The Dissolution of Western Culture

I’m not sure that either of the voices on the talk radio show I was listening to knew where to go. The news story was this: three men in England were killed while trying to protect their business from looters; they were struck by a car and killed.

First, I was sure the target was to be the looters—the no-good, over-entitled, low-class hooligans who just wanted new gadgets and so were raising havoc in one of the most civilized of nations on earth.

However, the men were Muslim, so the conversation turned on a sound bite. A brother of one of the victims was quoted as saying he would find the people responsible for the act and cut their heads from their bodies.

Then the line was, oh, but this is that peaceful religion we hear about. Pure sarcasm. They couldn't defend the victims because of that line from a grief-stricken brother.

Or could they? The conversation turned to the most purchased item in the riot areas: baseball bats. Apparently, the problem--and the selling point of the segment--is the laws against gun ownership in Great Britain: if the men had only had—that is, legally owned—guns, they could have stopped the car. So in an odd way it was about the looters after all and, as far as I can tell, it was a fantasy situation of sorts for a certain type of gun owner to be in: a time and place where they can take things into their own justice-wielding hands and stop that car coming at them.

Except “they” were Muslim, and so the fantasy got muddied.

This talk show also mentioned certain race-based crimes at the Wisconsin state fair, as if both events were part of the growing need for responsible gun-owners in society.

***

Today, I was privy to a multicultural birthday party. Well, the party was really very American: American food, presents, singing “Happy Birthday,” and cupcakes. What was multicultural was the families: one Asian, one Anglo; one Laotian-American, one Dutch-American. No. Two American families of different racial make-up; both immigrants; one third-generation, one first-generation.

However, certain strands of the different families cannot communicate; they absolutely do not “get” each other. One struggles to imagine life elsewhere and names so hard to pronounce. So for him I latch onto a narrative I know he’ll love: one of the women present has recently been reunited with her dear friend after 35 years; she had all but completed her degree in medicine in her home country, but fled before receiving her diploma, lest the communists should detain her. Here, because of language barriers perceived and real, she has been a CNA.

“So you gave up everything for freedom? Of course, I suppose I would too,” he says.

He does love the narrative. Because it speaks of freedom and because it speaks of the greatness of western culture and democracy which has taken her in. This is the narrative of his life, whose brother was killed in Korea, whose ideal it was to join the Army band, who lives on stories of the Navy Seals.

The other strand was mad at me for giving the narrative. For pre-packaging it for his consumption. For the way he made the story about him and his country. For him not understanding so much about the nuance of the situation, of the individual sitting before him. For a lack of respect for otherness, for the greatness that can come from elsewhere and be lost here. For a lack of humility before the gift of country and the diversity that continues to make it strong.

Trying to translate this kind of divide always leaves me at an utter loss for words. (Well, almost.) What makes me really fearful is the larger context. He has said to me earlier in the morning, “Yeah, it’s terrible times we live in, isn’t it? Course it’s kind of exciting, too, to see everything break up like it is. Like those riots. It’s already starting. And it’s coming here—it’s already here. Did you hear about that deal in Wisconsin? It’s here, it’s already here.”

Ditch Gifts

We live on the edge of town, below the last shoulder of hill that climbs out of the valley where the Rock River and Chanarambie Creek court before they join their waters forever and ever a mile south of town. There’s a scant half-mile between the two creeks where Edgerton is built, a ridge of land that falls off at the end of Edgerton’s mile or so length and climbs up toward regular Buffalo Ridge height directly to the north of our house.

Our position leaves us quite sheltered from a direct north wind, but the typical Northwester funnels down a black top that leaves us vulnerable to its whimsy. Thus, every year I find tumbleweeds rolled down from the wild Northwest Territories and trapped in the various nooks and crannies around the house, a real Wild West existence.

Perhaps it’s this wind that brought some more welcome guests to our road too. Our neighbors to the north moved to their house when the original tenant, their mother, moved to the rest home, Edgebrook, a couple of years ago. They moved from the farm and brought a farm mentality with them: in the fall they overpower unwanted trees with John Deere tractors; in winter, they pile up snow into epic and haphazard mountains; in spring, the dandelions take over. And they don’t care. Truth be told, I really don’t either, ex-farm boy that I am, but others do. One day last summer the dandelion family’s next door neighbor confided to me in the coffee shop, “I think they were camping and I had just sprayed my lawn, so I filled up another tank of spray and let ‘er have it.”

To little avail. This spring the dandelions were back unabated.

But so were other guests. After the dandelion boom—bloom—two large bushes of yellow sweet clover grew out of one side of the railroad tie retaining wall that keeps the hill on their side of the road. In hindsight, I blame what happened on the sweet clover. Sweet clover comes in a bush. It’s big and impossible to miss. Yes, at this time in the summer it gets wispy yellow flowers on the ends of its leaves, little fingers of gold that are nice but not gaudy. What’s coming in the fall is less nice. Sweet clover gets tangly and brown. Perhaps it even turns tumbleweed and spreads its seeds around that way—I’m not quite sure. Whatever the case, sweet clover suggests a wilder heritage than we want in an Edgerton striving for a suburban look. So it was perhaps inevitable that something would be done about it.

However, on the other side of the retaining wall another visitor sprang up, a more welcome visitor. It’s a repeat visitor, too, which is one reason why I caught it early. Our road is like a frontage road. It runs alongside the larger black top that mounts the hill to Fey Industries, but then our road bends along the hill—“Terrace View Avenue” it’s called—to the line of houses along our street. Rounding the corner after some random pee wee baseball game, the visitor’s yellow witness first caught my eye, but, alas, in the busyness that is children’s activities, even in the summer, I had no time to verify whether it truly was or not.

Returning home one evening, though, the yellow witness had grown and was caught momentarily in the headlights; it was only too apparent that our friend was back and that it was time to check it out. “Is that butter and eggs?” I asked my children.

And just like that, we had to know.

We first learned about butter-and-eggs at Pipestone. Up the road from Edgerton, in Pipestone, lies the only National Monument that I know of within an eight hour drive. Pipestone National Monument is not really a monument at all, not like the Washington Monument, a phallic symbol pointing to the sky, symbolizing I’m not sure what even though I have my suspicions. No, Pipestone National Monument is simply an outcropping of rock, a very unique kind of rock, in the midst of the wide sea of prairie. The red rock outcropping that bursts the sea of prairie here as well as down the Buffalo Ridge at Luverne and east near Jeffers—where Natives took advantage of the sheer, flat sheets of red rock to write some of the history and culture of their people on what we’ve come to call petroglyphs—is not jasper, as they dubbed it in the town that’s misnamed for the rock, but Sioux Quartzite, a rock that can be quarried and turned into official looking buildings like county courthouses that are centerpieces of Luverne and Pipestone, but not easily. However, at Pipestone, a special kind of Sioux Quartzite, a layer that’s much softer than the hard yet brittle rock, is laid bare. This band of rock is softer, with a soapy feel to it. It’s much more malleable and therefore more desirable for shaping into pipes, the central unifying instrument in Native cosmology, and other small trinkets and talismans, like the humble and therefore supremely important turtle. The outcropping of pipestone, then, became a quarry, but more importantly became sacred ground to which the Lakota and tribes from all across the continent came to quarry the stone and fashion the artifacts so important to their world. The stone, the natives say, is the flesh of the ancestors; it’s their gift, a means of making peace.

