The world’s newest rising global statesman said that to the National Prayer Breakfast on February 2. He also said this:

It’s not a coincidence that in the Scriptures, poverty is mentioned more than 2,100 times. It’s not an accident. That’s a lot of air time, 2,100 mentions. [You know, the only time Christ is judgmental is on the subject of the poor.] ‘As you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.’ (Matthew 25:40). As I say, good news to the poor.

And this:

I mean, God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill… I hope so. He may well be with us as in all manner of controversial stuff… maybe, maybe not… But the one thing we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor.

God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house… God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives… God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war… God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them. “If you remove the yolk from your midst, the pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness, and if you give yourself to the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then your light will rise in darkness and your gloom with become like midday and the Lord will continually guide you and satisfy your desire in scorched places.”

He said a lot of other things that day, all of them remarkable, and I encourage you to find five or ten minutes to read the transcript of that speech, archived here.

Of course, I’m talking about Paul David Hewson, born May 10, 1960 in Dublin, Ireland. Aka Bono.

A lot of you reading this started snickering, or sputtering, or maybe yelling at the screen as soon as you saw the photo of Bono and Dubya. The last time I mentioned Bono’s political crusade to somebody I got to hear about how appalling it is that he lends credibility to people like George Bush and Jesse Helms. And you can’t say his name in smart company without hearing how he’s a sold out rock star who has bought into his own hype. If you’re one of these people, go ahead, get it out, then catch a couple deep breaths and think with me for a second.

If you want to get huge money behind a cause – and 1% of the budget is huge money by any standard – you have to talk to the people who control the money. And if you expect to have any success, you need to find ways of speaking to them that motivate, not alienate.

I promise you, whatever you think of Bono, you don’t detest George Bush any worse than I do, and I doubt in a thousand years you could find a way to loathe Jesse Helms a fraction as much as I do. This isn’t about that. It’s about a plausible path to justice in the world we currently inhabit. Lately America hasn’t done a very good job of electing the kinds of people who will act in the way Bono thinks they should act, and the short list of alternatives include diplomacy and armed revolt.

It seems to me that Bono is doing something quite remarkable. He’s spending his hard-earned cultural capital to lobby those with the power and resources to actually make a difference, and he’s speaking to them in a language that they will have a hard time ignoring. See, a lot of the power these days got where it is by trading on the name of Jesus, and whether they actually believe any of it is beside the point. They’re on the public record as being on Team Jesus, so it’s difficult for them to ignore the Team Jesus Mission Statement when it’s being read back to them, line by line, by a very famous statesman in a very public forum.

The times and the political contexts are quite different, but in many respects Bono calls to mind another Irish artist who turned smiling public man, someone who allied with violent rebellious causes in his youth and who later spent his hard-earned cultural capital in service of public goals. I’m speaking, of course, of William Butler Yeats, the greatest poet of the 20th Century, and I’m pleased that Bono is spending his capital more productively than Yeats sometimes did.

It’s more than possible to disagree with Bono’s political agenda, and it’s certainly possible not to care for his music. But I would hope we can at least respect the combination of conscience and political acumen that is transforming him from Bono, Rock Star, into Paul Hewson, statesman. If he is able to engage powerbrokers like the current crop of Washington elites in a task as desperate as saving Africa, he’s truly capable of accomplishing just about anything.

[THX: Wendy Redal, Boulder Desk Chief.]