On gospel, Abba and the death of the record: an audience with Brian Eno

He's been a Roxy original, the inventor of 'ambient', Bowie's muse, the brain in Talking Heads and U2's 'fifth man'. Now Eno tells us where he's heading next

Brian Eno in his studio. Photograph: Harry Borden

When influential music website Pitchfork listed its 100 greatest albums of the 1970s – which in certain other lists is calculated to be the greatest decade for rock music – the modestly immodest, driven, musical non-musician Brian Eno was directly and indirectly involved in at least a quarter of them, including the number one, Low, on which he collaborated with a nomadic, post-"Fame" David Bowie and the producer Tony Visconti. As an intellectually mobile loner, scene-setter, systems lover, obstinate rebel, techno-prophet, sensual philosopher, courteous progressive, close listener, gentle heretic, sound planner, adviser explorer, pedant and slick conceptual salesman, and devoted fan of the new, undrab and surprising, wherever it fell between John Cage and Little Richard, or Duchamp and doo wop, or Mondrian and Moog, Eno busily and bossily remodelled pop music during the 70s. He looked at what the Velvet Underground, Can, Steve Reich and the Who had done, went forth and multiplied. Eno created an atmosphere, and helped determine what the history of electronic music was between the avant garde 1950s and the pop 21st century.

He demonstrated – as an abstract part of the early and surreal Roxy Music, the evocative Bowie Berlin trilogy Heroes/Low/Lodger, the nervy NY Talking Heads, as a floating collaborator with Nico, John Cale, Robert Wyatt, Cluster, Robert Fripp, Kevin Ayers, Jon Hassell and Harold Budd, as stern futurist mentor to Devo and Ultravox, as discerning curator of the beautifully conceived contemporary music label Obscure, as careful discoverer of the pulseless, wordless, eventless, timeless music he lovingly called "ambient" – that pop music was where you could be the kind of artist he wanted to be. In 1981, he designed the influential sound and content of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts with David Byrne – the prestigious culmination of his solo and group work in the 1970s, the studio combining of inner space, other worlds, random impressions, scrupulous visions, found sound, taped memories, cut-up text, stolen rhythms, daring edits, painted space, original borrowing, inquisitive permutations, mutant gospel and electronic interference.Then there was U2 and recently, as if relishing the snobbish horror of those who dismiss U2 as pompous irritants, he's attended to another ambitious four-piece male rock group with delusions of splendour, Coldplay, producing their last multi-million selling album and now, at the age of 61, finishing their next. A mischievous ghost of the glammed up art pop star Eno that was first noticed as part of the theatre of Roxy Music now haunts the sound and image of the two biggest rock bands in the world who would claim to be, in fact, post-Eno as much as post-punk. Coldplay didn't really belong anywhere before Eno apart from inside their own success. Now they have attached themselves via Eno to a very particular history of avant pop practice. Eno himself is prone to chuckle good naturedly when faced with bemusement at his connection to Coldplay.

He stays behind the scenes, more likely to curate an art festival or present a public lecture on something to do with pleasure, beauty, atheism, perfume or nuclear disarmament than appear to have anything to do with rock or pop music. If Roxy Music are ever spotted together on stage, he will be somewhere else, searching for something new to astound him. Much, naturally, has changed since the volatile, fussy, sublime Eno of For Your Pleasure, Here Come The Warm Jets, Discreet Music, Heroes and Once in a Lifetime, but he's still talking about what he does, and why, working out his place, the place of art, the history of progress, the enigma of meaning, the mechanics of creativity, the mystery of aesthetics, reluctant to think too much about his past in case, as he says, he starts to feel "useless awe towards his former self" but politely prepared to look back at his work if he thinks someone might find it useful. When you meet him to discuss something or other to do with his always perfectly organised research and development thoughts about something or other, you arrive as he is finishing one conversation with someone about, say, how technology changes the way our brains work, and as you leave someone else is arriving for a conversation about, say, the shrinking divisions between art and science. Or how Jeremy Clarkson almost moved into the house next to his office which was previously owned by Jason Donovan.

I talked with him as part of a series of conversations that were filmed for a BBC Arena documentary.

On talking: 1

"I heard a recording that had been made of me 35 years ago chatting with some friends and I thought the tape must have sped up because I sounded so fast. When ­others spoke, they were at a normal speed. It was me, I was speaking so fast. What I find both disappointing and reassuring is that I was saying exactly those things I will be saying today. I don't know what to make of that. A few different references, but the basic ideas haven't changed at all. No difference whatsoever! I suppose it's good to see I've been consistent as sometimes over the years it seems as though it's all been a bit incoherent, a bit of this, a bit of that, a while doing this, then one of those, followed by three of those. It seems all over the place when I'm doing it. Listening to me now talking then suggests there has been a pattern."

