by Harry Browne
Another devastating critique appeared in medical journal the Lancet. The authors note that the (RED) website features an ‘impact calculator’ to measure how your purchase helps in Africa. (This is, by the way, the nearest (RED) gets to transparency about how much money gets through from any given purchase.) But they wonder where you’ll find a deeper analysis of the role of global capitalism and its built-in inequalities:
There is no impact calculator tabulating the relational injustice of the economic institutions that privilege some (largely middle and upper class, and in developed countries) consumers able to buy (RED) while increasing risk and vulnerability to HIV and other diseases among those unable to afford even life’s necessities. The implacable logic of this injustice is hidden in high-gloss advertisements in which looking good (fashion), making good (profit), and doing good (charity) become a feelgood endorsement of an unhealthy status quo. The seemingly just consumer supplants the just citizen and social justice itself is commodified.125
These authors conclude that we should ‘be wary of the 21st century’s new noblesse oblige that replaces the efficiency of tax-funded programmes and transfers in improving health equity with a consumption-driven “charitainment” model whose appearances can be as deceptive as they are appealing’. In a later follow-up retort to their critics, who defended (RED) on the strength of the funds and the awareness it raises, the Lancet authors add that, in the world of (RED), commodities ‘seem disconnected from those who have produced them, and the resources on which their production is based. The HIV/AIDS pandemic, in turn, is disconnected from its historical and contemporary roots in the global economy and posited as a technical or medical problem for which there is a simple solution.’126 That is to say, instead of asking what global social and economic structures ensure that such a deadly pandemic overwhelmingly affects poor and marginalised people, we simply rely on the same structures to fix it.
Since the money made by (RED) is so trivial in the greater scheme of things, and even in the budgetary arithmetic of the fund it supports, you could be forgiven for concluding that it exists precisely to send out this message – of a rootless crisis solvable firmly within the logic of commodity capitalism.
It might be objected that Bono’s world-view isn’t always limited to the peculiarly simplistic and paternalistic discourse of ‘consumption for a cause’ that arises, perhaps intrinsically, from a consumer marketing campaign such as (RED), crucial though his role has been in that campaign. We know, after all, that he is capable of speaking the language of ‘justice, not charity’, and of at least appearing to analyse the Western-led practices and relations that ‘underpin poverty, inequality and disease’ in Africa. So what did he do to disseminate a deeper set of ideas when he took over as editor at various major international publications?
EDITORIAL CONTROL: PRINTING THE MYTH
‘I have no embarrassment at all. No shame.’ Bono said so himself, disarmingly, in the 16 May 2006 edition of the London Independent, which he was credited with editing. He said it apropos of nothing much, in the course of an interview with comedian Eddie Izzard.127 Nonetheless, it sums up as well as anything else could his capacity to take an opportunity like this and sink it in the mire of ‘brand awareness’ for (RED), rather than using it as a vehicle for developing a higher and deeper consciousness of global development issues.
The Independent should have been the perfect vehicle for the latter approach. Then still a part of Irish mogul Tony O’Reilly’s Independent News and Media group, the most powerful chain of newspapers in Ireland, the English ‘Indie’ had a modest circulation among mostly left-liberal readers; and though its editor Simon Kellner had dragged it slightly downmarket, it still had a name for sharp and sophisticated reporting and analysis, not least through its two great writers on the Middle East, Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn. Its tabloid shape was used as a means of presenting strong pictures and graphics rather than as an excuse for dumbing-down. Its front page was generally used as a sort of poster for a story or stories inside, and didn’t contain much text.
Bono-as-editor’s front page was a strong one, though why he needed the fashionable artist Damien Hirst to come in and design this simple twist on the idea of a newspaper is unknown: it was soaked in red – or should that be (RED)? – and cried out in large letters, ‘NO NEWS TODAY’, with an asterisk to guide the eye to the small print at the bottom of the page: ‘Just 6,500 Africans died today as a result of a preventable, treatable disease. (HIV/AIDS).’
