I think Bono is going to get the Nobel Peace Prize one day. I’m not even a fan, particularly, but I think the guy is a genius. Listen to him put himself on the line for a cause:
To help us with the HIV/Aids emergency we have come up with the concept of Red products [by Nike, Gap, etc.]. Why Red? Because Red is the colour for an emergency. And 6,500 people dying in Africa every day of a preventable and treatable disease is an emergency.
Red is where desire meets virtue, where consumerism meets philanthropy, where shopping attempts to meet the need of a continent in crisis, where once HIV/Aids meant a death sentence but where two pills a day can now have you back at work in 40 days….This is more hip-hop than indie. What does that mean? A certain generation who grew up wearing grey trenchcoats and crying into their beer about how daddy’s bedsit wasn’t big enough won’t like this. But the generation that came through in the early 1990s under Soul II Soul, the Young Disciples and the British soul movement love it.
Big business is not bad. Big bad business is bad. It is strange that it took the continent of Africa to turn an activist onto commerce, but that’s what Africans want now - to do business with us, to trade, to have dignity of labour. Of that, more later … until you find the vaccine.
“Big business is not bad.”
The “activist” has been turned on to “commerce.”
And it’s because instead of imposing his (postmaterialist) worldview, his conceits, his mind-set, his prejudices on those who have different ideas, concerns, and problems, he listened to what “Africans want now.”
Outer-directedness: there’s nothing like it.
(via Jeff Jarvis)
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[...] The author of this piece, Brendan O’Neill, is a little harsh on celebrities who go to Africa or some other poor place to make themselves feel “special” and do some gratuitous moral posturing in the process. And he paints my boy Bono with the same broad brush as Brangelina. [...]
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