Bono In New York TImes Magazine

Good article. Too long but I read whole thing.

Everything that is beautiful and terrible about limo lobbying. The preaching is dead on, and the story about Jesse Helms which I read before, amazing. Jesse Jackson does it too, quite well, but Americans discount him because of familiarity. Maybe Bono is partly the white Malcolm X I dream about, though not the ass-kicking voice reaching the poor and lower midle class that I think is needed. Now you should have seen Zbiggy Brezhinski on one of the first CNN town meeting type shows about 1992 nakedly insulting the Atlanta audience and, subsequently, the audience's wild cheers for him. Like excitable children who badly needed a firm parent. The audience had been applauding questions from the crowd, and he said, " I can understand you applauding a particularly good answer, but when you applaud each and every question you look like a bunch of trained seals!" He was not smiling. He was absolutely sincere and annoyed. The audience was stunned and sat in total silence after the reprimand. But as the show continued they listened raptly to Brezhinski's insights and gave him thunderous applause and cheers at the end. Too bad his main idea to save the world, to empower Islamic Mujhadeen to humiliate the Soviets, a brilliant tactical move, was not part of a broader strategy which took into account the devastating impact on the Islamic countries of vast influxes of resources to their most extreme religious fanatics, while secular mostly leftist elements were still being subverted, persecuted or killed by friendly regimes like Mubarak, Musharaf and King Hussein and the Israelis. Oh hindsight. Too bad for average working families in the middle who now had to demonstrate allegiance to the fanatics n varying degrees.

One thought - Bono needs to get at Cheney - maybe that is why Cheney is so elusive. Does he remain untouched, a virgin to feelings of humanity, by design, and yanks everybody back to the dark side if they get swayed by the likes of Bono. Does he say to the others, "remember our deal! Your soul in exchange for unlimited power. No backsliding into having a conscience or soul."?

The most interesting story is Paul O'Neill who opened up to Bono and the African reality and ended up frozen out of the Bush administration and wrote a very important, perhaps pivotal book that pulled the curtain aside on the administration, still influencing how irreverent many even mainstream journalists are getting.