On the intensity of ideas

"If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas. You expect to be engaged with ideas strongly whether you are for or against them. If you are part of a religion that very strongly insists that you believe then to decide not to do that is quite a big hurdle to jump over. You never forget the thought process you went through. It becomes part of your whole intellectual picture."

On listening

"If you think of the mid- to late-50swhen all of this started to happen for me, the experience of listening to sound was so different from now. Stereo didn't exist. If you listened to music outside of church, apart from live music, which was very rare, it was through tiny speakers. It was a nice experience but a very small experience. So to go into a church, which is a specially designed and echoey space, and it has an organ, and my grandfather built the organ in the church where we went, suddenly to hear music and singing was amazing. It was like hearing someone's album on a tiny transistor radio and then you go and see them in a 60,000-seater. It's huge by comparison. That had a lot to do with my feeling about sound and space, which became a big theme for me. How does space make a difference to sound, what's the difference between hearing something in this room and then another room. Can you imagine other rooms where you can hear music? It also made a difference to how I feel about the communality of music in that the music I liked the most, singing in church, was done by a group of people who were not skilled – they were just a group of people, I knew them in the rest of the week as the coal man and the baker."

On destiny

"It was a dilemma for me at the end of my time at school. Am I going into music or painting ? The Who were important to me when I was working out whether I would go into fine art or popular art. I felt they had found an important position between the two. Then the Velvet Underground came along and also made it clear how you could straddle the two somehow. It helped make my mind up to go into music."

On recording

"I came out of this funny place where I was interested in the experimental ideas of Cornelius Cardew, John Cage and Gavin Bryars, but also in pop music. Pop was all about the results and the feedback. The experimental side was interested in process more than the actual result – the results just happened and there was often very little control over them, and very little feedback. Take Steve Reich. He was an important composer for me with his early tape pieces and his way of having musicians play a piece each at different speeds so that they slipped out of synch.

"But then when he comes to record a piece of his like, say, Drumming, he uses orchestral drums stiffly played and badly recorded. He's learnt nothing from the history of recorded music. Why not look at what the pop world is doing with recording, which is making incredible sounds with great musicians who really feel what they play. It's because in Reich's world there was no real feedback. What was interesting to them in that world was merely the diagram of the piece, the music merely existed as an indicator of a type of process. I can see the point of it in one way, that you just want to show the skeleton, you don't want a lot of fluff around it, you just want to show how you did what you did.As a listener who grew up listening to pop music I am interested in results. Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop. Did it work? No. We'll do it differently then. Did it sell? No. We'll do it differently then. So I wanted to bring the two sides together. I liked the processes and systems in the experimental world and the attitude to effect that there was in the pop, I wanted the ideas to be seductive but also the results."

On being like nothing else

"In my house in Oxfordshire, we have this big, beautiful Andrew Logan sculpture of a lovely Pegasus with blue glass wings. When I get a taxi from the station, a driver will always comment on it because it is so striking. What they often say is, 'What does that stand for then?' Or, 'What does that mean?', based on the idea that something exists because it has to tell you something, or it refers to something else, and I realise that this notion is foreign to me. The earliest paintings I loved were always the most non-referential paintings you can imagine, by painters such as Mondrian. I was thrilled by them because they didn't refer to anything else. They stood alone and they were just charged magic objects that did not get their strength from being connected to anything else."

On singing

"I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant. Ultimately, the message of gospel music is that everything's going to be all right. If you listen to millions of gospel records – and I have – and try to distil what they all have in common it's a sense that somehow we can triumph. There could be many thousands of things. But the message… well , there are two messages… one is a kind of optimism for the future rather than a pessimism. Gospel music is never pessimistic, it's never 'oh my god, its all going down the tubes', like the blues often is. Gospel music is always about the possibility of transcendence, of things getting better. It's also about the loss of ego, that you will win through or get over things by losing yourself, becoming part of something better. Both those messages are completely universal and are nothing to do with religion or a particular religion. They're to do with basic human attitudes and you can have that attitude and therefore sing gospel even if you are not religious."

On the synthesiser: 1

"One of the important things about the synthesiser was that it came without any baggage. A piano comes with a whole history of music. There are all sorts of cultural conventions built into traditional instruments that tell you where and when that instrument comes from. When you play an instrument that does not have any such historical background you are designing sound basically. You're designing a new instrument. That's what a synthesiser is essentially. It's a constantly unfinished instrument. You finish it when you tweak it, and play around with it, and decide how to use it. You can combine a number of cultural references into one new thing."

