About Bono's New York Times Debut...

"I've never been great with the full stops or commas. Let's see how far we can take this," admits Bono in the news releases unveiling his new op-ed column (published today) in the New York Times. He’s a fucking demon with the colons, though, judging by the donkey he randomly plumps in the middle of the first paragraph. I guess it’s true about sub-eds being the first to go in a downturn.

Yet it’s not so much Bono’s grammar that gripes me- I throw in pointless colons all the time and nobody seems that cut up about it. It doesn’t even bother me (that much) that his writing style seems to have been influenced entirely by Rolling Stone articles about himself. It is that pretentious, but it’s not that surprising. I mean, having been exposed to the guy’s music for my entire life, it’s hardly a major shock that he’d try and force the same kind of pompous grandiosity into every sentence and paragraph.

Like the way, all of a sudden, the sentences become fragments towards the end.

Of a paragraph.

Still, what bothers me, and what I think should bother any Irish person (not the intended audience, granted, but this is freely available online), is that he clearly thrives on his “Oirishness,” but in the context of the article that’s about as relevant as what he ate for breakfast. Or drank for dinner. Is there some greater point to a couple of vague observations about recession-era Dublin (which, sorry, he has absolutely no concept of) interspersed with a mildly interesting anecdote about how he was friends with Frank Sinatra “before he was dead” (not an actual quote.)? And another thing: since when does the private area in Lillie’s count as “the crush in a Dublin pub”? Fuck me.

I know we Irish have an elevated opinion of ourselves and our importance in the world and, as much fun as it is to vote No on Lisbon and watch the rest of Europe squirm, we’re ultimately an irrelevant island on the edge of Wales. Still, it would be nice if one of our very few exports could talk about the country in anything other than abstract, distant terms. He even uses “Celtic Tiger” as an actual noun . Who does that? Ever? The New York Times is a middle-class American newspaper- not exactly the worst hit by the US recession, but certainly an audience that is likely to identify with a realistic portrait of cutbacks and job losses in another country bearing the worst of the financial crisis.

He could have used this opportunity to talk about how unemployment is threatening to double within the space of a year; about how employees in the civil service and the private sector are living in unceasing fear of spending cuts and redundancies; about how the first name on the budget’s cutback list was overseas aid, when we’re one of the few nations, however insignificant, to provide effective humanitarian aid to the people who need it most. He could even have chosen to address the effects of the crunch on print media, where career journalists are being squeezed out so some disconnected rock star can shit on a piece of paper and call it copy. Fat chance!

But the point still stands: why bring up Dublin and the recession if all you’re going to do is point an easy finger at bankers and builders? Anyone can do that. I hate to bring up Bono’s personal finances (I love to bring up Bono’s personal finances), but since when do people who’ve shifted the bulk of their earnings to tax shelters abroad get to lecture everybody else on nefarious forces within our economy? Is it too much to ask that somebody as influential as Bono could actually come up with an incisive point or, preferably, just shut the fuck up?

I mean, fair play, he actually lives here, unlike most moderately successful Irish people. But for all intents and purposes, the Ireland Bono envisions is the same bullshit land of saints and scholars that every jumped-up emigrant and trashy airport novelist envisions: an island of stout-swilling budding artistes who could quote you passages from Yeats quicker than you could fart yet, bizarrely, harbour a deep-seated belief in Leprechauns and the healing power of mystical stones. If he lives in the same city as me, then I must be the most unobservant dickhead going. And I don’t think I am.

I admit it, I was never going to react favourably to this article. Bono makes my skin crawl, and I make no apology for that fact. Nevertheless, as an Irish person training into a field in which job prospects are virtually zero, and working in a field in which they’re rapidly receding, it’d be nice if our self-appointed ambassador had something to say other than “I’m famous!”

Bring back Roy Keane. Fuck.