No shock Bono still hasn’t found the hero he’s looking for
THIS is where Bono would normally be doing a song and dance routine in outrage over the vile treatment being meted out to Myanmar’s deposed leader Aung San Suu Kyi who is being put on trial next week by the country’s murderous military dictatorship.
Trouble is, Mr Hewson and all the other millions of former groupies of
Myanmar’s once-great hope for democracy must feel rather embarrassed of late on this issue – seeing as how the delightful Ms Suu Kyi has been unmasked as a contemptible apologist for slaughter and ethnic cleansing, amounting to genocide. As Myanmar prime minister Suu Kyi remained in office as her country’s military committed genocide against the minority Rohingya Muslims.
In fairness to Bono, once it became clear that Suu Kyi had blood on her hands, he called on her to resign. He said he was ‘nauseated’ by the images of bloodshed and the refugee crisis caused by the genocide. Now, we all get carried away on occasions (Anthony Daly’s captain’s speech after Clare’s All-Ireland hurling win in 1995 was music to the ears) but the wide-eyed innocence that puts the likes of Suu Kyi on a pedestal runs counter to everything we’ve ever been told about the follies of hero-worshipping. Moses knew well how to deal with golden calves and craven images.
Aung San Suu Kyi was, is, and forever will be subject to normal human weaknesses which, in extreme circumstances such as those facing her country, become magnified and, at the darker end of the scale, totally evil.
Bono fell for the oldest of all human urges – the desire for meaning through hope, redemption through human decency. And he thought a self-serving politician like Suu Kyi was the answer. He, and others, should have known better.
We all need to dial back our fetish for the deification of others. Whoever said ‘never meet your heroes’ wasn’t wrong. A better injunction should be to never even contemplate heroes in the first place.