song, and this song really does hinge on the phrase, “I can feel your love teaching me how / Your love is teaching me how, how to kneel, kneel”. I find it difficult to get to Mattson’s conclusions, however, because like the rest of Bono’s vocabulary the terms are all ambiguous. Some people may say that this is the definition of poetry, the heart of artistic work in literature, but that is simply an uninformed view. You cannot find this kind of ambiguity in great poetry (cf. Williams, Stevens, Whitman, Elliot), but you can certainly find it in pop music.
Let’s consider, however, that I am still holding a grudge against Bono and that this song ought to be read in the context that the song “Yahweh” on this same CD – which is obviously using the covenant name of God for some purpose. In defense of Mattson’s view of this particular song, the first half certainly is, as he says, evidence that Bono has read the book of Psalms – and perhaps a little Isaiah as well. The whole matter of taking our ashes and turning them into something beautiful – to the very end, where Bono pleads “Take this heart/And make it break” – is classically biblical.
Yet here is the centerpiece of the song:
Even Mattson can admit that the phrase “always pain before a child is born” is a reference to the pain of this world – he goes to identify it as the matter of original sin. I will gladly accept that view – if it can be reconciled with what the ocean is in the bridge. The singer is “still waiting for the dawn” in spite of the “pain before a child is born” – so the dawn is something better, yes? And the sun is coming up “on the ocean”. We can hop ahead a little and try to say that “the ocean” is all of God’s love, and that the love that Bono knows/feels is “like a drop” in that ocean.Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, Yahweh
Still I'm waiting for the dawn
Still waiting for the dawn... sun is coming up
Sun is coming up on the ocean
This love is like a drop in the ocean
This love is like a drop in the ocean
Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, tell me now
Why the dark before the dawn?
But if we hop ahead and do that, we have a problem: the dawn is already “something better”. So is “something better” coming than God’s love? Or is God’s love in need of something more? This is question is amplified by the singer’s question “tell me now/why the dark before the dawn?” The easy way out is to say, “all of it is God’s love, cent. The dawn, the drop, the ocean.” And anyone is welcome to say that – but find a way to make the passage make sense if that is true. The singer is waiting for the dawn, and here comes the dawn, and the dawn is on the ocean, and the ocean is God’s love, so God’s love is enlightening God’s love ... ?
It seems to me that this bridge is instead saying, “I can see the dawn coming up on the ocean, but this love (the dawn) is like a drop in the ocean – that is, the problem looks bigger than the solution.” That makes sense especially in the context that the idiom “that’s just a drop in the ocean” is not an idiom which expresses surplus but one which expresses insignificance or inadequancy –- consider the Michelle branch lyric “Drop in the Ocean” or Mother Theresa’s classic quote, “We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean, but if that drop were not in the ocean,… the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.”
As I listen to this song, I want to hear what Mattson has expounded – but I hear something different, which is the confusion Bono has over the work of God and the role of man. Sure: he has this idea, as demonstrated in the book review post, that love came down in a humble way in the dung and the straw. But it is confused by a lot of things – like failing to connect suffering in this life to man’s actual guilt and also to Christ’s redemptive suffering (which are two different classes of suffering, to be sure).
In that way, to extol this song as a modern psalm (aside from the hubris of saying such a thing) is to overlook the shortcomings in its view of God’s relationship to man.
So, in the end, I think Mattson’s review is confused. And that’s a shame because I think he’s a bright guy. So if you’re looking for rock and roll, go ahead and buy U2’s last CD – but let’s not confuse it with something that deserves a theological 4-star rating.
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
[#] Somehow, we're in last place
Yes, this is more on the aid to Africa thing. I'm blogging about it because it seems to me that all we hear about in this discussion is that there's not enough being done. Greed in the west, says one talking head, is as great a sin as sexual promiscuity in Africa which is leading to the death of millions by AIDS.
Well, yes: greed is the same kind of sin as adultery. No doubt about that. Can we ask ourselves, however, how we define the word "greed" for a minute? For example, is it greedy for a rock star (no one in particular, but any given rockstar) to perform for free at a concert to promote his cause (a performance lasting about an hour, and perhaps it took all day to prepare for that hour), but afterwards fly home on a chartered jet and take his Mercedes from the Airport to his home? No?
I wouldn't say that is greedy, to be honest. I'd say, "that's how Capitalism pans out". If you define the end result of Capitalism as "greed", then of course it's greedy, but if you define the end result of capitalism as "economic justice as arbitrated by the marketplace", then it is not greedy.
Now consider the following chart:
click me to enlarge
The first is this: the sum of the aid given by these 22 countries in 2004 is $78.566 billion. In case you haven't been following my aid to Africa posts, that is about $2 billion less than the entire debt of the nations the Live8 gang want to see forgiven. And that's what was given in 2004. Nearly the same amount was given in 2003. So in the last 2 years, about double the total debt owed by these countries was given back to them in free, don't-pay-me-back, here's-a-check, aid.
The next thing is this: somehow, the country which has given the most in aid in raw dollars is at the bottom of the list. Excuse me: it’s second-to-last.
Well, of course it is -- because in this list the dollars given is indexed against GDP*. And the country which has given the most dollars also happens to have the highest GDP, so indexing against GDP is the only "fair" way to assess whether there has been any "justice", right? To whom much is given, much shall be required, right? You can't argue with the Bible: the US owes more to the African nations than, say, the French who exploited Africa through colonialism.
Well, it turns out that there is some latitude for the US in this even in the eyes of the beholders here. When we factor in private giving as well as national/political funds, the US goes from #22 on the list to #15 -- and that makes it's total giving not $18.999 billion but in fact $30.873 billion.
Think about that for a second, dear reader: last year the US gave $30.873 billion to Africa – and amount equal to about 38% of their total indebtedness. And the amount of private giving from the US was more than the total governmental giving of 13 other countries combined.
Which leads us to this particular chart:
click me to enlarge
It turns out that the US, in government funds only, gave more than the next 2 countries on the list, and also more than the bottom 14 countries combined. It’s pretty hard to say that the US is “greedy” or “stingy” in its giving when it gave more than 9 Italies or 7 Canadas.
I think it is also pretty, um, staged to say that “God will judge us” for the way we have shown good will in the form of almsgiving to the African continent. To make my final point here, I’m going to reference a formula that the president of every chamber of commerce in America uses to demonstrate the power of investing in a community. The “common knowledge” is that if you spend a dollar in any American community, it has a seven-fold impact on the community. I have no idea where this notion comes from, but they all parrot this as if it is a proven fact. Let’s assume for a minute that the impact is not seven-fold but three-fold. So if somebody dropped $1 billion into your community, if we assume that it would not be gobbled up by local politicians and scam artists, the net impact would be a $3 billion expansion of your local economy.
Now even if we give the benefit of the doubt to this formula and the Africa advocates and say, “and that’s because a viable economic infrastructure already exists”, let’s say that the impact in an African community ought to be dollar-for-dollar. That is, if we drop in $40 billion, the economy should grow by $40 billion.
The problem is that these economies do not grow by $40 billion. In fact, they are documented to be contracting rather than expanding – in spite of an annual infusion of literally billions of dollars. Billions.
The problem is not a lack of money: it is a lack of stewardship. That is to say, somehow the people we are giving this aid to are not spending it on things. They can’t be. If I had $1 billion, and I spent it all on bubblegum, a bubblegum industry would pop up. If I had $1 billion and I spent it on a castle, an explosion in construction employment would occur. If the money were being spent on things – which is, in the most objective sense, what money is for – then economic development would happen. Something else is happening to the money.
And in that lies the problem with the argument the aid for Africa folks have fronted up.
*Some of you, if you are like me, are thinking, “ah. GDP. Right. Exactly ... um ... what is GDP again?” “GDP” stands for “Gross Domestic Product”. We love Wikipedia here, but rather than make you click through, GDP is defined as the total value of all goods and services produced within that territory during a specified period (or, if not specified, annually, so that "the UK GDP" is the UK's annual product). GDP differs from gross national product (GNP) in excluding inter-country income transfers, in effect attributing to a territory the product generated within it rather than the incomes received in it. The standard GDP formula is expressed as:
GDP = private consumption + government + investment + net exports
I’m sure that clears it up for you. :-)
Well, yes: greed is the same kind of sin as adultery. No doubt about that. Can we ask ourselves, however, how we define the word "greed" for a minute? For example, is it greedy for a rock star (no one in particular, but any given rockstar) to perform for free at a concert to promote his cause (a performance lasting about an hour, and perhaps it took all day to prepare for that hour), but afterwards fly home on a chartered jet and take his Mercedes from the Airport to his home? No?
