Bono Is Doing Illustrations for the Atlantic Now, Because Everything’s Fake and Stupid
By Caitlin JOHNSTONE
So U2 singer Bono is literally just doing illustrations for the imperialist propaganda rag The Atlantic now, because that’s the sort of thing that occurs in a dystopian civilization throughout the death throes of a globe-spanning empire.
A Washington Post short article entitled “Bono likes to sketch Atlantic covers, so the publication hired him” reports that “Bono enjoys Atlantic cover fanfic– a lot so that he was invited to highlight the publication’s June cover featuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.”
Bono’s newest contribution to the mountain of cringe-inducing Zelensky minuteswe have actually been seeing for the past year provides a cover image for a postby lifelong war propagandists Anne Applebaumand Jeffrey Goldberg. The post backs a Ukrainian offensive to regain Crimea, which specialists mostly agree would be the relocation more than likely to trigger a nuclear warin this dispute.
Here’s a paragraph from Applebaum and Goldberg’s article, simply to offer you a taste of the infantile “Heros vs Bad Men” framing that western liberals are being fed by mass media war propagandists nowadays:
“In some cases, the war is described as a battle between autocracy and democracy, or in between dictatorship and liberty. In fact, the differences in between the two challengers are not simply ideological, however also sociological. Ukraine’s resist Russia pits a heterarchy versus a hierarchy. An open, networked, flexible society– one that is both more powerful at the grassroots level and more deeply integrated with Washington, Brussels, and Silicon Valley than anyone understood– is fighting a huge, very corrupt, top-down state. On one side, farmers defend their land and 20‑something engineers construct eyes in the sky, using tools that would recognize to 20‑something engineers anywhere else. On the other side, leaders send waves of poorly armed conscripts to be butchered– just as Stalin once sent out shtrafbats, chastening battalions, versus the Nazis– under the management of a totalitarian consumed with ancient bones. ‘The option,’ Zelensky informed us, ‘is between flexibility and fear.'”
Many westerners felt their very first stirrings of younger rebellious enthusiasms while listening to U2 songs like “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “Pride (In the Name of Love)”, but nowadays Bono’s voice is heard stating that he has “grown very fond” of war criminal George W Bush, praising industrialismat the World Economic Online Forum, collaboratingwith warmonger Lindsey Graham to promote US empire stories about Syria, and singing “Wait Ukraine”in support of US empire narratives in a Kyiv train. And just when it looks like he can’t become any more of a tool of the empire, he gets hired by one of the world’s worst militarist smut rags to draw a cover picture of Zelensky.
Since that’s simply how things go in a highly controlled societywhere traditional culture is developed to serve the powerful. A society where the minds of the general public are constantly being shaped by mass-scale mental adjustmentto make sure that they keep believing, speaking, working, consuming and voting in methods which serve the rich and effective. Whatever that gets raised to the top of traditional attention facilitates this program (or is at least harmless to it), and as quickly as it becomes possibly threatening to this program it is either remedied or marginalized far from mainstream attention.
This dynamic can cause some truly jaw-dropping floating wreckage to surface in the roilings of our cultural waters, like Simpsons characters waving Ukrainian flags, or an opera about a drone operatorsponsored by General Characteristics.
Here’s Accountable Statecraft’s Connor Echolson that last one:
This fall, DC citizens will be treated to the world premiere of “Grounded,” an opera following a Flying force ace named Jess whose unexpected pregnancy forces her to leave her precious F-16 and sign up with the “chair force.”
Throughout the show, the “hot shot” pilot wrestles with the psychological impact of shooting rockets from a drone in Afghanistan from a trailer in Las Vegas. “As Jess tracks terrorists by day and rocks her child to sleep by night, the limit in between her worlds becomes precariously permeable,” an advertisement tells us.
The production is given you by providing sponsor General Dynamics, one of the world’s largest weapons companies (and, wouldn’t you understand it, the maker of Jess’s favorite airplane). Playwright George Brant wrote the libretto, which will be brought to life by mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo and Tony-winning author Jeanine Tesori.
You’ll also see things like “humanitarian intervention” championSamantha Power enthusiastically tweetingabout the partnershipbetween the Sesame Street franchise and the CIA cutout USAIDin Iraq:
You see things like this all the time under the shadow of the United States empire, and separately they don’t appear like much, but once you start seeing them you come to recognize them as symptoms of the exceptionally infected civilizationthat we are living in. One where our heart strings are pulled in the most obnoxious methods imaginable to get us to support industrialism, empire and oligarchy, where we are controlled into embracing values systems which benefit powerful sociopaths under the cover of noble-sounding causes. Where we are trained like rats to support systems that are driving our species toward extinction due to the fact that our rulers gave lip service to humanitarianism and waved a rainbow flag.
Thisis what dystopia appears like. Like a lot of thought-controlled automatons mindlessly marching toward ecocide and omnicide to a beat played out by screens who inform them every day and in every way that there is no greater function than this. Like military commercial complex-funded feminist rock operas about drone operators and Cookie Beast assisting Samantha Power emotionally colonize Iraqi kids. Like Bono getting back from singing a genuine number about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr to highlight a cover for a war propaganda piece in The Atlantic.
It’s like they’re putting concrete over our hearts. Sewing blindfolds over our souls. Numbing us, distracting us, sedating us, so that the local riff raff won’t interfere in the workings of the imperial machine. They’re exterminating something lovely and spiritual in mankind, and they’re doing it to roll out a few of the ugliest visions this planet has actually ever seen.