When U2 busks in a war zone and Sean Penn gifts his Oscar to the leader of a war-torn country...
...that's when you know we're living in funhouse hall of mirrors.
We’ve arrived at the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine — a conflict that veteran Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondents Seymour Hersh and Chris Hedges (among others) argue was largely instigated by the U.S.
Hersh offered his take to The Spectator’s Freddy Gray last week, on the February 21st, 2023 episode of Americano while Hedges provided historical context a year ago with Katie Halper on February 27th, 2022 — just days after the war broke out:
My focus here, though, is on the phenomenon of pop stars being conscripted to manufacture consent for war.
Since the Ukraine conflict began, members of the band U2, comic actor/director Ben Stiller, and actor/director Sean Penn have all participated in a bizarre merger between pop-culture branding/meme-construction and war propaganda — a kind of reverse product-placement where, instead of a product being strategically placed in a film or music video, the product is war itself (or public support for war), with celebrities being strategically air-lifted into war zones, as if war were a Hollywood backdrop. Having these images widely disseminated via YouTube and cable news blurs the line between entertainment-industry marketing campaigns and war footage — pop-aganda, if you will
In May of 2022, U2’s Bono and The Edge traveled to Kyiv (a city that was re-branded overnight as “keev” in place of its former longtime pronunciation “kee-YEV”) to perform a short set in a subway station-turned-bomb shelter. My immediate reaction on hearing the news was to wonder how in the name of hell it was deemed safe for musicians at their echelon of superstardom to do something like that. I mean, what artist’s manager would ever approve such a decision? A manager’s job is to remain ever concerned with the bottom line, i.e: ensuring the protection of the cash cow/golden goose on whom the manager depends for their (often sizable) income.
Besides the fact that it seemed surreal — ridiculous to the verge of comical, yet totally on-brand — for Bono to insert himself into an unfolding war, the U2 performance also struck me as crass. The comic value undercuts how obscene such a gesture actually is. If we’re looking at this through a sober lens, we can only see the performance as a stunt. It reminded me, ironically enough, of what’s depicted in Ben Stiller’s ingenious comic satire Tropic Thunder — only stripped of all its satirical bite. (Stiller, who I’ll get to in a moment, apparently never got the point of his own movie.)
For the record, I love U2’s music. I even enjoyed the actual performance in the Kyiv subway. I found the performance powerful, evocative, and full of spirit. Even absent two bandmembers, I can still count on U2 to blow me away with their stage presence. And it baffles me that artists can summon that much passion at their age — which is why it dismays me so much to see the band reduce itself to propagandist shills, unwittingly or not.
When I watch the clip, there’s something deeply uncomfortable about watching Bono preen and strut amongst the gathered audience, as if his brain simply can’t recognize the difference between a stadium crowd and a group of up-close, flesh-and-blood human beings having to cope with the terror of their lives being upended by war. To not properly honor that distinction seems like a mis-use of music, rather than the offering of healing and solace that the band’s music actually is. It goes without saying that giving a performance in a country experiencing war calls for a different kind of decorum than when you’re bathed in spotlights at Wembley Stadium.
Of course, the symbolism of these larger-than-life figures busking in the subway — a subway station converted into a makeshift bomb shelter, no less — is supposed to communicate: we’re making ourselves smaller to stand with you; we’re on the same level as you when we look you in the eye, people of Ukraine. And heartstring-tuggers like “Where The Streets Have No Name” were targeted at pushing emotional buttons — not the buttons of the Ukrainians in attendance, but those of us watching from afar. The pitch, of course, was: we’re all in this together, so let’s all embrace in our concern for our fellow human beings — because we should never turn our backs when people on the other side of the world suffer.
Fair enough, but given the circumstances — and the fact that geopolitics are, by definition, complicated, to say nothing of the U.S.’s own blood-stained track record of causing untold civilian casualties the world over (which Hedges has covered in depth) — Bono and The Edge just came off as manipulative. Manipulat-ed, perhaps, but manipulative just the same.
Their intention to induce antipathy towards Vladimir Putin looked, from where I was sitting, as transparent as when streetcorner con artists would try to reel passersby into their scam games of three-card Monte when I was in middle school. (I always ignored them — except for one time when I got greedy against my mother’s advice. But the fact is, I knew better.)
The Kyiv subway “set” was a new level of out-of-touch’ness, even for a band prone to outrageous fits of grandiosity — grandiosity, mind you, that had worked just fine for me plenty of times in the past (like this one).