At Pipestone, somewhat miraculously, the government—no doubt prompted by gentle and wise souls both native and white, or, more cynically, perhaps in order to pacify natives—saw fit to preserve this outcropping of rock and call it a monument. Oh, there is a short cliff where Pipestone Creek dumps its waterfall until it becomes a trickle in the dryness of late summer, and there’s a small interpretive center complete with workshops for native craftsmen, but Pipestone National Monument by in large allows the landscape—the prairie landscape with a small outcropping of rock—to be the monument.

We go to Pipestone National Monument maybe twice a year. When my wife works and I’m tired of the kids asking if they can play the computer, we find a guidebook to wildflowers or two and head down the road for a short hike through the monument. Although a host of burr oaks have taken root and obscure the cliff line that once was visible at Pipestone, the park has a native prairie plant going, complete with seasonal burns to insure the prairie’s health, and a trail leads through the prairie and to the different mining sites along the rock ledge. As the prairie flowers bloom throughout the year, park employees mark the different blooms with simple labels.

For me, Pipestone preserves something else sacred to natives. It preserves—or resurrects—the prairie. Walking monument trails was precisely how we discovered prairie wildflowers and tall grass prairie grasses. The easiest for me and my children to name and remember, because of its soft yellow and gold complexion, and its wealth of blooms surrounding a long stem, was called butter and eggs.

Therefore, back at home, as we round the corner in our road, when I ask, “Is that butter-and-eggs?” I’ve created all the stir I need. “Let’s go check,” my daughter urges. She’s a notorious fan of evening and late night excursions like this, whether to check on a plague of slugs on our hostas or a midnight meteor shower of blessing. I grab the flashlight and we cross the street, a total of no more than thirty yards.

Somehow, under the bright rays of the flashlight in the growing darkness, the flower is even more brilliant, a torch in the gloom if you will. The plant is about two-thirds bloomed, the blossoms opening around the stem in the manner of a holly hock, but on an eighteen-inch scale. The blossoms themselves remind me of the snap dragon, the gauzy outside of soft buttery yellow leading to the bright gold yolk center. At least a half dozen blossoms are poised to open in succeeding days, a rich blessing to a neighborhood aspiring to controlled grass and shrubs. (http://www.minnesotawildflowers.info/flower/butter-and-eggs)

The beauty of butter-and-eggs is innocent. That’s why I say that without the daring bushiness of the sweet clover, the butter-and-eggs may have avoided notice. However, the sweet clover was too daring a flagship for the prairie, and doomed these advance guards too.

I was working outside when I subconsciously heard a grinding sort of noise, lawn mower-esque but a little too grindy even for a lawn mower. Because one is accustomed to hearing several different pitches of lawn mowers, weed wackers, leaf blowers, and edgers, as well as a dozen kinds of saws in any given neighborhood, I paid little attention to the noise.

Until I realized it was crawling across the road in slow motion, right next to the railroad tie retaining wall. My neighbor, astride a red Farmall reconditioned for lawn service, was pulling a tank of spray and letting a 10-inch swath of lawn edge have it with whatever death-chemical she held in the tank.

I didn’t grow up knowing environmental or political action. The butter and eggs mean something to me and do little harm or pose little threat to a lawn that is at best an afterthought to my neighbors anyway. However, it never occurred to me at the time to run across the road and stand in front of the butter-and-eggs, to finally catch my neighbor’s eye amidst the grinding of the machine and to yell at the top of my voice so she’d hear me, “Hey, don’t spray these—they’re my kids’ favorite.” Rather, I chalked it up to a lost cause and hoped that the innocent flowers would somehow avoid her death-swath.

Two nights later, at our neighborhood float meeting, too little too late, I asked her, lightheartedly, “Hey, did you spray my butter-and-eggs?” An uncomprehending stare. So I explain. “I saw you out spraying yesterday along the road. I noticed those big sweet clover bushes were gone. Did you spray some yellow flowers on the other side?”

“I chopped down those bushes,” she tells me. “And if there were flowers on the other side, they’re dead now!” she crows.

Three more days, and her swath is completely brown, the length of the road. It is, in two words, absolutely ugly. Will the butter and eggs return next season? Considering the amount and apparent power of the chemical sprayed on them, I doubt it.

***

“And for all of this, nature is never spent.”

As I said, our road first acts as a frontage road to a larger blacktop. In the space between the roads where they run parallel, there’s a small strip of land that the homeowners on the other side of the road are expected by the city council to keep looking sharp—that is, they’re supposed to mow it. It’s July and two of my neighbors have been away or busy as the weather turns sweltering. After three days of not mowing, certain grasses are shooting skyward like a rash of fireworks. It took me twenty-five years of living on the tall grass prairie, but I’ve learned about what grasses show up when the weather gets hot and withers the imports. Then the native grasses, with their immense root systems fit for just such weather, are resurrected: the puffed out heads of switch grass, the arrowheads of Indian grass, and the purple-stained crow’s feet of big bluestem, the prince of the prairie.

One evening, at dusk, I walk through this swath of grass to confirm my hopes. Indeed, big bluestem predominates, another tall grass prairie advance guard seeking to regain its dominion, but mixed in is another surprise, another treasure: a lesser known grass, sideoats grama grass is in full bloom, with its feathery seed heads hanging down, combed to one side, the yellow specks of pollen still visible between them, like a girl whose hair is strewn with flowers.

And so one gift replaces another. In the roadside ditches, the tall grass prairie still lurks, biding its time, waiting patiently to unwrap its riches.

U2 @ TCF III: The Aftermath

And then it was over. The lights came on and people poured into the streets. The new horns of our dilemma were these: should we eat first in a pub, restaurant, or hole-in-the-wall that would be packed, or should we mire ourselves in traffic and eat somewhere away from campus?

With my wife’s alumnus-knowledge, we went with the first option, headed toward Sally’s, a bar and grill we had seen in the afternoon. We crossed the street to escape the press of humanity and then realized why this side of the street was empty: “sidewalk closed ahead.” We pushed it as far as we could and then, sure enough, ended up backtracking. Up ahead, Sally’s was packed to overflowing.

“Should we just go home? My feet are killing me.”

Okay. Over to the parking garage we went, where cars are not moving. At all.

“Let’s go to Dinkytown,” the Gopher says. “It’s a few blocks walk.”

We walk up University Ave, down fraternity row. True to form, several of the large Victorian structures have music pumping and youth congregating on the sidewalks and front lawns.

