THE TEN-DAY, four-country tour of Africa that Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and U2 lead singer Bono Vox completed last week was taken for a publicity stunt, even if the controversy it was meant to address is an important one. Bono’s theory is that the billions of dollars in aid that sub-Saharan Africa gets from Western countries is not nearly enough. O’Neill thinks it’s plenty, but that it’s being squandered by crooked governments on ill-conceived projects. But as the pair–annoyingly and inevitably dubbed “the odd couple”–toured AIDS clinics, industry startups, and government facilities in Ghana, South Africa, Uganda, and Ethiopia, there was the tendency to treat their joint appearances as little more significant than an episode of “Crossfire,” or as one of those campus road shows on the legacy of the sixties that G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary used to stage. You say tomaytah, I say tomahtah. That was a mistake. Bono’s trip marks a qualitative change in the political power of celebrities that will alter the way non-celebrities are governed. As a member of Bono’s entourage said: “This is not radical chic. This is about political power, real political power.” Until recently, celebrities’ role in politics has been, one way or another, to trade their glamour for politicians’ prestige. Elizabeth Taylor thus stumped for politicians who backed AIDS funding. Susan Sarandon campaigned for President Clinton. Even this limited use of celebrities to make politics more “interesting” was a troubling indication. It showed how little passion voters brought to a bureaucratized and boring system in which, as P.J. O’Rourke memorably put it, the cardinal rule of civics is “the last one awake gets to spend all the money.” Alongside this “endorsement” model there arose a “charitable cause” model–entertainers’ lending their talents to raise money for worthy programs devised by others. George Harrison pioneered this kind of activism in his 1971 Concert for Bangladesh. It was carried on in the 1980s by the Boomtown Rats’ Bob Geldof (on behalf of Ethiopian famine victims) and Willie Nelson (on behalf of American small farmers). Bono understands the role that celebrities can play in just promoting politicians and causes. “Politics at a certain level is pop,” he says. “You have to get your record on the radio for people to pay attention.” But he has ceased to be content with merely lending a bit of glamour to the people who make the real decisions. As one professor at the University of Northumbria told the Christian Science Monitor, “He’s made the shift that non-governmental organizations like Oxfam and Save the Children have made, to say, ‘Hey, we aren’t going to be able to deal with this just by giving time and money. We’ve got to attack this as a political issue.'” Bono, as surely as any lobbyist, is interested in driving the decision-making himself. And a lobbyist is precisely what he is, in a postmodern sort of way. For the past several months, he has in fact been lobbying Congress for $435 million in debt relief for Africa. He was instrumental in getting President Clinton to call for the cancellation of $5.6 billion in debts to the United States. It’s worth noting here that Bono is an Irish citizen, and yet he is not registered as a foreign agent. It’s apparently not required, because Bono is speaking not for Ireland, nor even for Africa, but for humanity. What does it mean to lobby on behalf of the interest group “humanity”? Does Bono represent the poor? Or those who wish to take the political system apart to help the poor? And what of the people who support his “caring”? Do they themselves care about the world’s poor? Or are they merely fans who by their purchasing power authorize Bono to act as their proxy on matters where emotions and politics meet, based on his proven ability to elicit those emotions? If so, what is the difference between a fan and a constituent? This confusion is Bono’s political strength. For almost a decade now, celebrities’ concern for “humanity” has proved as capable of rousing a political constituency as the NRA’s concern for guns or NOW’s for abortions. Richard Gere, by taking up the cause of Tibet, has influenced America’s military policy towards China, its most heavily armed military rival. Princess Diana before her death managed to act as the focal point of a worldwide campaign to ban landmines, despite a feeble intellect and a self-evident preference for the parts of the job that involved attending charitable fashion shows. British prime minister Tony Blair was politically astute when he eulogized Diana as “the people’s princess.” He saw that Diana had gathered about her, on purely emotional grounds, a vast and volatile constituency. Politicians are careful not to fall afoul of people their voters admire; we can expect them to be even more deferential towards people their voters swoon over. The interaction between Bono and his own leftish constituency was visible on the Africa trip. In Ghana, O’Neill took him to visit a data-entry plant operated by the Kentucky-based Affiliated Computer Services. ACS pays 900 Ghanaians a dollar an hour, in a region where more than half the inhabitants subsist on less than a dollar a day. And Bono was, for the first time on the trip, tongue-tied. A buck an hour just didn’t sound like much. “As long as these employees and the government are exploiting the corporate world in a symbiotic relationship,” he finally ventured, “that’s fine. I haven’t made up my mind on some of these issues.” Really? You haven’t made up your mind on whether it’s better to make a dollar an hour or a dollar a day? Clearly, Bono is still in thrall to such political activists as Salih Booker of the Washington-based Africa Action, who warned that the rock star “risks inadvertently legitimizing approaches such as globalization.” Bono’s confusion resulted not from an examination of his political conscience but from an examination of his political base. AROUND THE TIME he first met Bono, Paul O’Neill worried in front of his staff, “He just wants to use me.” It was a legitimate worry. Throughout the trip, as frequently happens when one is dealing with darlings of the public, O’Neill kept winning arguments and losing soundbites. Visiting a Ugandan water-purification facility that had been paid for with $2,000 freed up by debt forgiveness, Bono cited the project as evidence that African countries could use aid money responsibly, and deserved more. O’Neill countered that, at $2,000 per well, the whole country could be similarly equipped for only $25 million. “Last year the World Bank lent $300 million to Uganda,” he remarked. “What was so important that there wasn’t $25 to $30 million to give everyone in Uganda clean water?” It might cross the disinterested observer’s mind here that $25 million is a sum that either O’Neill or Bono could pay out of his own pocket. But O’Neill lost the exchange. “If he sold only his tie collection,” Britain’s leftist Guardian remarked, “it would pay for fresh water in several Ghanaian slums.” Still, who was using whom is far from clear. It was O’Neill’s staff, after all, that suggested the joint trip, just two weeks after the men met in O’Neill’s office last year. Some detractors have noted that the itinerary, largely of Bono’s design, studiously avoids corrupt countries–like Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo–that were huge recipients of U.S. aid during the Cold War. Nor was it clear in the slightest which of the two represented the values of the vibrant New Economy and which the dead hand of the Old. At every stop, O’Neill expressed his wish to “unleash the private sector.” One of his favorite venues was an Ethiopian corporate vocational school, where the students, he said, “are being prepared for skills that could be used anywhere in the world.” (And probably will be, a Buchananite might add.) Yet O’Neill risks being hoist with his own petard here–the whole capitalist right along with him. His gig with Bono was a trade mission for the Internet era. Forty years ago, an Ameri
can cabinet member would have come accompanied by a Fortune 500 executive, who would have promised money for African factories. It is Bono, not O’Neill, who is that plutocrat’s Information-Age avatar, a mighty representative of what one British journalist calls the “entertainment-industrial complex.” It is Bono who is the self-made product of the private sector. And it is Bono’s emotive celebrity politics that provides the concrete expression of the electronic town hall idea that so excited futurists when Ross Perot and Newt Gingrich put it on the national agenda. It is the “capitalist” O’Neill, meanwhile–who began his career as a federal bureaucrat and entered the private sector only in his forties–who stands for the federal government’s revolving door. Many of the African leaders the two met on their journey sensed as much. They sounded more thrilled to host Bono than to importune O’Neill. Interviewed in Africa News at the start of the trip, Ghanaian president John Agyekum Kufuor said, “We want to live in a world of peoples. We believe in humanity. We do not see national boundaries, continents and races and so on. So Bono is very welcome here and, to me, he is very sincere.” It ought to give us pause to hear an African leader begging for aid in the imagine-a-world-without-limits jargon that is a staple of Silicon Valley prospectuses. To say borders are eroding is to say that the constitutional arrangements from which those borders arose are losing their definition. What will replace them? The left has often warned that our new rulers will be multinational corporations; the right has hoped that individuals would take more power into their own hands. If both sides are somewhat right (and they are), then in the new order of things, mass media “personalities” of Bono’s sort are going to wield political power of an important kind. Will they wield enough of it to transform our politics altogether? That the most powerful economic policymaker in the world invited a rock star on his tour of Africa is evidence that even the Bush administration is hedging its bets. Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
