Tuesday, 10 December 2013

Death by Embarrassment

Poor Nelson Mandela.  Not only is he undergoing canonization by flabby rhetoric spewed forth by mainstream politicians and leaders, many of whom would not so long ago have dubbed him a 'terrorist', but he has now suffered the final indignity of being eulogized, or rather appropriated, by the fool otherwise known as 'Bono': Paul David Hewson.

The Irish Times has today republished a spectacularly, though characteristically, self-aggrandizing article which appeared in Time magazine a few days ago: 'My friend Nelson Mandela, the man who could not cry'.  I am sure he is crying now, his legacy muffled and obscured by the wafflings of a little man with a big ego, whose primary function is campaigning for private corporate investment and theft in Africa.   Not that one could expect much better from Time magazine's idea of a 'rock band', which features a lead singer in his early fifties who still insists on being called 'Bono' (boner? bonehead?), and a bald guitarist (let us at last speak frankly) of the same age whose name is, apparently, The Edge - ludicrous and crass Peter Pan tax quasi-exiles and loudmouths who once planned the construction of twin skyscrapers on either side of the Liffey, like ugly international style Pillars of Hercules - hubris unbound.  With the scrapping of this plan, the collapse of the Celtic Tiger achieved at least one moment of creative destruction.

Read Harry Browne's The Showman: Bono (In the Name of Power), for a thorough demystification of this ridiculous and narcissistic upstart.


Conor


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