I wouldn't say that is greedy, to be honest. I'd say, "that's how Capitalism pans out". If you define the end result of Capitalism as "greed", then of course it's greedy, but if you define the end result of capitalism as "economic justice as arbitrated by the marketplace", then it is not greedy.
Now consider the following chart:
click me to enlarge
The first is this: the sum of the aid given by these 22 countries in 2004 is $78.566 billion. In case you haven't been following my aid to Africa posts, that is about $2 billion less than the entire debt of the nations the Live8 gang want to see forgiven. And that's what was given in 2004. Nearly the same amount was given in 2003. So in the last 2 years, about double the total debt owed by these countries was given back to them in free, don't-pay-me-back, here's-a-check, aid.
The next thing is this: somehow, the country which has given the most in aid in raw dollars is at the bottom of the list. Excuse me: it’s second-to-last.
Well, of course it is -- because in this list the dollars given is indexed against GDP*. And the country which has given the most dollars also happens to have the highest GDP, so indexing against GDP is the only "fair" way to assess whether there has been any "justice", right? To whom much is given, much shall be required, right? You can't argue with the Bible: the US owes more to the African nations than, say, the French who exploited Africa through colonialism.
Well, it turns out that there is some latitude for the US in this even in the eyes of the beholders here. When we factor in private giving as well as national/political funds, the US goes from #22 on the list to #15 -- and that makes it's total giving not $18.999 billion but in fact $30.873 billion.
Think about that for a second, dear reader: last year the US gave $30.873 billion to Africa – and amount equal to about 38% of their total indebtedness. And the amount of private giving from the US was more than the total governmental giving of 13 other countries combined.
Which leads us to this particular chart:
click me to enlarge
It turns out that the US, in government funds only, gave more than the next 2 countries on the list, and also more than the bottom 14 countries combined. It’s pretty hard to say that the US is “greedy” or “stingy” in its giving when it gave more than 9 Italies or 7 Canadas.
I think it is also pretty, um, staged to say that “God will judge us” for the way we have shown good will in the form of almsgiving to the African continent. To make my final point here, I’m going to reference a formula that the president of every chamber of commerce in America uses to demonstrate the power of investing in a community. The “common knowledge” is that if you spend a dollar in any American community, it has a seven-fold impact on the community. I have no idea where this notion comes from, but they all parrot this as if it is a proven fact. Let’s assume for a minute that the impact is not seven-fold but three-fold. So if somebody dropped $1 billion into your community, if we assume that it would not be gobbled up by local politicians and scam artists, the net impact would be a $3 billion expansion of your local economy.
Now even if we give the benefit of the doubt to this formula and the Africa advocates and say, “and that’s because a viable economic infrastructure already exists”, let’s say that the impact in an African community ought to be dollar-for-dollar. That is, if we drop in $40 billion, the economy should grow by $40 billion.
The problem is that these economies do not grow by $40 billion. In fact, they are documented to be contracting rather than expanding – in spite of an annual infusion of literally billions of dollars. Billions.
The problem is not a lack of money: it is a lack of stewardship. That is to say, somehow the people we are giving this aid to are not spending it on things. They can’t be. If I had $1 billion, and I spent it all on bubblegum, a bubblegum industry would pop up. If I had $1 billion and I spent it on a castle, an explosion in construction employment would occur. If the money were being spent on things – which is, in the most objective sense, what money is for – then economic development would happen. Something else is happening to the money.
And in that lies the problem with the argument the aid for Africa folks have fronted up.
*Some of you, if you are like me, are thinking, “ah. GDP. Right. Exactly ... um ... what is GDP again?” “GDP” stands for “Gross Domestic Product”. We love Wikipedia here, but rather than make you click through, GDP is defined as the total value of all goods and services produced within that territory during a specified period (or, if not specified, annually, so that "the UK GDP" is the UK's annual product). GDP differs from gross national product (GNP) in excluding inter-country income transfers, in effect attributing to a territory the product generated within it rather than the incomes received in it. The standard GDP formula is expressed as:
GDP = private consumption + government + investment + net exports
I’m sure that clears it up for you. :-)
Saturday, July 16, 2005
[#] More on the matter of African Debt Relief
Because it seemed unlikely that $40 billion in debt would actually make this kind of difference regarding the economic status of a continent, I did some more Googling and came across this article from the BBC regarding debt relief. Here's what I think is the key passage:
Just trying to keep the facts straight. Not that it improves their argument very much.
The main one is the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC) which was launched in 1996 and for which a total of 38 countries, mostly in Africa, are in principle eligible.So as a matter of correction, the World Bank says that prior to the current initiatives (which were enacted in 1996), there was $80 billion in debt out there in Afican debt, not the measely $40 billion I reported last week. That changes the math from $50 per person in debt to $100, and the ratio from 7% to 14%.
To qualify, countries have to be very poor and have a very heavy debt burden.
They also have to maintain economic stability and produce a strategy for reducing poverty.
A total of 18 have reached what is called the "completion point" - the end of the HIPC process. These are the countries that will immediately benefit from the plan announced in London on 11 June.
Another nine have got to the "decision point", at which debt relief starts to kick in.
The World Bank says the total debts of these 27 countries went from $80bn to $28bn as a result of HIPC and other debt relief initiatives.
It also says that what it calls "poverty-reducing expenditure" went from 40.9% of government revenue in 1999 to 48.5% in 2003.
There are another 11 HIPC countries yet to reach their decision points. Most have had difficulties such as internal conflicts, which have prevented them doing all that is required for debt relief under the initiative.
Just trying to keep the facts straight. Not that it improves their argument very much.
Friday, July 15, 2005
20-year-old beef (book review)
Is anyone going to be surprised if I write the following:
Well, I have finished the 300+ pages of conversation between Michka Assayas and Bono, and it turns out that Bono is a human being with flaws, and fears, and trouble in his past he hasn’t overcome, and he loves others, and he has great compassion for the poor of Africa. It also turns out that he’s in this band called “U2” which he started in High School that has had the same group members for more than 20 years.
Anyone surprised? I didn’t think so. He’s likable – you can’t help but like him. He’s self-deprecating and has a sense of humor about himself; he doesn’t appear to hold a grudge against anybody. Frankly, he has the Irish gift of tongues, which is to say his conversation is always interesting.
Look: you cannot read this book and come away thinking, “man, this guy is really a bad person at the core – you have to wonder if he thinks anyone is going to believe this stuff.” You can’t if you’re an honest reader. Bono is an amiable person. There are dozens of examples of why you ought to like Bono when you read this book.
So here’s the first real window-breaker of my response to Rooster’s review of U2’s last CD. I said this in my original post:
In that, I owe Bono and his friends an apology for saying such a thing. I was wrong to say that they have set out to intentionally deceive anybody about what they believe, and whether they have read it or not, I apologize.
However, I have to say this: I do actually think that since the “clever and nuanced uses of the Bible and the names and work of God” are present in the lyrics, they must mean something. So what can they possibly mean?
There are two paths to follow: what is evident in the text of those lyrics, and what is evident in Bono’s own description of his life in his own words as guided by Michka Assayas. Since this post is allegedly a review of that book, I’ll start with the last one first, and then come back to the lyrics the next time we handle this topic.
The interesting thing about this book, really, is that it isn’t very much about what Bono thinks is important even though he spends a lot of time talking about his work on behalf of the Africa poverty problem, his family, and his career. This book is about what Michka Assayas thinks is important about Bono. The really clever readers of this blog might come back with, “duh, Cent: it’s an interview. That’s how that genre works: someone asks (leading) questions and the answers come as they will. The interviewer guides the discussion.”
I think that speaking strictly from the view that genre exists in any piece of writing, that must be true. But anyone who has personally been interviewed for anything more than a job at Wendy’s knows something important: the person being interviewed has the option to take control. That is to say, the questions start to matter less than the answers if the person giving the answers has a piece of turf he’s trying to stake out.