“Hey, U2 fans. Wooo! U2 fans!”

A guy leans against the brick façade marking the house property, a girl straddles one of his legs. When something so exactly meets your facile expectations of it, is that cliché or stereotype? I mean, is it cliché to live up to the stereotype so exactly? Does that qualify as stereotype building? Or is that just living up to the definition?

“Let’s cross over one block,” my wife says.

After a few more blocks on 4^th Avenue where traffic is at a standstill, we begin to reach the businesses that make up the Dinkytown area. There’s Qdoba, but it’s set up as fast food and there’s a line. There’s a Chinese place but we had Chinese earlier. There’s a pasta bar that was recommended in a write up about where to get food before the U2 concert, but it looks closed. Down a side street, we see Wally’s, a hole in the wall kind of deli place. We walk over and my wife says, “But we had gyros today.”

“Let’s go to Blarneys,” I say. After all, it’s a Blarneys kind of night, right? Blarneys has to be Irish, there’s an outdoor seating area down the side of the building, and the sign says pub and grill. But I’m not reading the other signs very well. At the door, a big dude is checking IDs. Probably standard fare around the U of M, I think. There’s also music pumping. I’m sure we can get away from it, I think. Inside, everyone looks like they’re 19, slim, tight shirts, low necklines, beer in hand. We seek shelter from the eardrum swelling beats downstairs, going under a sign that says, “It’s a beautiful day,” but there it’s more of the same. The only food in sight is a plate of deep fried wings on the bar. This isn’t our crowd.

We cross the street and return to Wally’s. Inside, however, we realize that Wally’s is not just a gyro place. This is Wally’s Falafel and Hummus, and it’s Middle Easter cuisine. I have no idea what to order. I’ll probably try that waffle thing, I think to myself.

Too soon, it’s our turn. “We’ll have a sampler plate,” I say impetuously.

“I’ll have a shawarma plate,” my sister-in-law says.

When in doubt, imitate. “I’ll have a shawarma plate too,” I say.

Before I can wonder, what’s a shawarma, the lady asks me, “Chicken or Beef and Lamb?” That’s a no brainer. When in doubt, get what you’re less used to. “Lamb,” I say. Hold the beef, I think.

Only after we sit down and look more closely at the menu do we realize what we’re getting. The sampler plate includes hummus, baba ghanoush, falafel—looks like I’ll get my waffles after all—tabouli salad and bread. “Shawarma” is, quite simply, the meat you get in a gyro—shaved, barbecued beef and lamb. The plates include hummus—that’s hummus all around, I think, which has to be overkill—as well as salad and our choice of rice or fries.

When the food comes, only a few things don’t match up. The shawarma plates both have fries instead of rice. It turns out the pre-concert U2 crowd went crazy on the rice. There’s no tabouli salad on the sampler but we didn’t really know what we were looking for when it came so we never missed it. Also, it turns out Wally’s usually doesn’t serve food after eleven, so they’ve stayed open just to service the post-concert crowd. Finally, everything includes tahini sauce, which looks like ranch dressing but is much more flavorful—creamy, minty, garlicky.

The hummus looks like it’s just been whipped up. According to Wally’s menu, hummus is “a spread made of chickpeas, tahini (which is sesame paste and not to be confused with tahini sauce) lemon juice and garlic, topped with spiced chickpeas, paprika, olive oil, and served with bread.” It’s fresh, creamy, garlicky again and I can imagine nothing better after standing for four hours straight and wandering around frat parties and beer gardens. The baba ghanoush is also a spread or dip that goes on the flat bread. It’s mintier, tangier, and runnier than the hummus. The falafel look like hush puppies but inside it’s green with a mealy texture, again made from chickpeas and fava beans.

We stuff ourselves. It’s delicious to stumble off the street into another world of taste, to be filled with tastes you’re not altogether familiar with, to point at a menu and eat what you’re given and be filled. I’m dying to know from what country this food extends itself. I don’t ask, still don’t know how to ask. Later, my wife will see Lebanese mentioned somewhere on line. Love from Lebanon in the form of a shawarma plate. This is the wonder of the city, the reason my wife loved the U of M: diversity. No, difference.

Toward the end of the Vertigo Tour, Bono put on a bandana that said “coexist,” where the C was a symbol from Islam, the X was a Star of David and the T was a cross. Bono sang a line from “Father Abraham,” improvising a line that said “all sons of Abraham.” We went to see the concert film U23D in the theaters with some friends of ours, and during that section the staunch Republican friend I was with shook his head and muttered something under his breath. For some reason, coexistence seems a political threat to my friend.

Increasingly, however, I see the kingdom of God as a place of coexistence, a place where difference is preserved. For too long, the gospel itself has been a stamp upon cultures, a steam roller, a cookie cutter. I no longer think that a healthy vision of the kingdom is when “all the colors will bleed into one”; rather, in the kingdom, difference will be preserved—it will be the very crowns of the nations.

The lack of difference is also what makes me uncomfortable about the frat party and Blarneys. I’m not sure what’s distinctive there, what’s different. Rather, I get the sense that the stamp at both places was uniform and ubiquitous. If the future really does belong to crowds, as Don Delillo says, and if that means the stamp of sameness reigns in crowds, then I pray for more places like Wally’s Falafel and Hummus to coexist with an assortment of other places to eat that preserve difference.

By the time we head back to our car it’s past midnight. The buses are still packed with concert goers just now getting on. We’ll read that some concert goers had to wait up to two hours just to get on a bus. We’re headed back to Edgerton, will roll in at about 5 a.m., will pick up the kids at 8:30 and be at church by 9:30. It’s been a little crazy, but worth it: I can easily draw the lines from U2 to Wally’s Falafel and Hummus to the kingdom of God.

U2 @ TCF II: Fulfillment

Once down inside the arena, the chariot race to find the best spot was on. Our concert veteran acquaintance had counseled us that, at numbers 978-980, we could still find ourselves about three rows deep on Adam’s side, the lesser desirable of the guitarists. Edge’s side would fill up quicker.

“Last tour I was three rows deep on Adam’s side,” I mention, “and he and I had a connection.” No one’s buying it. “He’ll probably remember me.”

But there are other alternatives. As usual, there’s a walkway out away from the stage, creating an inner circle and an outer circle. One option, the concert veteran insists, is to stand with your back to the walkway so that when Bono and the Edge come out on the catwalk you’ll be able to turn around and have a tremendous view of their nostrils.

The way to the inner circle proves to be a maze. No, come to think of it, I’ve seen passageways like this before—it was rather like the stockyards: steel bars along the sides creating an alleyway, steel ramps beneath to prevent you from tripping, workers in special uniforms with assorted paraphernalia in their hands to keep you moving and orderly. Beneath our feet, in fact, there was no grass to be found anywhere. Interlocking aluminum paneling, grooved to insure we won’t lose our footing should the forecast prove true, covers every inch of TCF Bank turf. This will be no Woodstock mud fest.