No mistake, this was a powerful message. In a world of death tolls, where fewer than half that number of fatalities in New York and Washington on 9/11 became the dominant fact of global affairs for several years thereafter, it is worth noting not only that thousands more people die each day, every day, of AIDS, but that in the eyes of the Western media this apparently does not constitute a story. Yet at the same time it must be admitted that it is the sort of impersonal statistic that makes readers glaze over; and in keeping with the (RED) message it both limits and overgeneralises the AIDS story to be about ‘Africans’, when in half the continent’s countries it is not a huge problem, and when those dying are first and foremost individual people, not the inhabitants of a particular landmass.
Still, if Bono had stopped right there it would have been a good day’s work. Indeed, given that millions more people glimpsed this front page than actually bought and read the paper, it might be said that, having produced a strong consciousness-raising cover, he achieved much of what he set out to achieve.
But there was another phrase on that front page: ‘Genesis 1:27’. The text for that biblical verse does not appear, but it is easy even in this secular age to locate it: ‘God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.’ It’s a funny message to throw, unannotated, into the sea of unbelief that are the British public and, especially, the Independent readership. For most of them, the key argument for caring about the fate of unknown ‘Africans’ is not that they are images of God, but that they are human beings like ourselves. The idea of using this verse is dissonant not only because it attempts to smuggle faith into the discourse of a country where it is largely irrelevant, but because it brings to the fore a paternalistic relation, between an entity that creates and the ‘them’ who are his handiwork.
So who was God in this context? Well, given that journalists are likelier than most workers to characterise their boss, the editor, as ‘God’ – the most high, all seeing, all knowing, the final judge – then it’s not much of a stretch – or perhaps it is! – to suggest that Bono, the creator of this day’s newspaper, is at least auditioning for the role.
Certainly this edition of the Independent, largely given over to Africa and AIDS, created an image of a continent in dire need of an outside Saviour. On page after page, in stories, photographs and advertisements, Africans were presented as pathetic victims, often children: the pathos is laid on much thicker than would be acceptable in (RED)’s own upbeat promotional copy of celebrities, products and AIDS-free babies. Shockingly, from the front to the back of the paper, no Africans write about Africa. Only one is presented in an interview as having any agency at all: Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. Bono would not always be so neglectful of African voices in his work, but after the debate with Damon Albarn about Live 8 just ten months before, one would have expected a better showing, even if only for the sake of appearances for his sceptical British public, than this paternalistic presentation.
While there is some talk in Bono’s Independent about Africa’s need for fairer trade, there is nothing in the edition about the destruction wrought in Africa by the arms trade, though perhaps this is not surprising after BAE’s kind sponsorship of Live 8 and the presence in many of the paper’s advertising and editorial columns of (RED) partner Motorola, which in addition to its more familiar mobile phone line is also a military contractor, supplying high-tech communication systems. Nor is there any coverage of mineral exploita
tion in Africa – perhaps something else Motorola and Apple might be sensitive about, given the importance of central African coltan in manufacturing the electronic capacitors that are so vital in mobile-phone technology and other electronic devices.
Another missing story is the one that was convulsing Dublin on the day the paper appeared: forty-one Afghan men were on hunger- and thirst-strike inside historic, and touristic, St Patrick’s Cathedral to prevent their deportation to the dangers of their home country. A photo of them had dominated the front page of the previous day’s Irish Times. Since this story clearly involved the West’s role in the suffering of people from the poorer world, and also involved poor people taking their own, desperate measures to defy a Western government’s prescriptions, it obviously failed to fit Bono’s world-view.