Here’s the perfect example: the Matt Lauer/Tom Cruise interview. Technically, Matt Lauer was interviewing Cruise – and baiting him. Who would say that Lauer wasn’t baiting Cruise to say something outrageous or controversial? But Cruise turns out to be a pretty wiley fellow and turned the interview completely on its head. By the end of the interview, the only person more in control of that interview than Cruise was the person producing the segment from the control room. If the genre of interview was strictly about the softballs tossed out by the interviewer, then frankly I think no one would bother to be interviewed ever – why choose to be a pig in a poke?
If anything must be true of Bono, he’s not a pig in a poke. If he had the smallest whim to make the conversation about something specific, I am certain he could find a way to do it. He’s eloquent, he’s smart, and he’s got a lot of energy for a fellow past 40.
But this book is just not at all about what Bono might want to talk about. In fact, I would say that Bono takes great pain to make sure he’s not leading Assayas anywhere in particular. We might attribute that to a couple of things. First, these two have been friends since Bono was nobody and Assayas was, in his own words, “a ‘new wave’ preppy” working for the French magazine Le Monde de la Musique. Bono and Assayas have a history, and Bono frankly trusts his friends – so he could just trust Assayas to ask questions that he didn’t have to be afraid to answer. We also might say that Bono has no vested interest in being anything more or less than what is available for sale already – that is, he’s on the record, literally. Why muck that up by turning out to be something more (or less) than what the fans already expect?
So there are no earth-shakers in this book. Bono’s mother died when he was a teen – we knew that already. Bono’s dad took that pretty hard and he was never close to his son – well, we knew that somewhat already, I think. Bono has an older brother – I didn’t know that, but it’s not an atom bomb of revelation. What we get, for the most part, is Assayas’ filter of Bono’s life: a strict respect for the things he knows Bono holds close to the chest, a causal dialog that any two friends might have together, and a lot of talk about the question of what Bono is doing about Africa.
Technically, Chapter 4 is all about that aid to Africa stuff – it’s all about Bono acting as lead ambassador for the organization DATA (Democracy, Accountability and Trade for Africa – or Debt-AIDS-Trade-Africa, depending on who you ask) to round up G8 support (and particularly US support) for their cause. But the rest of the book is simply littered with more questions or anecdotes about this work.
Hey: it’s goal is good in the geopolitical sense. It would be good to have Africa not starving to death anymore, not to be living on dust anymore. My family supports a family in Africa monthly – we have been doing it for 7 years, since before my son was born -- and if every American family did that we could cut the rate of starvation in Africa significantly.
But to get back to my point here, Bono’s not the one who keeps bringing it up: Assayas is. He is apparently fascinated by this work – because he’s apparently seen the carnage up-front. Gosh: good for him. Thank God he’s got a conscience! But even if this is the most important thing Bono has ever done (and it might be, honestly), I’m really more interested in why he has this passion for good work rather than what a great job of rallying political allies he’s done to gain some debt relief for the African continent.
It comes back, full circle, to the matter of “Bono’s clever and nuanced uses of the Bible and the names and work of God”. The only reference Bono makes to God in all the talk about Africa is that God will judge us by how we react to this situation – and that seems rather amazing to me for someone who, elsewhere, seems to “get” the astonishing act of the incarnation – that man should be humbled and have his pride broken by the fact that God the Creator of all things condescended to be made flesh and be born in a manger.
I would offer up this bit from chapter 11 (Assayas is in italics; Bono is in plain face):
We can go into it in a future blog entry, but there is no way to say that both the Koran and the Bible are “some holy thesis” in the way he means here. They make exclusive claims. I hate to get all propositional and theological here, but either the Bible is “some holy thesis” or the Koran is “some holy thesis”.
There is also the problem of “people who are open spiritually”. Some people may think that way, but any person who thinks 5 minutes about God’s intention to set apart a chosen people in Christ can’t read that and not wonder which parts the of Bible Bono has neglected.
That’s one piece of evidence we should consider when we look at “Bono’s clever and nuanced uses of the Bible and the names and work of God”. But another comes up hard and fast:
My answer is: you cannot. I have no doubt that Bono believes both of these things as equal truths. In the very next response to Assayas, he says:
It is in the confusion evident in that kind of verbal alchemy that I realized something: whether Bono knows the Gospel or not, he doesn’t think there’s a difference between Allah and Yahweh. And inherent in this conversation he’s having with Assayas, I think there is something more important: I’m not sure he cares for those who do.
Before I clarify that and finish this review – which gives me the basis to finish my comments on the U2 review that kicked all of this off two weeks ago – let me say, as I have before, that I am not qualified to say whether Bono’s saved or unsaved. I tried baptizing my glasses to see if it would help, but it didn’t. He says the right words sometimes, but frankly in the best case he says “the older I get, the more comfort I find [in the ‘Holy Roman Church’]”.
But in all that, we have to go back to the first citation I gave from the book, above, when Assayas calls him a man of deep faith, and Bono responds, “I’m a lot of other things as well.” Bono is ambivalent about faith even when he asserts that it is the basis for his understanding of God and love. It comes our clearest when he speaks of an incident early in his life in chapter 8:
In that, we will proceed to the Rooster’s review next week some time. Have a nice weekend, and enjoy your time in the house of the Lord.
Well, I have finished the 300+ pages of conversation between Michka Assayas and Bono, and it turns out that Bono is a human being with flaws, and fears, and trouble in his past he hasn’t overcome, and he loves others, and he has great compassion for the poor of Africa. It also turns out that he’s in this band called “U2” which he started in High School that has had the same group members for more than 20 years.
Anyone surprised? I didn’t think so. He’s likable – you can’t help but like him. He’s self-deprecating and has a sense of humor about himself; he doesn’t appear to hold a grudge against anybody. Frankly, he has the Irish gift of tongues, which is to say his conversation is always interesting.
Look: you cannot read this book and come away thinking, “man, this guy is really a bad person at the core – you have to wonder if he thinks anyone is going to believe this stuff.” You can’t if you’re an honest reader. Bono is an amiable person. There are dozens of examples of why you ought to like Bono when you read this book.
So here’s the first real window-breaker of my response to Rooster’s review of U2’s last CD. I said this in my original post:
I think Bono’s clever and nuanced uses of the Bible and the names and work of God are not just pop marketing: I think they are intended to deceive.And when I said that, I was wrong. After reading the interview book, and bookmarking almost 100 critical points in the conversation and reviewing them, there is no way I was right about Bono or U2 setting out to deceive anybody.
In that, I owe Bono and his friends an apology for saying such a thing. I was wrong to say that they have set out to intentionally deceive anybody about what they believe, and whether they have read it or not, I apologize.
However, I have to say this: I do actually think that since the “clever and nuanced uses of the Bible and the names and work of God” are present in the lyrics, they must mean something. So what can they possibly mean?
There are two paths to follow: what is evident in the text of those lyrics, and what is evident in Bono’s own description of his life in his own words as guided by Michka Assayas. Since this post is allegedly a review of that book, I’ll start with the last one first, and then come back to the lyrics the next time we handle this topic.
The interesting thing about this book, really, is that it isn’t very much about what Bono thinks is important even though he spends a lot of time talking about his work on behalf of the Africa poverty problem, his family, and his career. This book is about what Michka Assayas thinks is important about Bono. The really clever readers of this blog might come back with, “duh, Cent: it’s an interview. That’s how that genre works: someone asks (leading) questions and the answers come as they will. The interviewer guides the discussion.”
I think that speaking strictly from the view that genre exists in any piece of writing, that must be true. But anyone who has personally been interviewed for anything more than a job at Wendy’s knows something important: the person being interviewed has the option to take control. That is to say, the questions start to matter less than the answers if the person giving the answers has a piece of turf he’s trying to stake out.
Here’s the perfect example: the Matt Lauer/Tom Cruise interview. Technically, Matt Lauer was interviewing Cruise – and baiting him. Who would say that Lauer wasn’t baiting Cruise to say something outrageous or controversial? But Cruise turns out to be a pretty wiley fellow and turned the interview completely on its head. By the end of the interview, the only person more in control of that interview than Cruise was the person producing the segment from the control room. If the genre of interview was strictly about the softballs tossed out by the interviewer, then frankly I think no one would bother to be interviewed ever – why choose to be a pig in a poke?
