Outside It's America

The artisans of moral seriousness pictured above are Larry Mullen Jr., Adam Clayton, the Edge, and Bono. They are the effort, the movement, the band called U2. I like them so much I can hardly stand it.

They understand the human task: Stand where you must stand. Be human there. They’ve been taking it up together with myriad feats of attentiveness and group courage for fifty years. I’ve been drawing on that courage remotely since I was twelve.

Art is integration, a long healing game to which everyone is invited. Art makes us feel. The more we feel, the more we can acknowledge, grieve, celebrate, and act upon what we’ve experienced, what we’re seeing and taking in. Consider “American Obituary.”

Art is news that stays news. There is so much here. Commemoration, lamentation, moral summons, love letter, sloganeering, holy decree. The lived witness of Renée Good is hereby sacramentalized. Her federal government’s attempt to smear her is hereby countered by art. The Department of Justice she funded refuses to open an investigation into her murder. The U2 op, however, has other plans. Art eats empire for breakfast.

And listen, “American Obituary” is just Track One on Days of Ash which dropped last week on Ash Wednesday. I am going to pace myself by saving further commentary on remaining tracks for future posts and my forthcoming book Explain All These Controls: U2 and the Inner America.

For now, I wish to note that we’ve been here before. In U2’s vision quest, America is a promise and a crime scene. “Vertigo” is its own distinct signal flare, but it started out as “Native Son” which honors Leonard Peltier. Their witness amplifies the witness of others. I am grateful and also a little ashamed that, at fourteen, it was this song appearing on MTV that focussed my mind and made me aware of the killing of Dr. King up the road in Memphis.

“American Obituary” persists down U2’s singular trajectory of seeing themselves in the mirror they hold up to the God-blessed, Christ-haunted USofA. Here’s Bono speaking of America in 1987. Read it twice:

I think rock & roll can make real the situation a country finds itself in….[In America] I found the people open. They wanted to be positive rather than negative. But this sort of openness makes Americans quite vulnerable to manipulation, vulnerable to what I call the new fascism. The new fascism will come with a warm handshake…and a smile. And through the media, people will be manipulated en masse. The potential is there. A nation as powerful as the United States must not elect a leader because of his suitability for television.

In a song, many things can be true at once and an oracle birthed in one context can prove applicable to another. Do y’all know “Get Out Of Your Own Way” from Songs of Experience (2017)? It’s aged well. Behold:

It lands a lot of different ways: personal, universal, foreign, domestic. I sometimes hear it as a parent addressing a broken-hearted child. It also reads like a note written to oneself. A pep talk, certainly. And yes, there’s America. Four grown men based in Ireland addressing a nation of 340 million? Actually, yes. I think that’s one of the things going on in this song. It pairs well with “American Obituary” in which we’re told, “We love you more than hate loves war.” And lest anyone feel preached at, Adam recently cited the phrase (“Get out of your own way”) as a personal mantra in the work of surrendering to God instead of trying to control outcomes. More on that here.

Quick funny thing. Days of Ash appeared on God’s internet at 11:AM last Wednesday. After my first listen, I walked my route from my office to Bongo Java and back and stopped to tell anyone I knew in my path that there’s a new U2 album among us. Within half an hour, two teenagers told me they were unaware of its existence, but they wanted me to know they were named after U2. One’s middle name is Clayton. The other’s first name is Joshua with the middle name of Tree. I was also alerted concerning a dad who named his dog Bono. True story.

Here’s me rambling on related matters.

Part of me wants to assure you that we’ll return to not-related-to-U2 matters shortly. But, in truth, I don’t believe in unrelated phenomena.

I welcome your thoughts on all of the above.