On the synthesiser: 2

"Instruments sound interesting not because of their sound but because of the relationship a player has with them. Instrumentalists build a rapport with their instruments which is what you like and respond to. If you were sitting down now to design an instrument you would not dream of coming up with something as ridiculous as an acoustic guitar. It's a strange instrument, it's very limited and it doesn't sound good. You would come up with something much better. But what we like about acoustic guitars is players who have had long relationships with them and know how to do something beautiful with them. You don't have that with synthesisers yet. They are a very new instrument. They are constantly renewing so people do not have time to build long relationships with them. So you tend to hear more of the technology and less of the rapport. It can sound less human. However ! That is changing. And there is a prediction that I made a few years ago that I'm very pleased to see is coming true – synthesisers that have inconsistency built into them. I have always wanted them to be less consistent. I like it that one note can be louder than the note next to it."

On the naming of things

"A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn't. Like East African free jazz, which as far as I know does not exist. To some extent, this was how ambient music emerged. My interest in making music has been to create something that does not exist that I would like to listen to, not because I wanted a job as a musician. I wanted to hear music that had not yet happened, by putting together things that suggested a new thing which did not yet exist. It's like having a ready-made formula if you are able to read it. One of the innovations of ambient music was leaving out the idea that there should be melody or words or a beat… so in a way that was music designed by leaving things out – that can be a form of innovation, knowing what to leave out. All the signs were in the air all around with ambient music in the mid 1970s, and other people were doing a similar thing. I just gave it a name. Which is exactly what it needed. A name. A name. Giving something a name can be just the same as inventing it. By naming something you create a difference. You say that this is now real. Names are very important."

On talking: 2

"I like to talk about all sorts of things. I've never seen the downside of it. I've never minded the egghead tag. It makes sense with my physiognomy anyway. I've fought for years the idea that rock and popular art is only about passion and fashion and nothing to do with thinking and examining and if you do think there is something suspicious about you."

On hindsight

"Instead of shooting arrows at someone else's target, which I've never been very good at, I make my own target around wherever my arrow happens to have landed. You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre."

On a celebration of human frailty

"The other day I heard a band who had the worst singer, the most out of time drummer and most out of tune guitarist I've ever heard on a professional record, and I thought, at last, the reaction against pro-tools perfection has set in. A pro-tools engineer would have sorted it all out, but this band was an actual celebration of human frailty. It was so rough it was really encouraging."

On Abba

"In the 70s, no one would admit that they liked Abba. Now it's fine. It's so kitsch. Kitsch is an excuse to defend the fact that they feel a common emotion. If it is kitsch. you put a sort of frame around something – to suggest you are being ironic. Actually, you aren't. You are really enjoying it. I like Abba. I did then and I didn't admit it. The snobbery of the time wouldn't allow it. I did admit it when I heard 'Fernando'; I could not bear to keep the secret to myself anymore and also because I think there is a difference between Swedish sentimentality and LA sentimentality because the Swedish are so restrained emotionally. When they get sentimental it's rather sweet and charming. What we really got me with "Fernando" was what the lower singer was doing, I don't know her name. I spent months trying to learn that. It's so obscure what she's doing and very hard to sing. And then from being a sceptic I went over the top in the other direction. I really fell for them."

On Frank Zappa

"Zappa was important to me because I realised I didn't have to make music like he did. I might have made a lot of music like he did if he had not done it first and made me realise that I did not want to go there. I did not like his music but I am grateful that he did it. Sometimes you learn as much from the things you don't like as from the things you do like. The rejection side is as important as the endorsement part. You define who you are and where you are by the things that you know you are not. Sometimes that's all the information you have to go on. I'm not that kind of person. You don't quite know where you are but you find yourself in the space left behind by the things you've rejected."

On working with U2 and Coldplay at the same time

"It was fine. A few jokes. I felt like a ­philanderer who was with another woman and might make a slip and call her by the wrong name in bed. I had one computer that had all of the Coldplay stuff and all the U2 stuff. I had to very carefully label each folder because I was paranoid that I might end up with the same basic track for each group and I wouldn't notice until it was too late. There was a chance the same track might have appeared on both albums."

