Reviews for The School of Homer

Thursday, February 02, 2006

The Ultimate Achievement: Kissing Bono's Ass

That great cultural hero, U2 lead singer "Bono" [Bah - no], author of such classic and poetic passages like the following from "Mysterious Ways,"

Johnny toke a walk/With your sister the moon/Let her pale light in/To fill up your room/You’ve been living underground/Eating from a can/You’ve been running away/From what you don’t understand/She’s slippy/Your’re sliding down/She’ll be there/When you hit the ground/It’s alright...it’s alright...it’s alright/She moves in mysterious ways/It’s alright...it’s alright...it’s alright/She moves in mysterious ways,

and of course what might possibly be the greatest thing ever written from the song "If God Will Send His Angels,"

Nobody else here baby/No one here to blame/No one to point the finger/It’s just you and me and the rain/Nobody made you do it/No one put words in your mouth/Nobody here taking orders/When love took a train heading south/It’s the blind leading the blond/It’s the stuff, it’s the stuff of country songs/Hey if God will send his angels/And if God will send a sign/And if God will send his angels/Would everything be alright/God has got his phone off the hook, babe/Would he even pick up if he could/It’s been a while since we saw that child/Hanging ’round this neighbourhood/You see his mother dealing in a doorway/See father christmas with a begging bowl/Jesus sister’s eyes are a blister/The high street never looked so low/It’s the blind leading the blond/It’s the cops collecting for the cons/So where is the hope and where is the faith/And the love...what’s that you say to me/Does love...light up your christmas tree/The next minute you’re blowing a fuse/And the cartoon network turns into the news/If God will send his angels/And if God will send a sign/And if God will send his angels/Where do we go/Where do we go/Jesus never let me down/You know jesus used to show me the score/Then they put jesus in show business/Now it’s hard to get in the door/It’s the stuff, it’s the stuff of country songs/But I guess it was something to go on

is a surprisingly effective and modernly irritating "do-gooder."

It should be quite obvious to everyone why "Bono" is the darling of world leaders and able to brow-beat governments around the world to relieve the debts of corrupt African governments and to fork over money for aids drugs, and the patents to those drugs so that they can be produced without those pesky property rights getting in the way. I mean, when you are dealing with an artistic mind that could produce the above passages, among numerous others, it is easy to understand why everyone would be intimidated.

Seriously though, Bono's continued presence on the scene beyond his extremely limited musical capacity is perhaps one of the most annoying and aggravating developments in recent times. It's no mystery why, he meets so many requirements for media attention. 1) He's already famous, 2) He's a big-time altruist, 3) He's a politically correct, mentally vacuous liberal and 4) He's more vocal than bandmate "The Edge" [the crackerjack box where these idiots picked up their names has got to be worth a fortune]. So when he turned up this morning at the equally dubious cold war relic and mystically inspired "National Prayer Breakfast," with numerous senators, congressmen, and the President I was, to say the least, disgusted. At times like this I begin to lose my last vestiges of hope.

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