Another stroke of genius from that contrary pest, Bono

Little of any lasting good has ever been achieved through predictability. The best minds are both a thorn and a salve. T...hey refuse to be locked away in a little drawer. They have notions that don't always compute. They encounter things that haven't yet been destroyed. They are joyful even though they have considered all the facts. They take on things that perhaps they shouldn't.

There is of course always a giant fuck-off factor that comes with the territory of the new, and if anyone knows that for certain, it's the editor of this past Tuesday's edition of the British newspaper, the Independent.

Bono took on the job for the day in order to drum up publicity for RED, an initiative designed to shake the sleep out of the eyes of the corporate world and wake them up to the meaning of what it is to live in a world full of too many easy coffins.

That may sound like bullshit, and bullshit is a delicacy for so much of today's media. Mea culpa. It is served up neatly and politely garnished. The story comes and the story goes. And bullshit is an even finer delicacy for our corporations. It is relentlessly doled out to be digested.

But Bono's latest stroke of genius – and that's what just might be, another stroke of genius – has been to step in and use whatever method he can in order to give both the media and the corporate world a pulse and a purpose. By extension he wakes the sleep out of our eyes. People can bitch and moan about it all they want – and they certainly are entitled to – but the fact of the matter is that Bono is doing something that matters.

Here it is, plain and simple: AIDS will kill two million Africans this year alone. That's almost half of Ireland's population. That's all of Manhattan in one fell swoop. While that little statistic is kicking us in the chest, consider this: 25 million people in Africa now suffer from HIV. Tuberculosis, pneumonia and ‘flu are rampant. If you stacked their bodies end to end the potential dead would circle the globe a number of times.

But you can't fly jetliners into statistics. If you could we might finally send armies to help out.

And while our governments trot out platitudes and some of them even come up with the goods – almost $5 billion has been donated to the Global Fund – the giant corporations of the world have essentially sat by and done very little. And so Bono, along with American philanthropist, Bobby Shriver, set up RED in order to try bring clothing companies, shoe manufacturers, banking concerns and, yes, newspapers on board that raft of ideas.

The background noise that goes alongside Bono's concerns can sometimes drown out the elemental thrust of his actions. People complain that he is over-paid, over-vexed and over here. He runs with the big-wigs. He shoulders up with the stuffed shirts. He sits in the boardroom at Nike's headquarters. He pours coals over his own head and then says don't call me a saint. He wants to re-wire politics his own way. But even if these notions were true, or even held a kernel of truth, who cares? One of the reasons why he doesn't publicly call George W Bush an asshole is that he would be calling 25 million people in Africa an asshole at the exact same time. He doesn't throw the TV out the Nike boardroom window precisely because it would finally land on the women in the back alleys sewing the shoes. Sometimes you hold your tongue for the greater good. You pick your fights. You bide your time.

He has already gotten Converse, Gap, American Express and Giorgio Armani onboard with the RED initiative as part of the extended DATA (Debt, Aids, Trade in Africa) network. They will launch products and portions of the profits will go towards combating poverty and disease. He is working with Shriver, Geldof and countless others. Between them they have a formidable team of intellectuals, business moguls, doctors, dreamers. Ultimately, though, it's the man and woman on the street who effects the change. The fact is that Bono is not speaking for people, but he is speaking alongside them. He could just as easily be sitting by the swimming pool sipping pina coladas and shoving white powder up his nose, and maybe he's doing that too, who knows, who cares? So what if he's in the South of France a couple of days a week? We'd all go if we got the chance.

Bono manipulates his fame. God bless him. Lots of other people manipulate theirs, but at least he's doing it for a reason. He's not swanning down the Champs Élysée after opening up a nightclub. He's not selling pictures of his children to Hello magazine. The fact of the matter is that he believes in decency and grace and benevolence. He also believes in accountability. He is aware that we are in the midst of a moral crisis and if nobody else is going to do it, it's his responsibility to at least try. He knows that there are machine guns at stake here too – if anywhere has the potential to foster terrorism, it will be the smaller countries of Africa. So he shouts and he screams at the corporations, the drug companies, the politicians, himself, in the hopes that some of the shouting will be heard.
If he fails, he fails. Failure is bravery anyway.

So he edits a paper. He puts together the world's largest petition calling for debt cancellation. He lobbies the World Bank. He travels with his wife, Alison, in a banged-up plane to Ethiopia. He asks the questions that have no answers. He is hopeful, even though he knows what's going on. He is aware that it takes a certain arrogance and anger to create something selfless. He risks his sense of cool. He reaches into our ribcages and turns the heart a notch backwards. He puts his finger on the pulse. He's a contrarian. He's a pest.

If he wasn't Irish, we'd want him to be.

Colum McCann's column for Round Midnight with Donal O'Herlihy RTÉ 1 (11.40pm) goes out every Tuesday night