What We Can We Learn from a Rolling Stone Interview with Bono

What We Can We Learn from a Rolling Stone Interview with Bono Regarding the Respectful Sharing of Differing Words and Ideas

PODCAST SUMMARY: This podcast is structured to stimulate respectful conversations, in a cyber coffee shop, employing words that matter as a framework for our discussions These words can provide a context to derive ideas. Typically, I use my background, education, and my faith as a context to begin our discussions over a good cup of coffee.

My coffee, while podcasting today, is in honor of U2’s and Bono’s Irish roots. My coffee is an “Irish Coffee” with Tullamore Dew (Irish Whiskey -- just a wee dram!) in Starbucks’ Dark Roast.
 
Our “Words That Matter” today are very polarizing and usually shut down any chance for respectful dialogue and the creation of important Ideas. Some of the polarizing words considered today that are used to stop the respectful sharing of words and ideas:

• I don’t care what you F***** believe!!!
• Racist!!
• Bigot!!!

These disparaging and hateful words are being thrown around and combined with absolutely no tolerance for the views others that may have a different, but equally valid, perspective. However, there is no reason that respectful and instructive dialogues around these words and topics cannot occur.

As I watch TV, I am reminded of my time at Oxford in the UK. I was blessed to be invited, for several years, to attend an annual think-tank like conclave in which about 100 business leaders from around the world met with a like number of Dons of Oxford to discuss, in small groups, global economics and politics. One day, at this conclave, some of my words and ideas were aggressively challenged by a fellow participant. She was a highly intelligent graduate of the Sorbonne and MIT and an aggressive atheist and Communist. Well, after the sessions that day, she and I agreed to meet for a cup of coffee at a well-known Oxford pub. While our beliefs and cultural backgrounds were opposites, we found that we liked the same cup of some of the same American fiction writers; and she was blown away by the fact that an American management consultant, born in the South, had read Lord John Maynard Keynes’ “General Theory”. At that point, over a good cup of coffee, we began a respectful discussion relating to the conflicts and impacts of social welfare programs that might, indeed, have profound long-term dysfunction on the very people segments these programs were intended to help – the economically disenfranchised. This respectful relationship lasted at Oxford, for several years.

My recollection of these respectful discourses of differing words and ideas over coffee at Oxford was driven by a combination of two totally different events that occurred at the same time:

• Watching the TV news of college demonstrators aggressively trying to impede a speaker with differing views and ideas; and
• Reading an interview, in Rolling Stone, with Bono.

Except for our strongly held Christian faith, Bono and I don’t agree on much; however, I hold Bono in awe because of how he can sit down with folks of diverse backgrounds, faith, and strongly differing ideas, in respectful conversations over coffee or a wee dram. Bono has established personal relationships with folks like arch conservative Senator Jesse Helms and President George W. Bush. These personal relationships have led to saving the lives of millions in Africa from Aids. We can learn so much from Bono because, among his many compelling heroic attributes, Bono has my first-order hero attribute – “personal courage under fire”.

It appeared that my TV news college demonstrators were a wee bit short in my “courage attribute” because many were wearing masks, and all were unwilling to hear differing words and ideas, thereby, limiting the “personal education” that they could derive, at no additional cost, from their college investment.

Jann S. Wenner, founder and president of Rolling Stone, conducted a wide-ranging interview of Bono that was published in Rolling Stone’s December 27, 2017 edition and was entitled simply as: Bono: The Rolling Stone Interview. Wenner said that his interview assessed “U2's frontman on the state of his band, the state of the world and what he learned from almost dying”. The interview occurred after U2’s recent release of their “Songs of Experience” album.

Wenner’s context for the interview: “Songs of Experience just debuted at Number One on the albums chart, which means you've had a chart-topping album in every decade from the Eighties on. Why do you still push so hard for hits? . . . How did your faith get you through all of this?”. Bono responded: “The person who wrote best about love in the Christian era was Paul of Tarsus, who became Saint Paul . . . He starts to preach, and he writes this ode to love, which everybody knows from his letter to the Corinthians: ‘Love is patient, love is kind. . . Love bears all things . . . I am looking to somebody like Paul, who was in prison and writing these love letters and thinking, ‘How does that happen? It is amazing.”.

Bono continues regarding Wenner’s faith question and Bono’s “near-death experience”: “I read the Psalms of David all the time. They are amazing. He is the first bluesman, shouting at God, ‘Why did this happen to me?’ But there's honesty in that too . . . but if you're asking me what I learned, I've learned to try and put time aside to meditate on the day ahead. I don't want to get all religious on your ass, so do forgive me . . .”.

Bono and Wenner, while their ideas regarding politics and social issues are aligned, are not even in the same book much less on the same page regarding religion and faith. Bono clearly and courageously expresses his faith to Wenner, in a most unthreatening and loving way. Wenner is a man whose power is legendary for making or breaking people in the music industry.

Also, we find that U2’s audience, in the Millennial demographic segment, is important and growing. Bono’s faith-based words and ideas are not well aligned with most Millennials, according to the Pew Research Center; and Bono’s ideas are, probably, not aligned with the TV news Millennial college demonstrators. Bono’s Rolling Stone faith-based words and ideas are fraught with the risk, to U2, for their potential to estrange U2 from their key Millennial target market segment. However, Bono’s courage, to respectfully present potentially differing words and ideas through his intellectual honesty, wins the interview day with Rolling Stone!

Rodney King, that great sociologist of the 1990s but unintended perpetrator of the 1992 LA Riots, said during the LA Riots: “Why can’t we all just get along?”. Well, Rodney, we can’t all just get along because we don’t first “love our neighbor as ourselves”. The “love”, in the context of Jesus, Paul, and Bono, means that one has respect and honor for another person, including their differing words and ideas. In loving another person, we do not approach their differing words and ideas with the “fear” that our words and ideas will not stand the test of a conversation. Rather, “love” encourages us to engage the differing ideas of another person with intellectual curiosity and respect, not “fear”. Remember, Jesus’ concept of “love” and “friendship” in John 15:13-14, which sets a high bar for us: “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends.”.

RESPECTFUL RESPONSE CONTACT INFORMATION: As listeners to this podcast, you can check out my first podcast regarding the word “friend”; and, as listeners to this podcast, I hope you become my friends and not just my acquaintances. Remember, my Website: www.coffeewordsideas.com  and my email: barista-bill@coffeewordsideas.com.

Words, indeed, do matter.

Barista Bill signing off