Bono himself was more than a figurehead as a reader flipped through the pages of his newspaper. He was present, conducting interviews, writing editorials – defending himself, undoubtedly, against the widespread criticism there had been on the British Left about the Make Poverty History fiasco (including in the Independent’s own ‘hijacked by celebrities’ story five months earlier). In his editorial, poignantly headlined ‘I Am a Witness. What Can I Do?’, he wrote (in prose that is both beyond parody and a stupidly ironic twist on a famous Yeats poem in which a poor man declares his love for a woman):
I truly try to tread carefully as I walk over the dreams of dignity under my feet in our work for the terrible beauty that is the continent of Africa. I’m used to the custard pies. I’ve even learnt to like the taste of them. But before you are tempted to let fly with your understandable invective, allow me to contextualise.
He defends (RED)’s meet-you-at-the-shops strategy – ‘as you lead your busy, businessy lives’ – and again stands up to Left critics:
On the far left, we will meet ‘better dead than RED’, a reaction to big business that is not wholly unjustified. But given the emergency that is Aids, I don’t see this as selling out. I see this as ganging up on the problem. This emergency demands a radical centre, as well as a radical edge. Creeping up on the everyday. Making the difficult easy.
Then the punch-line: ‘For anyone who thinks this means I’m going to retire to the boardroom and stop banging my fist on the door of No. 10 [Downing Street], I’m sorry to disappoint you.’128
The astonishing suggestion of fist-banging at his friend Tony’s place, where the butler had surely glidingly admitted him without waiting for a knock, for meetings like the one with top G8 officials the previous July, is belied elsewhere in the paper, in his skin-crawlingly obsequious interview with Blair and Gordon Brown, his John and Paul. The most newsworthy aspect of this article was that he apparently got the two men, sworn enemies by this time, to share the same conference call.
Bono’s hard-hitting line of questioning to Brown included: ‘Chancellor, I’ve just got back from a trip to Washington, where your announcement of $15bn over 10 years for education for the poorest of the poor created a real reverberation. Are you worried that some of your other G8 partners and finance ministers are not coming up with new initiatives to match this?’ Bono is still reverberating a few lines down when he turns to Blair: ‘Prime Minister, I want to just take you to a more personal place in your trips to this terrible beauty that we call Africa now – to an inspiring moment, a person you have met, or a moment of despair.’129 (They’re all interchangeable, these African people and moments.)
The obsession with justifying Live 8 and Bono’s premature declaration of victory, in partnership with Blair, turns up again in the newspaper’s centre-spread, which is given over to a play-it-yourself board game called ‘Gleneagles Crazy Golf’, subtitled ‘Will the G8 keep their word?’ Sadly, the biggest move available in the game is ‘Move Forward 3: Independent goes RED’.
Whether or not Bono’s longstanding two-step with the British government could compensate him for the fact that so much of the British public steadfastly refused to dance with him, Bono could not resist taking part of his (RED) Independent across the Atlantic, where he was and is loved more unambivalently. So we’ve got Condoleezza Rice getting an entire article to name her ‘ten best musical works’. Condi, it seems, is a ‘big fan’ of Bono and named ‘anything’ by U2 as number seven on her list, just ahead of Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’. Cream’s ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ is at number two (after Mozart): ‘I love to work out to this song. Believe it or not I loved acid rock in college – and I still do.’
The Independent supplement features another hard-hitting interview, and a further hint of what was to come the following year when Bono got his hands on Vanity Fair. ‘She’s the bright young star breaking all the rules. He’s the grand master whose influence on the way we dress is felt around the world. In a rare interview, STELLA McCARTNEY asks Giorgio Armani about fur, fashion and film – and why RED is his new favourite colour.’