After we’ve wound our way around the maze, we find the inner circle to be disappointingly full. We’re half a dozen rows from the stage, even on loser Adam’s side, and the back walkway is already three deep. People are sitting down, claiming spots. We make camp, sitting Indian style in a triangle to maximize space on the aluminum grooves. This is the non-turf we’ll be defending for the next two hours.

Before things get really crazy, I’m out to get a t-shirt. The selection has dwindled by this time in the tour, but the price has remained the same from 2005: $30 for a t-shirt; $40 for a fancier t-shirt. I get a safe, gray, $30 version and one glance at the collar reveals something about the price: Made in Tanzania of 100% African cotton. Good academic that I am, I’ve read Pietra Rivoli’s The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, so I know intellectually how hard it is to get around the corners that America has on the cotton market, that China has on the textile market. This t-shirt, if I can believe the tag, is consistent with the band’s ethos, a minor but important detail.

African cotton T-shirt in tow, I find things a bit tighter back at the stage. When my wife disappears to the bathroom for twenty minutes, I start to get antsy, convinced that the gentleman who’s wormed his way in front of me will soon fall backwards over my head. However, when she returns with a Dino’s gyro, I’m calmed a bit. We strike up a conversation with some early twenties near us. “How’d you get into U2?” I ask

“I found my dad’s album, the Joshua Tree—and I mean real album, vinyl. That and— ” I’ve forgotten who else, some 70s band, Led Zepellin perhaps—“and I was hooked.” Just as I suspected. This is a family inculcation thing.

And we wait. And it fills up more. There are people all up in my space and I don’t like people all up in my space. A mother and daughter creep in behind us. More family inculcation. I try to make myself bigger. No way am I letting some snot-nosed brat cute her way up in front of me. My wife talks to her, she’s 11. “This is her fifth U2 concert,” my wife tells me later. “She said, ‘I’ve been listening to U2 since I was born.’”

“Well, I’ve been listening since I was 12 and I’m much more discriminating,” I think.

We’re six rows deep. I look up to my right, and there’s Jason Lief, fellow professor, wearing a Twins hat. He’s at least three rows closer than I am. “When did you get here?” he yells over to me.

“2:15,” I say. “When’d you get here?”

“5:30,” he says.

Oh, he’s one of those, I think. “Oh, you’re one of those,” I say. A worm. The last three hours are looking like a lot of wasted time.

The first band, Interpol, is good. They’re dressed in semi-formal black that says, “we could be preppy but we’re rockers so we’ve turned up the sleeves on our button-down shirts and have grown our hair long/mussed it up”; the bassist and keyboard player look disinterested to me. I cheer, nod my head as if, “yeah, I get this music,” but I don’t. I stopped trying to catch lyrics to songs I didn’t know only about two concerts ago. My wife points out a woman going nuts about 25 rows up on the side. Weed—actually, speed. I cheer when they’re done. Unfortunately, the chunk of people in front of me weren’t here to see Interpol, and they don’t split once Interpol’s done like I had hoped.

It’s at least another hour wait after Interpol, with roadies swarming the stage, dissembling and assembling, plugging and checking. Finally, there’s only two left, both blond and oldish, and they won’t leave. After the end of every background song, the crowd roars in anticipation. Then another background song begins.

“What will they open with?” I ask my sister-in-law. She has no idea. She doesn’t know the new album. No one knows the new album. Early this morning, I read an MPR story that says U2 was best in the War album when they were a small-venue band. But with Joshua Tree, said the writer, they packaged their sound for something big and that was bad, the downfall of U2. Then with Achtung Baby, said the writer, they remade themselves. Then trended down. Then trended up with All That You Can’t Leave Behind. Then down. Now still down, said the writer, with No Line on the Horizon. But this is said to be a whirlwind tour, said the write, so he as going to splurge and go to the show.

Basically, if I can read between the lines, when U2 were just upstarts, on the make, when the writer and his snobby friends could be in a small selective group of fans that did not include people like Nicole Retzer, Anne-Marie Lee, and me, they were okay. Since then, not so much.

Reading around a bit more, I found someone in the Minneapolis Star Tribune celebrating the Zoo TV tour, when Bono played the playful, crazy rocker and pulled the camera up to his crotch and other rocker-appropriate stunts. I was there and 16 and it shocked me. But that’s two votes for Achtung Baby, zero for No Line on the Horizon.

But now I’m thinking of opening song possibilities. On the Elevation Tour, U2 opened with “Elevation,” a song I couldn’t stand—“A mole, digging in a hole, digging at my soul now going down—” but that they thought had the pop to be a single and an opener. On the Vertigo Tour they opened with “City of Blinding Lights,” followed immediately by “Vertigo.” They also closed with “Vertigo,” their most singley single since “Beautiful Day,” the song that made the decade for the band.

I think of songs that would fit the mold for opening acts from this album. I like the grinding intensity of the song “No Line on the Horizon,” while “Get on Your Boots” was their single of note from the album, but “Magnificent” has some of the most energy on the album, the one I would like to hear them open with. But “Magnificent” is no crotch-to-the-camera song. “I was born to sing for you,” the song says in verse 2. “I didn’t have a choice but to lift you up/ And sing whatever song you wanted me to/ I give you back my voice/ From the womb, my first cry, it was a joyful noise.” And the final cry of the chorus: “Justified till we die, you and I will magnify/ The Magnificent.”

But no one knows this album.

Dr. Brian Walsh, visiting my poetry class to expound on the music of Bruce Cockburn, also said something interesting about U2 relating to this album, No Line on the Horizon. Walsh is convinced that the Christian impulse of U2 is kept artistically in check by their unbelieving manager, Paul McGuinness, that McGuinness pulls the plug on anything that loses its cutting edge pop-artsiness and keeps U2 relevant. Walsh insists U2 can’t afford another No Line on the Horizon, it’s too Christian, too much of a popular failure.

When the background music finally fades midsong, it’s time. We see them approach first on the video board above. They’re in the building. There they are, larger than life. Where are they? Where are they?

Finally, they come on stage and apparently Bono has read the MPR article too: the opening song is “Even Better Than the Real Thing” from Achtung Baby. In fact, the first four songs are from that album, and I think I’ve flashed back to 1992.

But then the elements kick in. On “Mysterious Ways”—a song that seems to be about the mysteries of the female species but sneaks in the line “the spirit moves in mysterious ways” near the end—while Bono is out on the catwalk, it begins to rain lightly, a seeming rain of blessing.

About two songs later, it really starts to rain. We’ve brought ponchos, but everyone seems to agree that we’re going to weather this thing, Woodstockesque. When it starts to pour, I say screw it, and pull out the ponchos. One of them rips after five minutes so I’m the one left to soak.