If anything must be true of Bono, he’s not a pig in a poke. If he had the smallest whim to make the conversation about something specific, I am certain he could find a way to do it. He’s eloquent, he’s smart, and he’s got a lot of energy for a fellow past 40.
But this book is just not at all about what Bono might want to talk about. In fact, I would say that Bono takes great pain to make sure he’s not leading Assayas anywhere in particular. We might attribute that to a couple of things. First, these two have been friends since Bono was nobody and Assayas was, in his own words, “a ‘new wave’ preppy” working for the French magazine Le Monde de la Musique. Bono and Assayas have a history, and Bono frankly trusts his friends – so he could just trust Assayas to ask questions that he didn’t have to be afraid to answer. We also might say that Bono has no vested interest in being anything more or less than what is available for sale already – that is, he’s on the record, literally. Why muck that up by turning out to be something more (or less) than what the fans already expect?
So there are no earth-shakers in this book. Bono’s mother died when he was a teen – we knew that already. Bono’s dad took that pretty hard and he was never close to his son – well, we knew that somewhat already, I think. Bono has an older brother – I didn’t know that, but it’s not an atom bomb of revelation. What we get, for the most part, is Assayas’ filter of Bono’s life: a strict respect for the things he knows Bono holds close to the chest, a causal dialog that any two friends might have together, and a lot of talk about the question of what Bono is doing about Africa.
Technically, Chapter 4 is all about that aid to Africa stuff – it’s all about Bono acting as lead ambassador for the organization DATA (Democracy, Accountability and Trade for Africa – or Debt-AIDS-Trade-Africa, depending on who you ask) to round up G8 support (and particularly US support) for their cause. But the rest of the book is simply littered with more questions or anecdotes about this work.
Hey: it’s goal is good in the geopolitical sense. It would be good to have Africa not starving to death anymore, not to be living on dust anymore. My family supports a family in Africa monthly – we have been doing it for 7 years, since before my son was born -- and if every American family did that we could cut the rate of starvation in Africa significantly.
But to get back to my point here, Bono’s not the one who keeps bringing it up: Assayas is. He is apparently fascinated by this work – because he’s apparently seen the carnage up-front. Gosh: good for him. Thank God he’s got a conscience! But even if this is the most important thing Bono has ever done (and it might be, honestly), I’m really more interested in why he has this passion for good work rather than what a great job of rallying political allies he’s done to gain some debt relief for the African continent.
It comes back, full circle, to the matter of “Bono’s clever and nuanced uses of the Bible and the names and work of God”. The only reference Bono makes to God in all the talk about Africa is that God will judge us by how we react to this situation – and that seems rather amazing to me for someone who, elsewhere, seems to “get” the astonishing act of the incarnation – that man should be humbled and have his pride broken by the fact that God the Creator of all things condescended to be made flesh and be born in a manger.
I would offer up this bit from chapter 11 (Assayas is in italics; Bono is in plain face):
Terrorists are focused on big ideas. You’re quite aware that there are no greater idealists than terrorists. Most of them revere the notions of God (emph added) and holy justice. I guess for a person like you, who is deeply religious and idealistic, it must be very disturbing.Now Bono is about to say something here that’s frankly beautiful – but it is in contrast to calling both the Bible and the Koran “some holy thesis”. Let’s think about what he says here: an act of terror and the underscoring conviction is a corruption of “some holy thesis”, whether that thesis is from the Bible or the Koran.
I’m a lot of other things as well. But you see, Michka, people who are open spiritually are open to being manipulated more easily, are very vulnerable. The religious instinct is a very pure one in my opinion. But unless its met with a lot of rigor, it’s very hard to control.
Correct. But you’ve also never seen a skeptic or an atheist smash himself to pieces in order to kill as many people as possible. I mean, atheists would organize concentration camps or would plan collective starvation, but this kind of terror we are dealing with now is of a spiritual nature. You can’t hide from that.
It’s true. Yeah, smashing other people to pieces doesn’t need the same conviction. Most terrorists want to change the material world. Well, add eternity to that, and people can go a lot further to pursue their ends. ... but of course, this is always a corruption of some holy thesis, whether it’s the Koran or the Bible.
We can go into it in a future blog entry, but there is no way to say that both the Koran and the Bible are “some holy thesis” in the way he means here. They make exclusive claims. I hate to get all propositional and theological here, but either the Bible is “some holy thesis” or the Koran is “some holy thesis”.
There is also the problem of “people who are open spiritually”. Some people may think that way, but any person who thinks 5 minutes about God’s intention to set apart a chosen people in Christ can’t read that and not wonder which parts the of Bible Bono has neglected.
That’s one piece of evidence we should consider when we look at “Bono’s clever and nuanced uses of the Bible and the names and work of God”. But another comes up hard and fast:
My understanding of the Scriptures has been made simple by the person of Christ. Christ teaches that God is love. What does that mean? What it means for me: a study of the life of Christ. Love here describes itself as a child born in straw poverty, the most vulnerable situation of all, without honor. I don’t let my religious world get too complicated. I just kind of go: Well, I think I know what God is. God is love, and as much as I respond [sigh] in allowing myself to be transformed by that love and acting in that love, that’s my religion. Where things get complicated for me, is when I try to live this love. Now, that’s not so easy.How do you reconcile those two statements standing right next to each other, both coming out of the same mouth at the same time from the same man?
My answer is: you cannot. I have no doubt that Bono believes both of these things as equal truths. In the very next response to Assayas, he says:
There’s nothing hippie about my picture of Christ. The Gospels paint a picture of a very demanding, sometimes divisive love, but love it is.And a page or so later says:
It’s clear to me that Karma is at the very heart of the Universe. I’m absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that “as you reap, so will you sow” stuff. Grace defies reason and logic.In the very best case one can imagine, Bono is being quite the Emergent evangelist here, talking to his unbelieving friend in terms that he might “get” and using the whole vocabulary of world religions to try to make his point. Rather than talk about the Law – he actually calls the Old Testament an “action movie” of violence, special effects and adultery – he says “Karma”, as if they were the same thing.
It is in the confusion evident in that kind of verbal alchemy that I realized something: whether Bono knows the Gospel or not, he doesn’t think there’s a difference between Allah and Yahweh. And inherent in this conversation he’s having with Assayas, I think there is something more important: I’m not sure he cares for those who do.
Before I clarify that and finish this review – which gives me the basis to finish my comments on the U2 review that kicked all of this off two weeks ago – let me say, as I have before, that I am not qualified to say whether Bono’s saved or unsaved. I tried baptizing my glasses to see if it would help, but it didn’t. He says the right words sometimes, but frankly in the best case he says “the older I get, the more comfort I find [in the ‘Holy Roman Church’]”.
But in all that, we have to go back to the first citation I gave from the book, above, when Assayas calls him a man of deep faith, and Bono responds, “I’m a lot of other things as well.” Bono is ambivalent about faith even when he asserts that it is the basis for his understanding of God and love. It comes our clearest when he speaks of an incident early in his life in chapter 8:
I was very influenced by a man called Chris Rowe and his beautiful wife, Lilian. I think he spent a lot of time in China, the child of a mission there before the Communists threw his family out. He was an older man. He relied on the Lord to provide them with everything they needed. They were living hand-to-mouth, this community. I guess he would have been what you would call the pastor of the church, but he’d be much too radical to wear a collar or anything like that. This was the real deal: a radical group. And I said, “look, you shouldn’t have to worry about money. We’re going to earn plenty of money. I’m in a band, and I know we’ll be able to help. We’re going to make it.” He just looked at me and laughed. I remember what he said to me: “I wouldn’t want money earned that way.” And I said: “What do you mean by that?” He revealed to me that, even though he had known we were serious about being musicians, and being a rock group, that he was only really tolerating it. He didn’t really believe that out music was an integral part of who were as religious people unless we used the music to evangelize. I knew then that he didn’t really get it, such a fundamentalist, he didn’t want a part of the rock ‘n’ roll thing. Maybe it’s a compliment to him: we could have been a cash cow.He continues on the next page:
Then we came to a realization: ”Hold on a second. Where are these gifts coming from? This is how we worship God, even though we don’t write religious songs, because we didn’t feel God needs the advertising.”So this book – authored by an unbeliever, who I admit controlled the conversation with Bono, though he did not manipulate him – says specifically that Bono has a very uneven view of the Christian faith, and his own faith in particular.