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Going from bad to worse, there’s Sean Penn’s meeting last November with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to give Zelesnkyy his Oscar statue. In a sentimental display that would have embarrassed even the most amateur of actors, Penn laid it on so thick it’s hard to hold back from laughing out loud, even as the tawdry spectacle of the whole thing leaves you feeling a bit dirty, not unlike the sensation one gets on leaving an auto dealership after an interaction with a used-car salesman — or, perhaps, the sense of cognitive violation one might get after watching a piece of absurdist theatre that doesn’t reward you for having the patience to sit through it.
Get a load of the music in this clip!
Where does one even begin to peel away the layers of absurdity here? For starters, what kind of egomaniacal solipsist thinks that their Academy award is somehow going to provide a world leader with the encouragement to keep on fighting a war! Imagine, for a moment, that a loved one of yours was struggling with cancer. Imagine that I met with you, put my arm around you and choked up with tears as I gave you a trophy I’d won to give you strength. You’d probably think that was fucking strange — even outrageously inappropriate and narcissistic — right?
“When you win,” Penn said to Zelenskyy, “bring [the Oscar] back to Malibu.”
Hollywood’s delusions, alas, didn’t end there — both Penn and comic/Academy Awards co-host Amy Schumer lobbied for Zelenskyy to be invited to last year’s Oscars ceremony. Like, wow — way to confuse the cold, blunt reality of war with movie fantasy! In a rare showing of practical sense, though, the Academy nixed the idea. Not everyone agreed. Film industry trade site The Wrap posted a piece — titled Did The Oscars Just Snub Zelenskyy? Are They Nuts? — that may as well have been written by a military intelligence agent. But Penn got his way just last week, when the Berlin Film Fest beamed Zelenskyy in.
At least Ben Stiller, when he met with Zelenskyy between U2 and Sean Penn’s visits, had the decency not to over-act his way through the whole routine. Much like my feelings for U2, I have intense admiration for Sean Penn’s acting skills. And yet, it was Penn who looked like he was in a Benny Hill skit (albeit one directed by Terry Gilliam), while Stiller the comic at least played it straight — a fitting barometer for how upside-down and inside-out the messaging around this war has been.
I’ve never understood why propaganda is so successful, because it’s often as subtle as an 18-wheeler truck pulling up to a family picnic while the driver blares the horn. Propaganda announces itself with such obvious lack of tact you can see and hear it coming from miles away. It’s simultaneously laughable, repugnant, and shocking to me that it manages to work on people — in fact, I’m so surprised at people’s willingness to submit to propaganda’s influence that the only conclusion I can come to is that lies of a certain scale aren’t influential so much as they require the willful participation of the “influenced.”
I mean, you have to work to rationalize your way into believing a premise that’s so obviously being sold to you on false (or at least shaky) pretenses. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as dumb people. I don’t believe people are gullible by nature either. As far as I’m concerned, what we call “stupidity” only exists as an action — not a condition. Which is to say: if the images of U2, Sean Penn, and Ben Stiller engaging in photo opps in a war zone and playing footsie with a world leader manage to get past your suspicions, while our government puts the pedal to the medal on a military engagement that looks more and more like it could and should have been avoided, well… that’s a choice.
After two years straight of nonstop messaging around covid, of watching in horror as the public got baited day after day after day, I’d reached a point of exhaustion when the Ukraine war began. I decided, simply, to put my foot down and ignore the bait. I refused to allow even the slightest bit of stress over the potential for the outbreak of World War III. I wasn’t going to give any psychic energy to the mechanism goading us into feeding it with an endless supply of our agitation. No matter how many scare gags get hurled at me in the funhouse hall of mirrors that the media has become, I’ve made the choice to look straight ahead and just keep walking.
When highly talented musicians and actors jumped into the breach, though, it had the opposite effect than what had been intended: the preposterousness, the flagrance — the choreography — of it all felt oddly reassuring. If our perceptions around this war were being so carefully manicured… if Bono could be persuaded to leave his mansion and show up at a bomb shelter on cue — the same way he’d stand at a duct-taped “x” onstage during a flashpot explosion at a specific point in a song — then maybe we weren’t on the brink of World War III after all.
Maybe there’s something that’s pulling the strings — malign, yes, but intact — and maybe there’s an orderliness to what’s taking place. I have no idea whether this is the correct way to view what’s happening here. All I’m saying is that it’s hard to take a war seriously when you’ve got Ben Stiller — the man who played Zoolander, of all people! — flashing across our screens imploring us to buy-in with the most deadly-earnest expression set on his face. Would the architects of this war have sent Don Rickles or Rodney Dangerfield if they could have?
It’s hard to shake the feeling that we’re being laughed at. If that’s the case, then I say we might as well laugh right back.
Hugs! <3 SRK
That’s a really good piece. I had no idea they were doing these stunts, not watching propaganda shows on TV (or listening on radio) does mean I miss out on all the sick moves being played right now. I never liked U2 anyway and actors really will do anything for coin.