“The World Don’t Need Any More Songs… As A Matter Of Fact, If Nobody Wrote Any Songs From This

“[A]s artists, filmmakers, writers, we all work in the realm of imagination and know that is our best weapon.  I suggest that it is our failure to imagine both in art and other spheres that has allowed this latest movement to the far right to take place.

The inability to put ourselves in another’s shoes is the core of intolerance.  In his novel The Book of Evidence, Irish author John Banville’ s narrator and murderer confesses to the unforgivable crime of having failed to imagine what it was like to be his victim.  ‘I could kill her,’ he says, ‘because for me she was not alive.’  If we want to challenge hatred, emphatic imagination is central.

As survivors of the Holocaust both Hannah Arendt and Primo Levi implored us ‘to tell our stories.’ And we must, not just to make real the oppressed and the oppressor.  Not just to break down the idea of separateness, that we understand each other better.  Not just so we don’t forget!  We tell our stories to put flesh and blood on new ideas ...  To tell our stories, to play them out, to paint pictures, moving and still, but above all to glimpse another way of being. Because as much as we need to describe the kind of world we do live in, we need to dream up the kind of world we want to live in.  In the case of a rock & roll band that is to dream out loud, at high volume, to turn it up to eleven.  Because we have fallen asleep in the comfort of our freedom.

Rock & roll is for some of us a kind of alarm clock.  It wakes us up to dream!  It has stopped me from becoming cynical in cynical times.  Surely it is the inherited cynicism of our political and economic thinking that contributes so much to the despair of the 1990s.  

The fascists at least recognize the void, their pseudoleadership a reaction to what feels like no leadership, their simplistic racist analysis as to what ails the economy and why there is so much unemployment a reaction to our government’s gobbledegook, which even the smartest among us cannot understand…

Fascism is about control. They know what we won’t admit: that things are out of control. We started this century with so many competing ideas as to how we should live together.  We end it with so few.

The machismo – and it is machismo – of the New Right has much to do with the impotence of an electorate who feel they have only one real choice anyway.  It has much to do with a consumer society that equates manhood with spending power.  Maleness is an elusive notion, distorted but made accessible and concrete by the Nazis.  We shouldn’t underestimate this.  The fascists feed off youth culture and if we are to overcome them we must understand their sex appeal.  And what is our appeal? The neo-Nazis have a perverted idealism, but do we have any idealism left?  What is the ground we stand on politically?  Economically?  Spiritually?

...  Obviously, this is not a German problem.  In fact, we look to a people who have survived not one but two totalitarian regimes in the last sixty years.  The hundreds and thousands who took part in the candlelight marches all over this country last month sent a signal to the rest of us that Germany ‘will not let it happen again.’  But for that you need our support, because while it is fine to fight darkness with light, it is better to make the light brighter.”

- Bono, January 30, 1993, Festival Against Racism in Hamburg, Germany

Speech excerpted From U2 At The End Of The World by Bill Flanagan, Photo by BP Fallon 

Bono's Joshua Tree era photos = master class in eye fucking.

A favorite moment from Vegas Night 2.

I was planning to work this afternoon, but I think I'll just stare at this picture for the next four hours instead.

😍🤤

This morning my town’s college radio station played a story on Russian foxes, selectively bred for gentleness and fearlessness. They are now so domesticated that when they see their caretakers, they lick their faces and roll over to have their bellies scratched. Immediately thought of you, @bonos-grindcore-sideproject.

So I open my door and find a snail on my front porch. I pick it up and throw it across the street. A year later I open my door and find the same snail on my front porch. The snail looks up and says, “What the fuck was that all about?”

Thank you! I’ll be on PJ’s blog all week.

"If I could through myself Set your spirit free, I'd lead your heart away"

"Bad" - Rattle and Hum

@U2place