In that, we will proceed to the Rooster’s review next week some time. Have a nice weekend, and enjoy your time in the house of the Lord.
Thursday, July 14, 2005
[#] An Axe to Grind about World Poverty
There’s a chapter in the Bono book about African relief, and it is both touching and infuriating and, I think, incomplete.
Bono has two very large axes to grind over Africa: AIDS relief, and debt relief. I’m not sure I’m equipped to talk about AIDS relief yet, but as a knee-jerk person who claims to know something about Jesus Christ I’d say that we should be giving them AIDS relief. We should be finding ways to give them medical comfort – which ought to be paired with spiritual comfort and discipleship.
What I want to write about briefly is the matter of debt. Much has been made about the billions in debt owed by the poorest African nations and how it is crippling them economically. Well, whenever we talk about economics, there is of course the matter of “real people” who are either starving or dying from being fat pigs, and somehow the argument is always that the fat pigs are to blame for the ones who are starving. Let’s just take that “argument” as one side for a moment and frame another side.
I just did a quick Google for the total amount of debt (converted to US dollars) owed by the African continent, and came up with the number $40 billion. I couldn’t find it on the “Make Poverty History” website, which is odd since they are demanding that the only economic justice is to forgive all the debt; one would think that the scope of the demand would be outlined in a little more detail than simply saying “all”. So: $40 billion in debt. A quick scan of the World Factbook says that there are roughly (which is to say, rounding down for the sake of the argument) 800 million people living in Africa. fao.org says that the GDP per person in Africa is $736.
To get all terms in the same denomination, the debt per person for the continent of Africa is $40 billion / 800 million = $50. So here’s the comparison: the GDP per person is $736, and the debt per person is $50. Those of you with quick calculators can see that the debt-to-GDP percent of the African continent is 6.7934% -- we’ll round it up to 7% to keep things simple.
Now let’s look at the United States. The Population of the United States as I type this note (according to the US census bureau) is 296 million – give or take 500,000. The GDP for the United States for FYE 2004 was $10.841 trillion, and the nation debt of the US as I type this $7.849 trillion.
To get all the terms in the same denomination, the GDP per person for 2004 for the US was $36,625; the national debt per person in the US is $26,516. So the debt to GDP percent per person for the US is 72.4%.
To bring it all together, the debt per person in Africa is about 7% of what they generate in production of goods and services, and the debt per person in the United States is almost 73% of what they generate in production of goods and services. That is to say: the debt burden of the US per person is 10 times what it is per person on the African continent – as a percent of their productive output, not as measured in dollar-for-dollar comparisons. The dollar-to-dollar comparison says that the debt burden per person in the US is more than 500 times what it is in Africa.
There are probably a billion directions in which this discussion could go at this point – like the justice of making a nation pay back the debts of a despotic ruler they have overthrown, or the wisdom of making loans or “relief payments” to despotic rulers in the first place without demanding some accountability from them – but the question of debt “burden” seems to be one that does not account for the proportional matters of economic scale.
Listen: there is no doubt that there are people dying from poverty in Africa. Proving mathematically that their debt burden is really pretty small is the worst excuse to do nothing at all about the problem. In exactly the same spirit and mind, it is also the same kind of stupid to relieve the debt as if that debt was the cause of the problem – because it is not at all the cause of the economic black hole these people live in – it can’t be, because it is not large enough to create that kind of force.
I have dozens of Post-it notes in my copy of the Bono book, and I’m only about 1/3 through it. This was the first major take-away I had, so I thought I break the silence this morning to keep you readers properly informed on world events.
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Note to RSS feeders: soory about the edits. MSWord does stupid things with quotes, and it was messing up the links. All fixed now, and back to your business.
Bono has two very large axes to grind over Africa: AIDS relief, and debt relief. I’m not sure I’m equipped to talk about AIDS relief yet, but as a knee-jerk person who claims to know something about Jesus Christ I’d say that we should be giving them AIDS relief. We should be finding ways to give them medical comfort – which ought to be paired with spiritual comfort and discipleship.
What I want to write about briefly is the matter of debt. Much has been made about the billions in debt owed by the poorest African nations and how it is crippling them economically. Well, whenever we talk about economics, there is of course the matter of “real people” who are either starving or dying from being fat pigs, and somehow the argument is always that the fat pigs are to blame for the ones who are starving. Let’s just take that “argument” as one side for a moment and frame another side.
I just did a quick Google for the total amount of debt (converted to US dollars) owed by the African continent, and came up with the number $40 billion. I couldn’t find it on the “Make Poverty History” website, which is odd since they are demanding that the only economic justice is to forgive all the debt; one would think that the scope of the demand would be outlined in a little more detail than simply saying “all”. So: $40 billion in debt. A quick scan of the World Factbook says that there are roughly (which is to say, rounding down for the sake of the argument) 800 million people living in Africa. fao.org says that the GDP per person in Africa is $736.
To get all terms in the same denomination, the debt per person for the continent of Africa is $40 billion / 800 million = $50. So here’s the comparison: the GDP per person is $736, and the debt per person is $50. Those of you with quick calculators can see that the debt-to-GDP percent of the African continent is 6.7934% -- we’ll round it up to 7% to keep things simple.
Now let’s look at the United States. The Population of the United States as I type this note (according to the US census bureau) is 296 million – give or take 500,000. The GDP for the United States for FYE 2004 was $10.841 trillion, and the nation debt of the US as I type this $7.849 trillion.
To get all the terms in the same denomination, the GDP per person for 2004 for the US was $36,625; the national debt per person in the US is $26,516. So the debt to GDP percent per person for the US is 72.4%.
To bring it all together, the debt per person in Africa is about 7% of what they generate in production of goods and services, and the debt per person in the United States is almost 73% of what they generate in production of goods and services. That is to say: the debt burden of the US per person is 10 times what it is per person on the African continent – as a percent of their productive output, not as measured in dollar-for-dollar comparisons. The dollar-to-dollar comparison says that the debt burden per person in the US is more than 500 times what it is in Africa.
There are probably a billion directions in which this discussion could go at this point – like the justice of making a nation pay back the debts of a despotic ruler they have overthrown, or the wisdom of making loans or “relief payments” to despotic rulers in the first place without demanding some accountability from them – but the question of debt “burden” seems to be one that does not account for the proportional matters of economic scale.
Listen: there is no doubt that there are people dying from poverty in Africa. Proving mathematically that their debt burden is really pretty small is the worst excuse to do nothing at all about the problem. In exactly the same spirit and mind, it is also the same kind of stupid to relieve the debt as if that debt was the cause of the problem – because it is not at all the cause of the economic black hole these people live in – it can’t be, because it is not large enough to create that kind of force.
I have dozens of Post-it notes in my copy of the Bono book, and I’m only about 1/3 through it. This was the first major take-away I had, so I thought I break the silence this morning to keep you readers properly informed on world events.
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Note to RSS feeders: soory about the edits. MSWord does stupid things with quotes, and it was messing up the links. All fixed now, and back to your business.
Friday, July 01, 2005
[*] A 20-year-old beef (plastic fork and spoon)
So I'm thinking about this short series since last night, and I realize that some people might read this and call it another in series of merciless beatings regarding purity of doctrine. Let me tell you that I do not intend this to be a "merciless beating".
The last bit of background or foreground or pallet or whatever you want to call my qualifications of this series about U2's last CD and the Banty Rooster's review of said CD (this is still about that 2-part review) is that I reject using the name of Christ and His church for ungodly ends. If I wanted to translate that down into something more application-oriented, it pretty well makes me sick when someone tries to leverage the good conscience of a disciple of Christ to achieve something that is not glorifying to Christ.
Some of you have read the article in CT from the “condiment” entry in this series, and you are prolly asking yourselves, “Cent: crackhead. Is eliminating AIDS in Africa actually not glorifying to God? What about eliminating poverty? Have you gone mad?”