Oh no, I think. This Minnesota crowd is going to bail. The last two indoor arena crowds, except for the people in the front of the stage, the real diehards, have been, at least in my opinion, lackluster. Primarily white, well-insured, Scandinavian Lutherans like their U2, but they like it sitting down. I keep scanning the arena throughout the show and almost no one leaves. Perhaps it’s due to the influx of New Mexicans like Doris, perhaps it’s due to the elements themselves, perhaps it’s the financial investment, but the crowd is piqued up to the top row.

Bono is piqued too. The elements and crowd response makes him improvisational. He splices in clips of the show tune “Singing in the rain,” and even digs up “Purple Rain” by Minnesota-product Prince. He introduces the lads as forces of nature/supernature: Larry is thunder and lightning, Adam is an earthquake, Edge is angels wearing beanies. Who’s left? “And then I heard the voice of God…” Bono says. We get the joke and we like the joke, like that he’ll acknowledge his own reputation and primary shortcoming.

Throughout the night, Bono is aware. He pulls the apparently up-and-coming rapper K’naan on stage, a man of Somali heritage who once called Minneapolis home, and they do a rendition of “Stand By Me” which Bono dominates. Still, Bono has done what Bono does best: share the stage in a way that makes U2 benefactors in a positive way, using music to point us to a world event that Bono wants us to pay attention to, the hunger crisis in the horn of Africa, which Bono addresses later in the show.

Later, Bono and the Edge perform an acoustic version of “Stuck in a Moment,” a song originally dedicated to INXS front man Michael Hutchence after his suicide; tonight it’s dedicated to the troubled but talented Amy Winehouse, found dead at 27. U2 are all over fifty now, past, it would seem, the traps of fame and popularity. Yet when it comes to artists in the arena of pop music, U2 is still able to say, “This is our crowd, this is the community we are a part of,” and for that reason, I think, they are still able to bear tremendous witness in that community. The performance comes off tremendously empathetic.

It’s pouring. And the show continues. At one point, Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese opposition politician who was under house arrest for years, addresses us on the video screen. She’s been freed but thousands like her have not. Won’t we continue to raise our voices, she implores, to speak for freedom? After this, U2 plays the song written for her, “Walk On.” It’s a song that makes you believe, the last song before encore.

As the night winds down, the band seem genuinely impressed at the crowd. At times, during the first part of the rain, I could swear it was otherwise. Edge looked like he was asking himself, “What am I doing at 50 in the rain? I could get pneumonia.” Larry’s tour around the catwalk—he’s supposed to come out and play the bongo for one song—was at best a hurried walk before he repositioned himself under his umbrella. Still, by the end, they all seem loathe to leave. They look around as if to say, “Wow.”

Personally, I’m good with it. I’m soaked to the boxers and I know this can’t go on forever. Bono has been as authentic as I’ve seen him. The last two concerts I thought he was faking it a good portion of the time. This crowd has performed equally well. I’m only disappointed by the set list, which has included only three songs from the new album. On the Vertigo Tour, they played eight songs from How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, and even Lief agrees—and he’s a theologian—that this album is better. That is to say, it’s more meaningful, less pop-py. It also, apparently, was a total flop.

This would also explain why, after hearing over a year ago that the band was set to release another album close on the heels of this one, that album is nowhere in sight. The album was to be called “Songs of Ascent,” a direct reference to the psalms, an album I can only believe was to be even more, well, spiritual than No Line on the Horizon.

As I left the stadium, soaked, my fingers pruned, I couldn’t help but be a little disappointed. The show was a great show for the masses, unforgettable to many, a spiritual experience for some, but personally, I felt the band rub up against forces greater than themselves—namely market forces and age—that reminded me just how human U2 is, how human I am.

But perhaps that’s exactly what I love about them. No matter how big and grandiose—and, I might add, filthy rich—they’ve managed to remain four lads from Dublin, still on a journey, still looking for something but spreading a very human message of hope along the way. I expect they’ll try to remake themselves next album, and I won’t like it. But I still believe in what they’re trying to do, a very human endeavor.

Walk on, lads, walk on.

U2 @ TCF I: The Anticipation

I can sum up being at the U2 concert at TCF Bank Stadium in Minneapolis in one line: It was like being inside a Don Delillo novel. But so you don’t have to run out and read his twelve or so novels, gentle reader, let me narrow it down: it was like being in Delillo’s novel Underworld. Now all you have to read is 800 or so pages.

“The future belongs to crowds,” Delillo famously wrote in another of his novels, Mao II. That theme, the group magnetism and indelible imprint of crowds upon individuals, shows up again in the opening scene of Underworld: the one game playoff for the National League pennant between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers at Polo Grounds in 1951, the game in which Bobby Thomson hit a ninth inning home run off Ralph Branca to win the game for the Giants, a hit that would come to be known as “the shot heard ‘round the world.” Delillo masterfully points his lens around the stadium at this event, showing us the lives of both celebrities and nobodies, but he paints the identity of the crowd that day as something impassioned, desperate, supplicating. In Delillo’s portrayal of the stadium event, of the arena, individuals become both strong and vulnerable, they get swept up in timelessness and are at the mercy of history, they become the targets of both genius and terror.

We arrived at the stadium at 2:15 for the 7:00 show, earlier than my wife wanted, but later than my sister-in-law, an avid concert goer, would have liked. The plan was to grab something to eat at a semi-trendy restaurant in the area, the heart of the University of Minnesota, then stand in line for maybe an hour until the gates opened to general admission fans at 4:30.

In the car on the way up, we began to hear rumors of what we were in for: people who had camped out overnight in order to be the first ones into the arena. Upon arrival, then, we went to check out the length of the line. It extended for perhaps a quarter-mile. Event workers were handing out purple adhesive bracelets upon which they were writing numbers in black Sharpie. Once we realized this, the plan was out the window. I became number 980.

“The future belongs to crowds.”

The CSC Event worker told us that they planned to “move us up” at 2:30. We didn’t really know what “move us up” meant, but we knew it had to be important, so the new plan was to wait until “they moved us up,” then to leave my sister-in-law in line while my wife and I went to get food and brought it back to her.

While we waited, we oriented ourselves to our place in line. Ahead of us were two younger couples, in their early twenties by the looks of it: heavy makeup on one of the young women that said high school was not too far behind her; a buff, young athlete-look to one of the males; rings on one couple but not the other. They were already decked out in U2 garb; one of the young women wore a One t-shirt, the aid organization founded by Bono whose goal it is to wipe out extreme poverty, mainly through marshaling international government aid.

Behind us were two women of an ethnicity not Caucasian, then a Caucasian man; they were not together. However, they were comparing notes about whom had been to what concert, and it turns out the guy was a rock star of U2 concerts—132 shows total in his life, concerts hit on this leg of the tour having included Chicago, two shows in Montreal, Toronto, Denver, Utah, now Minneapolis, and he would be boarding a plane the next morning for the upcoming show in Pittsburgh. I looked over this fan of fans: a somewhat disheveled man in his late forties, graying, sitting in a camping chair with a cooler full of liquid at his feet. I figured he was single until he confessed—lied?—that his wife packed the cooler for him. “You’re gonna just leave the chair?” someone asked him once we were told we couldn’t bring any big items with us.

“It’s like two-fifty at the dollar store, man” he responded.

Moving up happened a little later than promised, about 2:45. We moved about 100 yards, then stopped, recamped, my sister-in-law setting herself up under a small avenue tree to hide from a sun that occasionally peaked through heavy if unfocused clouds and sent the temperatures into the upper eighties. The forecast was for serious storms so I kept searching the sky to the southwest, though that view was blocked by the faux brick of TCF Bank Stadium, the corporate title hierarchically printed above the names of each individual county where tax dollars grow on green stalks of a variety of thicknesses and make their way here—only symbolically, of course—to the crown jewel of the state university: a stadium for a perennially losing football team. (By this time in the afternoon, I’ve already thought and said “TCF Bank Stadium” so much that I’ve begun to subconsciously transfer my funds to said bank, agog at the benefits of their “free checking” program.)

My wife and I marched back around the building to the far side where we had parked, and as we did so we heard the sound checks for the evening, including significant riffs from a number of songs that I assumed would be on the set list that night. To the southwest the stadium is open and we stopped momentarily to get our first look at “the claw,” a huge, arched tripod that is the show. The lights and sound for the show hang primarily from this claw with the stage propped in the middle above which hangs a round video screen that projects what’s happening on stage, creating a 360 degree viewing venue and maximizing arena performances. Thus the tour is called the 360 Tour. It’s supposed to be state of the art and looks space age. Rumor has it that it takes three days to set up. No doubt it’s patented and all that. They also want to sell them now for other tours. Go figure.

Two streets over where we want to get lunch, Washington Avenue, is completely torn up. This information was also what prompted our 2:15 arrival. Multiple media outlets were warning about congestion due to lack of parking and road construction. Get prepaid parking, arrive early, and use public transportation were the three mantras, in descending order, that concert goers were encouraged to consume and regurgitate in order to avoid mass chaos. We opted for the second choice and had our pick of parking at the first lot we tried.

We conquered Washington Avenue on foot and brought back pork lo mein, moo shoo pork, and spring rolls to share with my sister-in-law on the curbside by 3:15. By 4:00, the anticipated “second move,” everyone stood up without prompting.

For nothing. We didn’t move again until 4:30, the official time for the gates to open. In the meantime, though, no one sat. This was time for more people watching. Up ahead, a man in his fifties, balding but with long blond hair hanging down his back, kept up a ruckus about being from Canada. A woman with short blond hair and a U2 tattoo on her upper arm also walked by a couple of times.

My sister-in-law had acquainted herself with one of the women directly behind us. Doris was from New Mexico, had been to shows primarily out west, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Denver, and now Minneapolis because she had relatives here. “Where are you from originally?” I asked.

“I’m Santa Fe,” she says, answering questions of place origin and ethnic origin all in one. Doris is a small business owner and a flamenco dancer and was once photographed for a book about the people and places of New Mexico and the picture ended up in the governor’s office where she also ended up lobbying for small business owners—to no avail. She’s also religious. “I grew up Baptist,” she says, but has also volunteered to help the Carmelite Nuns in New Mexico who recommended a Chinese acupuncturist after her father had a stroke. The acupuncturist helped the father immensely. “It was a miracle,” she says, “Praise Jesus.”

I’m from a small town. We have our own colorful people though we’re primarily the same color. But we have no Doris. I am swept away by her narrative, enthralled. Later, I overhear that she’ll be having her fortieth class reunion soon. Doris is ballpark 58.

Doris also characterizes a U2 concert as “a spiritual experience.” She’s not the first to do so; nor will she be the last. In fact, I myself have held onto a quote from a 1987 Time Magazine article in which someone said, “U2 is what church should be.” I flash the quote now for Doris, who’s appreciative.

Later, I’ll watch a piece from KARE 11 news that is full of wonderful, over the top sound bites from my fellow fans who are ahead of me in the line. Several of them react to a set of storms that passed through in the morning. Ann-Marie Lee of Milwaukee, whose name, complexion, and accent suggest that she’s probably Hmong says for the camera, “This is a spiritual pilgrimage and we’ll be here no matter how bad the weather gets” (Tessman). The tattoo lady, though, is Nicole Retzer, a home grown fanatic from St. Paul. “Bono signed my arm and then the Edge signed my arm,” Ratzer says of her run-in with the band at the 2005 concert, “and then the next morning I went and had [the signatures] tattooed over.”

The future belongs to crowds—and to cameras videotaping crowds, or to cameras videotaping individuals trying to stand out from or ride the wave of crowds. Ms. Retzer isn’t done. The next question that reporter Renee Tessman asks must have been something like, “Are you worried about getting rained out tonight?” To which Retzer replies, “Bono has, I think, direct communication with, or is some kind of higher power. So I’m not worried about it.”

Another thing that passes the time is the volunteers coming around signing people up for Bono’s causes. The One people leave us alone, but I’m already a member anyway and so is my sister-in-law, who, she recalls, signed up to free Burma during the last tour. Is Burma free now? We don’t ask. But a young woman wearing an Amnesty International t-shirt does stop and ask if she can talk to us. She prefaces her comments with the typical “I’m-not-here-to-pressure-you, just-give-you-some-information” spiel, but U2 fans are notably supple toward anything that smacks of Bono, and this has Bono written all over it.

I’m wondering what international cause it will be this time. Political prisoners in Sudan? Justice for the Khmer Rouge? Free Mongolia? Surprisingly, this time the cause is maternal health during pregnancy and childbirth in the U.S., especially among poor and minority populations where, we’re told, the U.S. ranks fiftieth in the number of maternal deaths or something. They’re aiming for healthcare, I say to myself, and more pointedly, for white suburban guilt, which I’ve got, even though it’s white small town guilt in my case, but okay, we do sign up which just means giving our names and email accounts. The young lady is a student at St. Olaf College in Northfield, studying such a long list of improbably serious topics that I catch my breath and can’t reproduce it in its entirety for you here, but know it includes sociology and women’s studies and something about race relations.

I also see some people walking around in t-shirts proclaiming “U2 green team” and now, I think to myself, this is getting entirely too predictable. I hear from some former high school students of mine ahead of me in line—who admit to being U2 fans for about a month—that the team goes around explaining how green their semi-trucks are. The tour trucks are parked behind us on this closed off street: shiny red ones with pure white trailers. One of the students, now an engineering student at SDSU, says under his breath, “I don’t care how green they are, they still get eight miles to the gallon.”

About this time, after standing for the last forty-five minutes in anticipation of the (false) promised move at 4:00, we do begin to move, and the line cheers. We move through the desolation in front of us: empty water bottles, newspapers, pizza boxes, chairs, Styrofoam coolers, umbrellas, blankets, pool floaties, and a tent, all momentary comforts now abandoned like this is the rapture. As we walk by the green team, one of them has the gall to say, “U2 recycles, so should you.”

