OPINION/John Waters: There was a time when Bono on the cover of Time magazine would have sent us into paroxysms of national self-congratulation, but now we take it in our stride, suspecting that it is more about him than about us. The first time U2 were accorded that not insignificant recognition, almost two decades ago, their being dubbed "Rock's Hottest Ticket" provided their fellow citizens with an opportunity for an orgy of reflected glorying.
Now, I detect, we realise that Bono has not just outstripped the rest of the rock 'n' roll pack and become far bigger than his own band, but has left the present Celtic Tiger mindset behind as well. And yet there is something in his elevation to universal saviour so related to his origins that we would be missing something if we were not to remind ourselves of it.
The current Time cover story relates mainly to Bono's solo attempt to persuade world leaders to find a way of forgiving Third World debt.
The cover headline: "Can Bono Save The World?" is almost free from irony and there is a sense that this may for the first time be entirely justified. "Don't laugh," the cover blurb goes on, "the globe's biggest rock star is on a mission to make a difference."
Bono is now going where no celebrity spokesman for his generation has gone before, earned considerable international respect for himself and his motivations and somehow managed to crack the code of the old conundrum concerning whether rock 'n' roll can move beyond its Dionysian obsession with sex and drugs.
The irony is confined to the first line of the Time article: "Bono is an egomaniac." There have been efforts to suggest that his current mission is an ego trip, but anyone who knows him knows it has more to do with his humility, a sense of personal gratitude and awe at what he has achieved in his own life, combined with a genuine grief that such things are denied to many of his fellow human beings.
THERE is an interesting section towards the end of Josh Tyraniel's article, which begins: "At 41, Bono says he has given up on music as a political force. He believes his work negotiating in political back rooms is more vital and effective than singing in sold-out stadiums." Tyraniel quotes W. H. Auden: "Poetry makes nothing happen", and says Bono agrees.
"I'm tired of dreaming," he tells the interviewer. "I'm into doing at the moment. It's like, let's only have goals that we can go after. U2 is about the impossible.
"Politics is the art of the possible. They're very different and I'm resigned to that now ... When you sing you make people vulnerable to change in their lives. You make yourself vulnerable to change in your life. But in the end, you've got to become the change you want to see in the world."
Three things occurred to me on reading this. The first is that Bono, with Bob Geldof, has rewritten the rock 'n' roll manifesto. It used to maintain that art and politics failed to mix only because the system had not (yet) changed enough to tune in. Now it recognises that art and politics are parallel realities which can cross-pollinate but never intersect. Geldof recently said something to the effect that music itself is not a force for change but those who acquire influence through it can use that for good in other ways.
Bono, I believe, is nudging at a new frontier. His age hints at the ironies and the inevitability of the fact that it has taken so long to discover a formula for translating the moral clarity of youthful idealism into a new kind of political vision. Hence the second thing that occurred to me was that Bono is now a little older than John Lennon was when Mark Chapman blew the dream away.
For the two decades since his death and the best part of two more before that, Lennon's moral stature and searching intelligence cast a moral shadow over rock 'n' roll's inability to transcend its own contradictions.
What Lennon had strived for - the means of translating his artistic power into something more "practical" - Bono now stands on the point of achieving and, with this achievement, comes the realisation that he has now, finally, stepped beyond the shadow of the original rock 'n' roll messiah. This presents both a moment of exhilaration and a chill of anxiety on his behalf.
The third thing that occurred to me is that Lennon, Geldof and Bono have something else in common: they are all, in a sense, Irishmen.
I'm not suggesting this makes them holier than anyone, just observing that it may be more than coincidence and might, conceivably, have to do with certain cultural memories of quite recent historical experiences which now afflict other parts of the globe. Famine, yes, but also, more recently, the experience of being strangled by debt.
Up there in what BP Fallon might call the Mainmanland, John Winston must be looking down on the creatures of his influence with no little pride, and acknowledging that Paul Hewson has finally become his natural representative on Earth. (The "Bono" business he would probably dismiss as he did the "Dylan" business as "bullshit".)
Lennon, Geldof, Hewson - through the searching of this Celtic Trinity, we may finally have reached a breakthrough moment of rock 'n' roll possibility, considered elusive if not unattainable since Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles.