THEM, TOO.(foreign assistance policy of Paul O'Neill and Bono)(Brief Article)

Last Friday, a couple of Irishmen named Paul returned from what the younger of the two, but probably not the older, might term a long, strange trip. The older one, who is not really Irish (his ancestors were, but he is a native of St. Louis), is Paul O'Neill, sixty-six, the Secretary of the Treasury in the Bush Administration. The younger one, who is not really named Paul (his passport identifies him as Paul Hewson, but that's a technicality), is Bono, forty-two, the uninomial lead singer and lyricist of U2. The long, strange trip was a ten-day journey to Ghana, South Africa, Uganda, and Ethiopia, in a United States government airplane, ostensibly to study questions of poverty and development and, maybe, to see whose ideas on the subject make more sense, the Cabinet secretary's or the rock star's.

U2--the name, originally nicked from the high-flying spy plane, evokes a bond with the audience, as in "you, too"--is a quartet whose members have been making music together since they were schoolboys in Dublin. They play good, loud, guitar-and-vocal rock and roll. Some of the songs that Bono has written are "political," in that they refer to events like the Irish troubles and the "disappeared" of Central America. But what is really political about Bono is his politics. As a celebrity trying to change the world, he has no peer. Stars with a cause are often dismissed as dilettantes. This, if not always unfair, is beside the point. The world would not be a better place, on balance, if Barbra Streisand never raised a dime for female candidates, Paul McCartney forgot all about land mines, and Richard Gere shut up about the Dalai Lama. With Bono, however, the dilettante question does not arise. He is unarguably serious, and his talent for politics has turned out to be the equal of his talent for music.

In the mid-eighties, Bono and U2 participated in Live Aid and Band Aid, the famine-relief benefits organized by Bob Geldof. But Bono did not leave it at that. With his wife, he spent six weeks working in an Ethiopian orphanage--the beginning of a long process of self-education. Eventually, he became a mainstay of the Jubilee 2000 movement, which aimed at providing debt relief for poor countries. Debt relief is a curiously abstract cause for a star to adopt. It has no poster children and offers no obvious photo ops. But it happens to be a useful, creative, and efficient approach to Third World development. Last month, in conjunction with Geldof, and with funding from George Soros and Bill Gates, Bono launched a new operation, called DATA (Debt, Aid, and Trade for Africa), which advocates not only debt relief but also fairer trade rules and a greater effort against Africa's nightmarish AIDS pandemic. And it's not just this kind of focussed persistence that makes him unique among celebrity causeniks. It's also knowledgeability--by all accounts, he can more than hold his own in a roomful of development specialists--and a canny sense of how to use it, along with celebrity and charm, to influence elites. He ...