Here’s what I think about that: Jesus doesn’t call us to eliminate poverty, but to minister to the poor. In that, ministering to the poor starts with delivering the Gospel ministry. To hand our loaves and fishes but not to hand out the “Bread of Life” sermon is metaphysically criminal. If you have also read Doug Wilson’s blog that I linked to today, you’ll see the fleshing out of that argument in a way which I can agree with.
Jesus also doesn’t just call on us to heal the sick, but to preach the Gospel in order to reap the Kingdom, which is to say the Resurrection. Somebody is bound to try to take my head off over that statement, arguing that I am disjoining the incarnation or making the hope of the Gospel purely future and Aristotelian. Well, “I doubt it”. Those who are allegedly “antisectarian” but will call anyone with a cross earring a “Christian” are doing far worse when you think that the ministry to physical needs takes priority over the Gospel ministry.
Now go ahead: cite James 1 & 2 on me. You know what I’m taking about:
In what way? Because James never bothers to tell us what he thinks about works apart from faith! If someone is doing “good works” but can’t bring himself to say “in the name of Jesus Christ” as a matter of qualification and a matter of adoration, then this person is has no faith and is merely trying to live up to the Law.
It is not at all either/or. I would submit that it is wrong to spout propositions in hopes that they will do some spiritual or earthly good without also ministering to the person, but it is equally wrong to set up a soup kitchen or a hospital or whatever and not include the Gospel as part of the ministry – it simply stops being a ministry and turns into a bureaucracy.
My point, really, is to underscore one important fact of the matter here: I’m in no position to judge the state of Bono’s soul. I can’t see that well. My glasses don’t have the Spiritu Sanctu polarized lenses. So in that, I can’t tell you if Bono is saved or not.
Whatever conclusions I draw in the final part of this series, (like nobody can see what’s coming in this series, right?) I am not consigning Bono to Hell: I am trying to underscore the point that his rhetoric and his poses are a ploy to achieve a political end and not a statement of faith. The reason to make this point is simple: the conscience of the church should not be played for the sake of politics. And in that, it raises questions that the Banty Rooster’s review of U2’s last CD doesn’t answer.
The question you readers should ask yourselves is if, after Cent finished deconstructing Bono and TBR, he will apply the same level of disinterest to those with whom he shares some political affinity.
See: THAT’s gotta hurt.
The last bit of background or foreground or pallet or whatever you want to call my qualifications of this series about U2's last CD and the Banty Rooster's review of said CD (this is still about that 2-part review) is that I reject using the name of Christ and His church for ungodly ends. If I wanted to translate that down into something more application-oriented, it pretty well makes me sick when someone tries to leverage the good conscience of a disciple of Christ to achieve something that is not glorifying to Christ.
Some of you have read the article in CT from the “condiment” entry in this series, and you are prolly asking yourselves, “Cent: crackhead. Is eliminating AIDS in Africa actually not glorifying to God? What about eliminating poverty? Have you gone mad?”
Here’s what I think about that: Jesus doesn’t call us to eliminate poverty, but to minister to the poor. In that, ministering to the poor starts with delivering the Gospel ministry. To hand our loaves and fishes but not to hand out the “Bread of Life” sermon is metaphysically criminal. If you have also read Doug Wilson’s blog that I linked to today, you’ll see the fleshing out of that argument in a way which I can agree with.
Jesus also doesn’t just call on us to heal the sick, but to preach the Gospel in order to reap the Kingdom, which is to say the Resurrection. Somebody is bound to try to take my head off over that statement, arguing that I am disjoining the incarnation or making the hope of the Gospel purely future and Aristotelian. Well, “I doubt it”. Those who are allegedly “antisectarian” but will call anyone with a cross earring a “Christian” are doing far worse when you think that the ministry to physical needs takes priority over the Gospel ministry.
Now go ahead: cite James 1 & 2 on me. You know what I’m taking about:
- What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, "Go in peace, be warmed and filled," without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.
In what way? Because James never bothers to tell us what he thinks about works apart from faith! If someone is doing “good works” but can’t bring himself to say “in the name of Jesus Christ” as a matter of qualification and a matter of adoration, then this person is has no faith and is merely trying to live up to the Law.
It is not at all either/or. I would submit that it is wrong to spout propositions in hopes that they will do some spiritual or earthly good without also ministering to the person, but it is equally wrong to set up a soup kitchen or a hospital or whatever and not include the Gospel as part of the ministry – it simply stops being a ministry and turns into a bureaucracy.
My point, really, is to underscore one important fact of the matter here: I’m in no position to judge the state of Bono’s soul. I can’t see that well. My glasses don’t have the Spiritu Sanctu polarized lenses. So in that, I can’t tell you if Bono is saved or not.
Whatever conclusions I draw in the final part of this series, (like nobody can see what’s coming in this series, right?) I am not consigning Bono to Hell: I am trying to underscore the point that his rhetoric and his poses are a ploy to achieve a political end and not a statement of faith. The reason to make this point is simple: the conscience of the church should not be played for the sake of politics. And in that, it raises questions that the Banty Rooster’s review of U2’s last CD doesn’t answer.
The question you readers should ask yourselves is if, after Cent finished deconstructing Bono and TBR, he will apply the same level of disinterest to those with whom he shares some political affinity.
See: THAT’s gotta hurt.
[*] A 20-year-old beef (condiment)
OK: we have set the stage with my discontent regarding U2 that has stayed with me for 20 years.
I have also recommended (and am selling, so don't get me confused with that guy over there who is not a hypocrite) the antithesis to U2, which is the biography of Johnny Cash.
And before I take apart their lyrics and the Banty Rooster's review of their last CD, I want to offer something by way of "in their own words". The wildly-ecumenical Christianity Today did a little joy ride with Bono back in March, 2003. It is frankly the exact context I would choose for you to read before you read anything else I have to say about this subject.
Read up, and get ready for the main course of beef.
I have also recommended (and am selling, so don't get me confused with that guy over there who is not a hypocrite) the antithesis to U2, which is the biography of Johnny Cash.
And before I take apart their lyrics and the Banty Rooster's review of their last CD, I want to offer something by way of "in their own words". The wildly-ecumenical Christianity Today did a little joy ride with Bono back in March, 2003. It is frankly the exact context I would choose for you to read before you read anything else I have to say about this subject.
Read up, and get ready for the main course of beef.
[*] A 20-year-old-beef (side dish)
The Man Called Cash: The Life, Love and Faith of an American Legend, by Steve Turnerbuy it now!
To try and be even-handed about my complaints about U2, I wanted to put this little book in here. I read it last night, and it is the perfect counter-example to U2's hide-and-go-seek "faith" and "Christianity". Sure: Johnny Cash was a flawed man with problems we ought to call "sin problems" that he struggled with his whole life. But that was exactly his confession, and overtly Cash admitted that his only hope, and his only salvation, was in Jesus Christ. No mincing words.Turner offers this in this book:
{Cash} spoke most often of his spiritual pain. A battle waged within him, he said, between doing his divinely inspired desire to do right and his natural inclination to do wrong, between serving God and serving himself ...I highly recommend this book for a testimony from a man who never compromised his faith in spite of his stutter-stepped walk.
..."I fight the beast in me every day, "he once said. "I've won a few rounds with God's help."(227)
Thursday, June 30, 2005
[*] A 20-year-old beef
You know you’re getting old when you read something and you realize that what you are reading – even though it was composed during the last TV season – makes you think about something you have been mulling over for 20 years.
The really-alert readers of this blog have noticed that recently I added The Banty Rooster (that’s Brian Mattson) to my blogroll (yes: “banty” is a word – it’s the diminutive of “bantam”, which is somewhat funny because “bantam” means “small and/or feisty”; a “bantam” rooster is a decorative fowl, so a “banty” rooster is like a really small decorative fowl), and I did so on an experimental basis. I’m not sure that he’s not going to get demoted to “crickets and locusts” yet, but I have enjoyed reading his blog for a lot of reasons.
One of the reasons is this 20-year beef – and I have enjoyed it only to the extent that it has been somewhat of a gut check regarding what I really believe about things, and whether I have changed any since I was an atheist in college. My 20-year beef is with U2. Mattson has a 2-part review of the last U2 CD on his blog under “best of”, and that review got me back on this bicycle. Keep in mind, as well, that my first blog entry ever was on Derek Webb’s defense of Bono as a Christian hero.
There was a time, in the high age of vinyl records, when I had all of U2’s records. I had “Boy” before it was cool to have “Boy”, though I admit that I didn’t actually own it until about 1983 when “War” broke out. I had them all through “Rattle and Hum”, and it appeared to me that they were much smarter than the average rock band. I might not have used the word “grounded” then, but that’s what I would have meant if I had that kind of understanding of things. However, I always treated their lyrics with rubber gloves – because they always seemed to be saying one thing but meaning another.
Then came “Achtung baby”, and I swore never to buy another U2 record again.
(For the belly-achers, if you count the years, “Achtung Baby” came out in 1991, so you might want your money back for this blog post if you think that the beef begins where my album-buying ended. Well, you’re wrong, and it’s my blog, so go listen to your trashy U2 CDs from the 90’s on afterward and let the saner readers read in peace.)
Now why did “Achtung Baby” mark the end of my fanaticism for U2? Well, for several reasons:
(1) It was bad. You cannot compare that CD to October or the Unforgettable Fire or (for pete’s sake!) The Joshua Tree and honestly say, “boy, that Album’s the top of their game”. For all intents and purposes, this was U2’s 8th CD and it was by a long shot the worst. And don’t tell me about “One”, OK? I will argue from here that “One” is the reason to call the rest of the CD a dud.
(2) It was bad for all the wrong reasons. See: you can forgive a band for going out on a limb and trying something experimental or arty and admire the way they failed. But “Achtung Baby” was the seed from which the tragic and useless “Zooropa” CD came. It was an appeal to Pop, and while many people may have gotten on-board the U2 bus because of “Achtung Baby” and/or “Zooropa”, I was getting off. The same thing that happened to Peter Gabriel – which is a whole other blog entry yet to be written, I guess – was happening to the fellows from Dublin, and it made me sick.
(3) It confirmed my worst suspicions about them. Let me make it clear that from about 1981 to about 1993 I was an atheist, so my problem wasn’t that I found out that U2 was “Christian” or “not Christian”, but that I found out that they were in it for the money.
They were in it for the money! I would feel like an episode of Seinfeld if I said, “not that there’s anything wrong with that”, because in U2’s case, there is actually something wrong with that. Whatever it was that they were singing about, it was really just about the money – because they had just come off of what I would call one of the classic Rock and Roll LPs of all time, and now, as a follow-up, they traded all the things that mattered about “Rattle and Hum” for something with no regard for what they themselves had accomplished to that point.
Everybody needs a day job, right? Bills gotta be paid. Baby needs a new pair of fuzzy dice and all that. There’s no shame in working for a living, even if you have to work for “The Man” (whatever that means) or what your day job turns out to be is Rocking the House. See: when a businessman is just “in it for the money”, shucks, he’s just an ignorant capitalist and who can blame him. But when an ARTIST trades his aesthetics for cash, he’s just a guy on the corner selling pictures of Jesus or Elvis or the Dogs Playing Poker on black velvet – that is to say, it is obvious that he doesn’t care what he is selling as long as it is actually selling. There’s nobody on the internet complaining about the time that Duran Duran or Flock of Seagulls or Scritti Politti or Brittany Spears sold out for an extra buck because it turns out that they were only ever about the buck – they were made to be pop stars, not to take popular music to some new and dangerous place. U2 was taking rock and roll to a new and dangerous place by being faithful to a couple of ideals (apparently, anyway) and a few tips-o-the-hate to the roots of Rock and Roll (again, apparently).
And then there was the whole Christian vocabulary they were (and perhaps still are) massaging. Lifting texts from the book of Psalms, trading on religious-sounding refrains, and mentioning Jesus and God often enough to be (obviously?) involved in a conversation about Him if not to Him or with Him. For the atheist (me), they were obviously trading on what Dr. Martini used to call modern (I am pretty confident he meant “postmodern”, but I am quoting from memory) man’s inherent willingness to believe in something greater than himself, but at the same time modern man’s problem of having nothing left to believe in. So as I listened – not a Christian – I wasn’t hearing Psalm 40 or revised Catholic antiphons: I was hearing the modern voice adapting classical religious language to express its own message of optimism in spite of its own despair at having nothing greater than itself to believe in.
But it turns out they weren’t doing any such a thing: they were in it for the money. So when they turned out “Achtung Baby”, and we find lyrics like this:
When you listen to that CD’s other 11 tracks, then come back to “One”, the context is what those other tracks have established. The most charitable thing to say about “one” is that it is a cynical tip of the hat to U2’s previous 7 records.
That is undoubtedly underscored in the next verses:
Now we can cover the rest of this song, verse for verse, and talk about how the writer uses the image of Christ without actually invoking the person of Christ in order to demean the object of the lyric; we can talk about how the writer equates the temple of love that the object idealizes with a place which is in fact a trap into slavery or worse. But when it all comes to a conclusion, even the high language of “sisters and brothers … carry each other” is only an echo of the emptiness of the first time the writer uses the phrase “carry each other”.
And in that, this song is really a much darker, forlorn version of “Africa” by Toto or “She’s out of My Life” by Michael Jackson. And some people would say that it’s art because of the more somber tones and shades it uses, and comparing it to “Africa” or “She’s out of my life” is frankly reductive – but to that I say “I doubt it”. You cannot put this song in the context of this album and say, “oh brother – at least they threw their ‘real’ fans a bone”.
For me, as a fan, I was pretty shocked. I gave up on them. It wasn’t so much that they were voicing things I didn’t personally believe – because I have to say that as an atheist I believed exactly what that song and that CD was saying. It was because all the times I thought they were trying to raise our eyes up from the daily mud to a higher ground of brotherhood – even as a kind of dream – they were doing no such thing. They were paying the bills.
When it turned out that this is how I saw their work, it was obviously ridiculous to listen to them anymore – especially when they (meaning: Bono) would drone on about how the rich take advantage of the poor on a collective level. Somehow it is America’s fault and Western Europe’s fault that the Third World is run by dictators and con men – when this selfsame person is a con man for pretending to have higher ideals about the ability or the duty of men to lift each other up, and the only reason he has a platform to say any of this is because he has fooled others into believing something he does not.
And 20 years later, I think it is much worse than that. After finding the love of God, and seeing the inability of man, and finding God’s grace not by being good but in spite of being good, I think Bono’s clever and nuanced uses of the Bible and the names and work of God are not just pop marketing: I think they are intended to deceive.
After I describe why I think that by example, I’m going to tell you what I think of the Banty Rooster’s review of the last U2 CD.
The really-alert readers of this blog have noticed that recently I added The Banty Rooster (that’s Brian Mattson) to my blogroll (yes: “banty” is a word – it’s the diminutive of “bantam”, which is somewhat funny because “bantam” means “small and/or feisty”; a “bantam” rooster is a decorative fowl, so a “banty” rooster is like a really small decorative fowl), and I did so on an experimental basis. I’m not sure that he’s not going to get demoted to “crickets and locusts” yet, but I have enjoyed reading his blog for a lot of reasons.
One of the reasons is this 20-year beef – and I have enjoyed it only to the extent that it has been somewhat of a gut check regarding what I really believe about things, and whether I have changed any since I was an atheist in college. My 20-year beef is with U2. Mattson has a 2-part review of the last U2 CD on his blog under “best of”, and that review got me back on this bicycle. Keep in mind, as well, that my first blog entry ever was on Derek Webb’s defense of Bono as a Christian hero.
There was a time, in the high age of vinyl records, when I had all of U2’s records. I had “Boy” before it was cool to have “Boy”, though I admit that I didn’t actually own it until about 1983 when “War” broke out. I had them all through “Rattle and Hum”, and it appeared to me that they were much smarter than the average rock band. I might not have used the word “grounded” then, but that’s what I would have meant if I had that kind of understanding of things. However, I always treated their lyrics with rubber gloves – because they always seemed to be saying one thing but meaning another.
Then came “Achtung baby”, and I swore never to buy another U2 record again.
