It is an image that was once rare if not paradoxical, but which today no longer surprises anyone: a president who places a medal around the neck of a rock singer. It happened yesterday, when Joe Biden awarded Bono of U2 and about twenty other public figures the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States.
For years now Bono has been rewarded for his civil commitment and at the same time hated for his closeness to politics and capital, appreciated for his pragmatism and hated because he gets his hands dirty. For Roger Waters it is “a huge piece of shit”, guilty of having remembered the victims of the October 7 massacre in concert. Bono is Bono, concrete and hyperbolic, pragmatic and dreamer, saint and paraculo, a door-to-door salesman of songs and ideas.
While Biden rewarded him, theAtlantic published an essay entitled “The Gorgeous, Unglamorous Work of Freedom” in which he defines himself as a actualista word that we could freely translate as realist: not a digital activist who always positions himself on the right side, that is, where the wind of indignation is blowing that day, but one who sacrifices his own coolness in order to achieve concrete results, covering themselves with ridicule and insults when necessary. Someone who has chosen to free himself from all embarrassment in order to do things.
Freedom, writes Bono, is a word that occurs all too frequently in rock even if, “let's face it, the freedom that musicians are interested in is above all their own”. And then: «When we rock stars talk about freedom, we most often refer to libertinism and not to liberation». However, he grew up in Ireland in the 1960s and therefore, like his peers, he was hungry for freedoms, those they didn't have: political, religious and obviously sexual. “Rock and roll was a promise of freedom that could not be contained or silenced.”
Son of a generation that believed in the unstoppable progress of humanity towards freedom and equality, despite millennia of history proving the opposite, Bono became acquainted with activism when he was 18, at the time of the anti-apartheid demonstrations, and he got his education by going to Africa threatened by AIDS. He then launched One and (Red) and decided to operate in a pragmatic way, that is «involving a wide variety of politicians from all sides, doing the same thing with economic subjects to ensure that medicines reach those who need them, whether they could afford it or not.”
It's not do-goodism, it's bonism. And it's a strategy that the singer has never stopped using. Instead of judging from the outside with his little finger raised or posting a meme and collecting hearts and likes, he got his hands dirty, receiving insults from those who couldn't bear to see him alongside then President George W. Bush. In the essay, the singer recalls that thanks to the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief wanted by Bush, 26 million people survived despite HIV. Because even when freedom struts, staggering with a drink in hand and a cigar in his mouth, it must be forgiven if it brings results.
While America today questions what freedom is (reproductive freedom or freedom from the shackles of government?), “in other parts of the world people are literally dying for it.” Bono mentions Ukraine and asks: Are our lives worth the fight for freedom against Putin's guns and bombs? He mentions Sudan, Syria, Yemen. And Gaza, without bringing up the word genocide: «For almost twenty years, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has used the defense of the freedom of Israel and its people as an excuse to systematically deny that same freedom and security to the Palestinians, a contradiction self-harming and deadly that has led to an obscene erasure of civil life that people all over the world can see daily on their smartphones. There must be freedom for the Israeli hostages, whose abduction by Hamas triggered this cataclysm. And there must be freedom for the Palestinian people. It doesn't take a prophet to predict that Israel will not be free until Palestine is free.”
Freedom, says Bono, is a complicated business. Getting there is a much more difficult job than you might think. Sometimes, or rather perhaps most of the time, it goes wrong and therefore it is easier to do as he did in the past: «Talking nonsense before knowing things was part of the attraction of rock and roll. I thought being listened to was the most useful thing I could do, perhaps because I didn't know how to do anything else.” It is a strategy that has not led to the desired results. Bono understood this when Paul McGuinness, U2's then manager, asked him in exasperation: «What is it this time, Bono? Is it time for Rock Against Bad Things?
While he continues to appreciate what he calls poetic gestures, Bono has replaced symbolism with activism. «Every month some petition arrives at home for an absolutely worthy cause, but I'm not one to sign many. I am more inclined to organize than to agonize.” In short, strategy and tactics are better than the symbolic representation of the world, even if angry and on the right side. Be a actualist (“I thought I had invented the word until I found it in the dictionary”) means living somewhere between an idealist and a pragmatist. And in any case, he writes, in the end it is not the great personalities who change things, but the movements. But someone has to feed them, working on them and financing them by “bringing the capitalists on board.”
There is a famous maxim by Martin Luther King which more or less says that the arc of the moral universe is broad, but it bends inexorably towards justice. Over time Bono understood that it's not true and that there must be particularly stubborn people who bend that blessed bow with force and work. Because in the end the results count, don't represent yourself on the good side. What comes to mind is what he wrote some time ago in his book Surrender: «I don't remember who said that the artist's job is to describe the problem and not solve it, but whoever it was, I wasn't listening. I want to be with people who move from words to deeds, who manage to improve things. I like functionality.”