On ego

"Bono commits the crime of rising above your station. To the British, it's the worst thing you can do. Bono is hated for doing something considered unbecoming for a pop star – meddling in things that apparently have nothing to do with him. He has a huge ego, no doubt about it. On the other hand, he has a huge brain and a huge heart. He's just a big kind of person. That's not easy for some to deal with. They don't mind in Italy. They like larger-than-life people there. In most places in the world they don't mind him. Here, they think he must be conning them."

On reporting in the 1990s that there was too much music being released and he was not going to add to it any more

"I didn't think it through to be honest."

On the end of an era

"I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn't last, and now it's running out. I don't particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you'd be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history's moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it."

Public relations in the recession; Good news, other firms’ suffering has bolstered the public-relations business

Illustration by Claudio Munoz

THE past year or two has tested the idea that all publicity is good publicity, at least when it comes to business. Undeserved bonuses, plunging share prices and government bail-outs, among other ills, have elicited the ire of the media and public—and created a bonanza for public-relations firms. The recession has increased corporate demand for PR, analysts say, and enhanced the industry’s status. “We used to be the tail on the dog,” says Richard Edelman, the boss of Edelman, the world’s biggest independent PR firm. But now, he continues, PR is “the organising principle” behind many business decisions.

According to data from Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS), a private-equity firm, spending on public relations in America grew by more than 4% in 2008 and nearly 3% in 2009 to $3.7 billion. That is remarkable when compared with other forms of marketing. Spending on advertising contracted by nearly 3% in 2008 and by 8% in the past year. PR’s position looks even rosier when word-of-mouth marketing, which includes services that PR firms often manage, such as outreach to bloggers, is included. Spending on such things increased by more than 10% in 2009.

Not all PR firms did as well as IPREX, a global consortium whose revenues increased by 14% last year. Many had to shed jobs, and some estimates show the industry’s overall revenues declining, although not nearly as sharply as those of most of the businesses it serves. According to a survey by StevensGouldPincus, a consulting firm for the communications industry, nearly 64% of participating firms saw revenues slide in 2009 and only 23% saw revenues increase, perhaps because businesses put their faith only in the biggest and most established firms.

PR has done well in part because it is often cheaper than mass advertising campaigns. Its impact, in the form of favourable coverage in the media or online, can also be more easily measured. Moreover, PR firms are beginning to encroach on territory that used to be the domain of advertising firms, a sign of their increasing clout. They used chiefly to pitch story ideas to media outlets and try to get their clients mentioned in newspapers. Now they also dream up and orchestrate live events, web launches and the like. “When you look at advertising versus public relations, it’s not going to be those clearly defined silos,” says Christopher Graves, the boss of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. “It may be indistinguishable at some point where one ends and the other begins.”

PR has also benefited from the changing media landscape. The withering of many traditional media outlets has left fewer journalists from fewer firms covering business. That makes PR doubly important, both for attracting journalists’ attention, and for helping firms bypass old routes altogether and disseminate news by posting press releases on their websites, for example.

The rise of the internet and social media has given PR a big boost. Many big firms have a presence on social-networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, overseen by PR staff. PR firms are increasingly called on to track what consumers are saying about their clients online and to respond directly to any negative commentary. When two employees of Domino’s, a pizza chain, uploaded a video of themselves apparently sticking ingredients for dishes they were preparing up their noses, the firm responded by posting a video of its own online, of a senior executive apologising for the incident.

Blow-dried blogs

That sort of content is proliferating. A PR firm called Ketchum helped IBM start a blog about sustainability, complete with posts written by the technology firm’s executives. It also created cartoons on the subject that it uploaded to YouTube. Edelman recently worked with eBay on the launch of a web-only magazine, “The Inside Source”, which provides articles on shopping and tells readers what is selling well on the online retail giant’s website.

VSS forecasts that spending on PR in America will surpass $8 billion by 2013, with much of the growth coming from online projects such as these. According to Miles Nadal, chief executive of MDC Partners, a media holding company, investment in digital PR accelerated during the recession “and will go forward in perpetuity” because clients became more focused on measuring the impact of their efforts. The internet offers various yardsticks, from traffic to cheerleading websites to numbers of Facebook fans, whereas the number of people who see a conventional advertisement is much harder to gauge.

Perhaps the best indication of PR’s growing importance is the attention it is attracting from regulators. They are worried that PR firms do not make it clear enough that they are behind much seemingly independent commentary on blogs and social networks. In October America’s Federal Trade Commission published new guidelines for bloggers, requiring them to disclose whether they had been paid by companies or received free merchandise. Further regulation is likely. But that will not hamper PR’s growth, says Jim Rutherfurd of VSS. After all, companies that fall foul of the rules will need the help of a PR firm.