(For the belly-achers, if you count the years, “Achtung Baby” came out in 1991, so you might want your money back for this blog post if you think that the beef begins where my album-buying ended. Well, you’re wrong, and it’s my blog, so go listen to your trashy U2 CDs from the 90’s on afterward and let the saner readers read in peace.)
Now why did “Achtung Baby” mark the end of my fanaticism for U2? Well, for several reasons:
(1) It was bad. You cannot compare that CD to October or the Unforgettable Fire or (for pete’s sake!) The Joshua Tree and honestly say, “boy, that Album’s the top of their game”. For all intents and purposes, this was U2’s 8th CD and it was by a long shot the worst. And don’t tell me about “One”, OK? I will argue from here that “One” is the reason to call the rest of the CD a dud.
(2) It was bad for all the wrong reasons. See: you can forgive a band for going out on a limb and trying something experimental or arty and admire the way they failed. But “Achtung Baby” was the seed from which the tragic and useless “Zooropa” CD came. It was an appeal to Pop, and while many people may have gotten on-board the U2 bus because of “Achtung Baby” and/or “Zooropa”, I was getting off. The same thing that happened to Peter Gabriel – which is a whole other blog entry yet to be written, I guess – was happening to the fellows from Dublin, and it made me sick.
(3) It confirmed my worst suspicions about them. Let me make it clear that from about 1981 to about 1993 I was an atheist, so my problem wasn’t that I found out that U2 was “Christian” or “not Christian”, but that I found out that they were in it for the money.
They were in it for the money! I would feel like an episode of Seinfeld if I said, “not that there’s anything wrong with that”, because in U2’s case, there is actually something wrong with that. Whatever it was that they were singing about, it was really just about the money – because they had just come off of what I would call one of the classic Rock and Roll LPs of all time, and now, as a follow-up, they traded all the things that mattered about “Rattle and Hum” for something with no regard for what they themselves had accomplished to that point.
Everybody needs a day job, right? Bills gotta be paid. Baby needs a new pair of fuzzy dice and all that. There’s no shame in working for a living, even if you have to work for “The Man” (whatever that means) or what your day job turns out to be is Rocking the House. See: when a businessman is just “in it for the money”, shucks, he’s just an ignorant capitalist and who can blame him. But when an ARTIST trades his aesthetics for cash, he’s just a guy on the corner selling pictures of Jesus or Elvis or the Dogs Playing Poker on black velvet – that is to say, it is obvious that he doesn’t care what he is selling as long as it is actually selling. There’s nobody on the internet complaining about the time that Duran Duran or Flock of Seagulls or Scritti Politti or Brittany Spears sold out for an extra buck because it turns out that they were only ever about the buck – they were made to be pop stars, not to take popular music to some new and dangerous place. U2 was taking rock and roll to a new and dangerous place by being faithful to a couple of ideals (apparently, anyway) and a few tips-o-the-hate to the roots of Rock and Roll (again, apparently).
And then there was the whole Christian vocabulary they were (and perhaps still are) massaging. Lifting texts from the book of Psalms, trading on religious-sounding refrains, and mentioning Jesus and God often enough to be (obviously?) involved in a conversation about Him if not to Him or with Him. For the atheist (me), they were obviously trading on what Dr. Martini used to call modern (I am pretty confident he meant “postmodern”, but I am quoting from memory) man’s inherent willingness to believe in something greater than himself, but at the same time modern man’s problem of having nothing left to believe in. So as I listened – not a Christian – I wasn’t hearing Psalm 40 or revised Catholic antiphons: I was hearing the modern voice adapting classical religious language to express its own message of optimism in spite of its own despair at having nothing greater than itself to believe in.
But it turns out they weren’t doing any such a thing: they were in it for the money. So when they turned out “Achtung Baby”, and we find lyrics like this:
Or like this:Give me one more chance
And you'll be satisfied
Give me two more chances
You won't be denied
Well my heart is where it's always been
My head is somewhere in between
Give me one more chance
Let me be your lover tonight
Or like this:You're dangerous 'cause you're honest
You're dangerous, you don't know what you want
Well you left my heart empty as a vacant lot
For any spirit to haunt
Very mystical-sounding language, right? Very curious and high-brow, as far as pop lyrics go. But what are these songs about? They’re about what every other song on the radio is about: feeling your urges without regard to anything but your satisfaction. So when Bono intones, “If you want to kiss the sky, you betta learn how to kneel – on your knees boy!” he’s not talking about submission to a higher ideal: he’s talking about submission to something a little more immediate and either sultry or sensual.Johnny take a dive with your sister in the rain
Let her talk about the things you can't explain
To touch is to heal
To hurt is to steal
If you want to kiss the sky
Better learn how to kneel
On your knees boy
She's the wave
She'll turn the tide
She sees the man inside the child, yeah
It's alright, it's alright, it's alright
She moves in mysterious ways
It's alright, it's alright, it's alright
She moves in mysterious ways, yeah
It's alright, it's alright, it's alright / Love, oh love
Lift my days, light up my nights, love
When you listen to that CD’s other 11 tracks, then come back to “One”, the context is what those other tracks have established. The most charitable thing to say about “one” is that it is a cynical tip of the hat to U2’s previous 7 records.
So far so good, right? But the sentiment of this verse is irony: You say “one love, one life” [u]but[/u] it’s one need in the night. It would be interesting to see what that “one need” is, but clearly it’s not the “one love”. And what “love” leaves you if you don’t care for it? As an atheist, this can make sense, but it can make sense only in the context of love being itself a thing of impotence and limited scope, not a thing which is a greater purpose and a greater power.Is it getting better
Or do you feel the same?
Will it make it easier on you now?
You got someone to blame
You say one love, one life
When it's one need in the night
One love, we get to share it
Leaves you baby if you don't care for it
That is undoubtedly underscored in the next verses:
Very mournful stuff, this – and the conclusion that “we’re not the same / we get to carry each other” – there’s no love there, or even duty. It’s just the last thing left to do.Did I disappoint you?
Or leave a bad taste in your mouth?
You act like you never had love
And you want me to go without
Well it's too late, tonight
To drag the past out into the light
We're one, but we're not the same
We get to carry each other
Carry each other
Now we can cover the rest of this song, verse for verse, and talk about how the writer uses the image of Christ without actually invoking the person of Christ in order to demean the object of the lyric; we can talk about how the writer equates the temple of love that the object idealizes with a place which is in fact a trap into slavery or worse. But when it all comes to a conclusion, even the high language of “sisters and brothers … carry each other” is only an echo of the emptiness of the first time the writer uses the phrase “carry each other”.
And in that, this song is really a much darker, forlorn version of “Africa” by Toto or “She’s out of My Life” by Michael Jackson. And some people would say that it’s art because of the more somber tones and shades it uses, and comparing it to “Africa” or “She’s out of my life” is frankly reductive – but to that I say “I doubt it”. You cannot put this song in the context of this album and say, “oh brother – at least they threw their ‘real’ fans a bone”.
For me, as a fan, I was pretty shocked. I gave up on them. It wasn’t so much that they were voicing things I didn’t personally believe – because I have to say that as an atheist I believed exactly what that song and that CD was saying. It was because all the times I thought they were trying to raise our eyes up from the daily mud to a higher ground of brotherhood – even as a kind of dream – they were doing no such thing. They were paying the bills.
When it turned out that this is how I saw their work, it was obviously ridiculous to listen to them anymore – especially when they (meaning: Bono) would drone on about how the rich take advantage of the poor on a collective level. Somehow it is America’s fault and Western Europe’s fault that the Third World is run by dictators and con men – when this selfsame person is a con man for pretending to have higher ideals about the ability or the duty of men to lift each other up, and the only reason he has a platform to say any of this is because he has fooled others into believing something he does not.
And 20 years later, I think it is much worse than that. After finding the love of God, and seeing the inability of man, and finding God’s grace not by being good but in spite of being good, I think Bono’s clever and nuanced uses of the Bible and the names and work of God are not just pop marketing: I think they are intended to deceive.
After I describe why I think that by example, I’m going to tell you what I think of the Banty Rooster’s review of the last U2 CD.
As you undoubtedly noticed, I like comics. I wouldn't call myself a "fan boy" because I don't give a flying FOOM what they are worth. That said, almost all the images on my blog are scanned from comics I own -- so they are scanned from comics I own and are used under what I assume is 