The Independent’s associate editor, Paul Vallely, is a journalist who has done decent work reporting from Africa, worked for big development agencies, co-authored Blair’s Commission for Africa report and various official Live 8 paraphernalia, and also happened to ghost-write two Bob Geldof books. (His assessments of Africa policy are presented regularly in the Independent without any of these biographical facts being noted. He is also a sort of moral philosopher who has, for example, sought to justify the prison at Guantánamo.) So his feature in Bono’s Independent – ‘Can rock stars change the world?’ – was always going to end up with a soul-searching Yes. ‘Oh all right then. But with a little help from their friends. Which includes all of us – fans, activists, politicians and now – as Project RED so clearly demonstrates – shoppers too.’130
BBC radio DJ Zane Lowe sang loudest from Bono’s (RED) hymn sheet:
The only thing people who are trying to make a difference can do is work alongside corporations. We’re not going to abolish big business, people aren’t going to stop drinking Starbucks and buying Nike, but you can say to them, ‘There’s a big difference you can make and if we find a way to make it easier for you, would you contribute?’131
The only thing, indeed. Two more signed opinion pieces, by Geldof and Niall Fitzgerald (chairman of Reuters, former chairman of Unilever), both advocate more or less neoliberal solutions to Africa’s crisis, focusing on trade and investment. Geldof, like Bono in the Blair/Brown interview, does criticise in a few lines ‘enforced liberalisation by the IMF, the World Bank or the EU’132 – but frankly, if you blinked you’d miss such trenchant politics in the sea of (RED).
Bono’s edition of the American style magazine Vanity Fair, a year later, is the same, only different: glitzier, more Hollywood, and very definitely more black. This time the brand is not simply (RED), it is, in huge capital letters, AFRICA. Africans and Africa, nonetheless, are objects rather than subjects: here’s Bill Clinton on Nelson Mandela, Brad Pitt interviewing Desmond Tutu. The cover this time is a space for excess: twenty different covers, all shot by snapper-to-the-stars Annie Leibovitz, all used to display Bono’s star-studded cast through a sort of celibate twist on La Ronde: a celebrity is shown speaking to another celebrity, then the latter appears on the next cover talking to yet another one. They’re spreading the message about something, presumably the terrible beauty that is Africa; no one openly suggests it’s a metaphor for the spread of AIDS, not when it’s ‘H.M. Queen Rania of Jordan’ to Bono to Condi to Bush to Tutu to Brad Pitt, or Warren Buffett to Oprah to George Clooney.133
Notable among the cover stars, for a magazine that was planned for months before its July 2007 publication date, was Senator Barack Obama, with whom Bono was striking up yet another beautiful friendship (see Chapter 3). It is interesting, though, that inside the magazine, where Bono interviewed the whole crop of presidential candidates from both parties to get their views on Africa – although the replies read exactly like emailed statements – the one who most conspicuously kissed the Irishman’s arse, saying he was going to make Bono’s ONE campaign a key part of his
own presidential run, was not Obama but the Southern Baptist preacher and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.134 Bono remained an attractive figure for much of the evangelical Right, and incidentally had his bases covered in the event of further political success for that wing of the Republican Party.
Although (RED) had already been widely criticised by this time, Bono’s outing as editor for Africa received fawning coverage in other media, not least the New York Times, where Bono was presented as a rare missionary to the ‘idle rich’, who it seemed might otherwise have been unfamiliar with charitable causes such as African disease and poverty.135 Not everyone was so impressed, however: the photographic image of Bono and regular Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter discussing their Africa issue against the backdrop of the Manhattan skyline incensed at least one Nigerian woman, cited as typical by the two South African scholars who quoted her:
‘Look’, her finger wags wildly, as she did what the Nigerians refer to as the ‘yabis’, mock jabbing, and rap crying furiously … ‘A-f-r-i-c-a?’ she pauses, aghast. ‘Look at this!’ she points mockingly. ‘What do you see? … What do you expect? Two white men. Two middle-aged white men at the helm of it. Where are the Africans?’136
Those scholars, Natasha Himmelman and Danai Mupotsa, write of ‘wanting to love’ this issue of Vanity Fair because it did, after all, feature some great African writers and artists, but finding it ultimately ‘self congratulatory’ and oblivious to its alleged subject, not least because neither it nor (RED) seemed to be marketed in Africa.137