We’re slowly funneled down toward TCF Bank Stadium (“free checking”) and the mouth marked Gate C. Through the gauntlet of semidarkness, I can see the light of the field ahead. If this is a pilgrimage, that’s the goal, the shrine. But perhaps, as in Canterbury Tales, the real reward has been the stories of my fellow pilgrims. And, I must admit, as in Flannery O’Connor’s, “Revelation,” as I walk toward the goal, I’m firmly one of this crowd: we’re all bearing equal baggage, all caught up in the mass impulse, in the danger of being a collective, in the search for something emotive and human and technologically enhanced, for something momentary yet lasting.

If the future belongs to crowds, the future is upon me as I’m swept by a river of humanity and desire down a tunnel but toward some distant light.

Tessman, Renee. “U2 fans weather the storm waiting for outdoor concert.” Kare 11 News. Online. 23 July 2011.

Music and Politics: U2 and the Country of Adolescence

At the end of spring semester, I know it’s coming. It’s most often an honest question from both colleagues and non-teachers alike, though sometimes the latter’s fascination with “summers off” borders on an obsession. Still, in whatever form, the question still comes: “What you got planned for the summer?” Even though I answer this question more assuredly as a college teacher than I did as a high school teacher, this year I find myself fishing for an answer that will satisfy. “Some grad school work; reading and writing of course; parenting.”

Then there’s this: I hold tickets to two concerts this summer, both of them for U2 concerts, in separate cities, and a significant portion of our summer plans revolve around these events. Even though U2 has a certain amount of credence in Christian higher ed circles, thanks especially to “Christian themes” in their lyrics and Bono’s global activism on behalf of the poor, I still feel apologetic, still feel beholden to the critic in me that says things like “Rock concerts are so low brow”; “What are you, a groupie?” and “U2, what genre is that, nursing home rock?”

To be fair, U2 has aged pretty well and for that I’m, well, proud of them. While many bands fade with a decade or burn out in the night sky that is rock and roll, U2 has remade themselves a couple of times and has continued to grow to the point where they have become a significant global influence. The reason I’m proud of them, of course, is that this ultimately reflects positively on me as a fan. After all, I discerned all of this as a teenager, selecting them from the wasteland of 80s music as a prophetic voice in the postmodern rock and roll landscape.

Whatever.

In reality, I latched onto them when I was, as they say, pretheoretical, at the ripe old age of 12 when my 17-year-old sister got The Joshua Tree for her birthday. Was she the prescient one? Considering that she was split at the time between the singles “With or Without You” and Cutting Crew’s forgotten “Died in Your Arms Tonight” that also seems doubtful.

No, if I’m honest with myself, my love for U2 is probably akin to almost any adolescent fascination with rock music. But I reserve the “almost.” Throughout the years, U2 have climbed the charts with such varied songs as “With or Without You,” “One,” “Numb,” and “Vertigo”; they have fostered fledgling faith with songs like “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and “The First Time”; they have given voice to our collective sense of tragedy—see their post 9/11 Superbowl performance—and triumph—see “The Saints Are Coming,” and they have shamelessly plugged Amnesty International and Jubilee 2000. The point here is that U2 have moved fans beyond just the effect of adrenalized rock to something more. And for that, I think, they do deserve some thanks from many of us.

While I could argue that it was in the area of fledgling faith that U2 have most impacted me personally, as I drive off toward U2 sightings this summer, I credit them most with my own, well, political awakening.

How to explain the political atmosphere in the early 80s in the Middle America where I grew up? Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer from the South who talked slow and thought slower; Ronald Reagan was a movie star from California whose slick hair matched his slick talk. More importantly, one of them was a democrat who we never voted for, the other was a republican who we always voted for, but, most importantly, they were as unreal as the other superhero programs that came to us through the TV including Dukes of Hazard, Wonder Woman, The Incredible Hulk, and Dallas. This was proved when Reagan was shot, the footage playing over and over again in chaotic slow motion.

No, politicians were far away from us, if they existed at all, and the only way they really touched us was in the same way the air touched us, in a way that you don’t really stop to consider—or need to.

So, when dad started taking me to neighbors’ farm auctions where a mob assembled and took turns raising white notecards to take away that neighbor’s stuff, why blame the air? When I drove dad’s prized tractor to the local consignment auction and dad was prescribed lithium, was that the air’s fault? When mom and dad whispered in the kitchen and in the bedroom and told me and my sister that dad was going to California to work for a season and that we might join him there if he liked it well enough, the air had nothing to do with it. This was nothing historical or political, even when it got some press and its own name, “the farm crisis.” This was just the way things happened to go, the air you happened to breathe.

But when people questioned the air, organized into groups that pointed out the air quality, that was something evil. One story was about a group called “Groundswell,” who went around to these farm auctions and intimidated would-be buyers, real thugs in my mom’s version of the story, thugs who would threaten to rough you up if you took your neighbor’s stuff. “It was the bankers who were the real enemies here,” went the thugs’ line of argument, “so if we drive auction prices down to nothing, what would they do? They’d have to let us stay on the land—after all, we’re all in this together.” While this sounded like good logic, my parents made clear that it was really the devil’s reasoning.

Because, of course, politics in Middle America in the 1980s was also bound up with—although separate from—God. A good God had instituted a land of the free, home of the brave, and He would see that it was governed by the people and for the people, and while the government was like God’s screw-up nephew, it was nonetheless instituted by God and therefore none of your business.

The next step from “Groundswell,” the connecting argument went, was what happened thirty miles up the road from our farm, where two bankers were lured out to a farm and shot dead by the farmer and his son. No, it was either breathe the air or commit murder. There was no middle ground.

It was in this context that I heard “Bullet the Blue Sky” for the first time, a song my sister and I couldn’t make heads or tails of until we read in Time Magazine that Bono had written it while in El Salvador, about the conflict there. Conflict? It was in this context that we heard “Pride (In the Name of Love),” a tribute to Martin Luther King, a black man from the 1960s. 1960s? A black man?

Then, in the fall of 1989, my sister got me the movie Rattle and Hum, a rather unremarkable rockumentary, according to most critics, filmed during the American leg of the Joshua Tree Tour. Of course, I loved it as one loves anything that calls to one from the country of adolescence. The pinnacle of the film is a performance of “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” at McNichols Arena, in Denver, Colorado, on November 8, 1987. It’s filmed in dingy black and white, as is much of the film. Bono is bare-armed, sweaty, wearing something that looks like sweat pants and a sleeveless vest. His shoulder-length hair has, well, the perfect body to it. It’s roughly my wife’s 80s ‘do without the wings. Cool.

“Well here we are the Irish in America,” Bono begins. The crowd screams. However, this is not the “look at us, the greatest rock band in the world moment” that Bono is prone to. No, Bono, still true to grandiose Bono fashion, is going to lecture the crowd at a rock concert about Irish history. “The Irish have been coming to America for years,” he intones, “going back to the Great Famine, when the Irish were on the run from starvation, and a British government that couldn’t care less.” The Irish are still coming to America in 1987, Bono goes on to argue, “a lot of them are just running from high unemployment, some run from the troubles of Northern Ireland, the hatred of the H-blocks and the torture, others from wild acts of terrorism like we had today in a town called Enniskillen, where eleven people lie dead, many more injured, on a Sunday, Blood Sunday.”

My dad was a news watcher. In those days the violence of the IRA was pretty high profile. I had seen footage of grim, beleaguered-looking people juxtaposed against bulked up military personnel with machine guns, and I had seen rubble in blind streets set against dingy skies, the aftermath of bombs.

The song proper starts with Edge’s simple guitar picking, an ascending and descending pattern that’s meant to be haunting—and succeeds. When Bono sings, “I can’t believe the news today,” it’s perfectly fit to that day in 1987. Bono’s vocals are elegiac, this is a dirge, and the sorrow in this performance lingers through multiple verses, longer than the album version of the song. When the drums and bass do kick in, they come in hard and fast and we launch almost immediately into Edge’s guitar solo, which is so sharp as to be grating, searing.

Then, while the band goes into a holding pattern, Bono goes on an impassioned rant, remarkably coherent and, to one viewer at least, almost poetic considering the circumstances. Very early on, the rant denounces the violence of Enniskillen with a convincing if startling “Fuck the revolution!”—which you can imagine really got one adolescent’s attention—but it gets more sorrowful and reflective from there. It ends with Bono engaging what I imagine to be a relatively clueless Coloradan audience in a call and response that begs for an end to the violence. “No more!” he screams, and they echo over and over, and at one point his voice overpowers the Mic, before resolving into the song lyrics, “Wipe your tears away.”

While the rant is done, the song isn’t. There’s still hope to go in the song: Edge’s high octave picking seems like sunlight piercing the darkness surrounding the McNichols stage, and, while the driving guitar returns and the song ominously promises, “The real battle yet begun…” the phrase finishes with, “We’ll claim the victory Jesus won on…Sunday, Bloody, Sunday.” In the McNichols version, this phrase is almost downplayed, you have to know the lyrics, as if the lads don’t want the resolution to the violence that is the condition of the world to seem too cheap, too easy to pronounce, with or without Christ.

No, I didn’t think about all this then. I was an eighth grader. Watching this scene unfold, I simply got goose bumps. This was something that meant something. This was how words could take a stand on something—could affect something? Maybe. But could move people, I knew, because they moved me. However, I would certainly hide this from mom and dad because, no matter what the circumstances, they wouldn’t understand the F-word.

Of course, there were other things that endeared the performance to me beside the politics: the F-word made it contraband; the fact that most of my friends listened to Motley Crue, Poison, and Warrant drove me to the imagined high road that was U2; the simple adrenaline of the song even meant that the performance found its way to becoming a pre-game ritual before JV basketball games. Weird.

Still, world news was never quite the same again for me. Revolution, protests, violence, elections—these things mattered, I came to understand.

Years later, as a senior in college, on a study abroad semester, as a passenger on a bus, I would pass through a border with machine-gun toting guards armored to the hilt, protecting a fenced and barb-wired compound that marked the beginning of Northern Ireland, and I would pass, quite unexpectedly, through the town of Enniskillen, would want to stop and get off and look at the place, the monuments and placards remembering the dead. Instead, with that emotion from the country of adolescence washing over me, I would recount the song and Bono’s impassioned speech, word for word.

Years after graduating from college, with the critical thinking skills that I paid handsomely for, I also learned about the wave of factors that drove my family out of farming in the eighties—factors that ranged from ideas like “manifest destiny,” to politics like the Cold War, to policy that valued efficiency and technology at the expense of people, to poor personal choices—and I would come to understand the profound importance of a movement like “Groundswell.”

So that’s my justification for my summer plans. As I ride off toward major metropolitan areas to see the lads from Dublin in mammoth stadiums full of wealthy middle-class thirty- and forty-somethings—sometimes with their children in tow, as I saw during the last tour—who’ve paid handsomely for their tickets—one blogger says the mean ticket goes for $159.72, even though my tickets are the cheapest and in front of the stage, a place reserved for members of U2.com (yes, it’s that bad)—I do so because they still call to me from that magic country of adolescence, but also because they called me out of that country and taught me that words matters, that a stance on something and willingness to speak out about it matters.

Recently, in a concert in Mexico City, Bono addressed that country and its partner in drugs and violence, the United States. “Why is it that all we hear on the news is how drugs are smuggled through Mexico to the United States?” Bono reportedly asked. “And we don’t hear about all the automatic weapons that are being smuggled into Mexico from the United States. Nine thousand registered arms dealers on the other side of the border. Nine thousand.”

Of course, there’s room for significant critique of Bono’s ego, his politics, and his concert diatribes crafted specifically for the local audience. But words and politics do matter. They should matter to us, and we should teach them to our children. As U2 ages—I half expect Bono to come on stage with a walker this summer, but no, that’s much too undignified for him—I wonder about the future, about who will arise to arouse a generation to the condition of world events. Coldplay, of course, is the heir apparent, a wildly popular band with a slightly younger demographic. However, at least among college students, the music scene is increasingly fractured: a band’s shelf-life is shorter than Wonder Bread genres and subgenres explore market niches that seem to attack the monolith that used to be pop music; “albums” themselves are almost a thing of the past, replaced by singles you consume off the ITunes dollar menu; then again, Lady Gaga comes out with a worldwide promotional package for her new album that has her posing on the cover of every magazine, visiting every talk show and sit com she can, and pairing with every popular form from FarmVille to Starbucks in an attempt to seemingly take over the world itself. In this landscape, the idea that we could take a band—a media construct—seriously, that it could, as I have claimed, “call us out of the land of adolescence,” seems laughable. Global popular culture in any form seems increasingly distant from political realities. In fact, politics seems increasingly distant from political realities.

Maybe, then, my U2 fetish is a sign of my own age. In a world of uncertainty, I cling to what I know, to the good old days. Granted. Maybe we’re at the point where U2 can’t do what they used to anymore. Maybe they’re permanently part of that scrap heap known as classic rock.

Still, I stick by what I said earlier. Recently, my wife had a facebook friend write to her, “Tell your husband thanks. Twenty-one years ago, he introduced me to a little Irish band called U2.” The point here is not my proselytizing on behalf of U2—although I do think it merits some back stage passes—but that for generations of fans, U2 have moved us beyond just the effect of adrenalized rock to something more aware, something perhaps more active, something definitely more fully human. And for that, I think, they do deserve some thanks. One could do worse, it seems to me, than be a lover of U2.