Bono by Michka Assayas & Michka Assayas

Author:Michka Assayas & Michka Assayas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US

11. ADD ETERNITY TO THAT

Our next telephone call took place a week after the Madrid train bombings that left 191 commuters dead and more than 1,800 wounded on March 11, 2004. Everyone was in shock; it was the biggest terrorist attack to ever occur in Europe. I wrote about it in my weekly column for the French magazineVSD.I wanted to convey how I felt about that act. It was one of those moments I wished I’d been a songwriter.

I wanted to know how Bono reacted to the news—not as a spokesperson or an ambassador for DATA, but as a human being. I mean, how do idealism and goodwill stand in front of that? This is the piece:

Song lyrics may be silly, but they do tell the truth. At the Olympia Theatre in Paris, the Beach Boys’ former songwriter Brian Wilson insisted on dedicating “Love and Mercy” to the people of Spain:

I was lyin’ in my room and the news came on TV / A lotta people there hurtin’ and it really scares me / Love and mercy, that’s what you need tonight / Love and mercy to you and your friends tonight . . .

Rather dull words, you might say, nothing original about them. But then again, unfortunately, there’s nothing original either nowadays about the Massacre of the Innocents as seen live on TV. Maybe you’ll find his words derisory and useless, but that utterance of compassion made me feel good.

As much as anyone, I was caught between subdued anger and a need to cry when the news came on TV. Is there a way to feel intelligent when you see a gymnasium turned into a makeshift mortuary, strewn with stretchers? Some morning, a handful of people board a commuter train, carrying bags filled with charge, all stuffed with bolts and nails. I am refusing to analyze it. Try putting yourself inside the head of a madman, and pretty soon you’ll find yourself feeling like a madman too. Moreover, that is exactly the aim of those delirious political and religious sects: carrying the world away into a collective madness at the end of which, of course, truth will prevail, a truth that only its followers detain.

So, love and mercy, then . . . In a magazine calledCourier International, I have just read about the story of Zarema, a twenty-three-year-old from Chechnya. Armed with an explosive belt, she renounced, just at the last minute, to smash herself to pieces in a pub in Moscow, and turned herself in to the police. A Russian journalist got the opportunity to interview her in her cell. There she told him her appalling life story. Her mother abandons her while she is a ten-month-old baby. Then her father gets murdered on a building site in Siberia. It doesn’t sound like a great start in life. It isn’t. Raised by her grandparents, she is forced into marrying “according to our old customs,” as she puts it, some local dealer. Pretty soon, the man gets shot down by a competing gang.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.