Obama lovers vs. the tea-party crew

By MICHAEL BARONE

When you look back over the surges of enthusiasm in the politics of the last two years, you see something like this: The Obama enthusiasts who dominated so much of the 2008 campaign cycle were motivated by style. The tea-party protesters who dominated so much of 2009 were motivated by substance.<p> </p><br /> Remember those rapturous crowds that swooned at Barack Obama's rhetoric. "We are the change we are seeking," he proclaimed. "We will be able to look back and tell our children" that "this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."<p> </p><br /> A lot of style there, but not very much substance. A Brookings Institution scholar who produced nothing more than that would soon be looking for a new job.<p> </p><br /> In retrospect, the Obama enthusiasts seem to have been motivated by a yearning for a rapturous, nuanced leader. Send that terrible tyrant with his tortured sentences and moral certitude back to Texas and install The One in the White House, and all would be well.<p> </p><br /> The Obama enthusiasts have achieved that goal -- and perhaps it's not surprising that, as polls show, they're not much engaged in the details of the health-care bills or cap-and-trade legislation or looming tax increases and the like. They, or at least most of them, were never much interested in those things anyway.<p> </p><br /> In contrast, the tea-party protesters, even if many are loud and fractious, are interested in substantive political issues. They decry the dangers of expanding the national debt, increasing government spending and putting government in command of the health-care sector.<p> </p><br /> Their concerns have basis in fact. The national debt is on a trajectory to double as a percentage of the economy over 10 years, and the Democrats' health-care bills threaten to bend the cost curve up. Higher taxes could choke off economic recovery and keep unemployment up near double-digit rates for years.<p> </p><br /> Last year's stimulus bill surreptitiously raised the budget baseline for many domestic spending programs and sent money to state and local governments -- a payoff to the public-employee unions who spent more than $100 million to elect Democrats in 2008.<p> </p><br /> Agree with the tea-party folk or not, these are substantive public-policy issues of fundamental importance.<p> </p><br /> Or look at other issues on which, as David Brooks notes in The New York Times, Americans have been moving away from positions "associated with the educated class."<p> </p><br /> The educated class thinks that gun control can reduce crime. But over the last 15 years, crime rates have plummeted thanks to Rudy Giuliani-type police tactics and while 40 states have laws permitting law-abiding citizens to get licenses to carry concealed weapons.<p> </p><br /> "The educated class believes in global warming," Brooks notes. But ordinary Americans have been noticing that temperatures have not been rising in the last decade as climate scientists' models predicted, and they may have noticed those Climategate e-mails that show how climate scientists have been jiggering the statistics and suppressing opposing views.<p> </p><br /> On these issues the educated class is faith-based and the ordinary Americans who increasingly reject their views are fact-based, just as the Obama enthusiasts are motivated by style and the tea partiers by substance.<p> </p><br /> As the educated class bitterly clings to its contempt for the increasing numbers not enlightened enough to share its views, other Americans have noticed, even in the liberal heartland of Massachusetts, where Republican Scott Brown seems on the brink of an upset victory in the special Senate election next Tuesday. That would have reverberations for the educated class an awful lot like that tea party back in 1773.<p> </p><br /> Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner.<p> </p><br />

When you look back over the surges of enthusiasm in the politics of the last two years, you see something like this: The Obama enthusiasts who dominated so much of the 2008 campaign cycle were motivated by style. The tea-party protesters who dominated so much of 2009 were motivated by substance.

Remember those rapturous crowds that swooned at Barack Obama's rhetoric. "We are the change we are seeking," he proclaimed. "We will be able to look back and tell our children" that "this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."

A lot of style there, but not very much substance. A Brookings Institution scholar who produced nothing more than that would soon be looking for a new job.

In retrospect, the Obama enthusiasts seem to have been motivated by a yearning for a rapturous, nuanced leader. Send that terrible tyrant with his tortured sentences and moral certitude back to Texas and install The One in the White House, and all would be well.

The Obama enthusiasts have achieved that goal -- and perhaps it's not surprising that, as polls show, they're not much engaged in the details of the health-care bills or cap-and-trade legislation or looming tax increases and the like. They, or at least most of them, were never much interested in those things anyway.

In contrast, the tea-party protesters, even if many are loud and fractious, are interested in substantive political issues. They decry the dangers of expanding the national debt, increasing government spending and putting government in command of the health-care sector.

Their concerns have basis in fact. The national debt is on a trajectory to double as a percentage of the economy over 10 years, and the Democrats' health-care bills threaten to bend the cost curve up. Higher taxes could choke off economic recovery and keep unemployment up near double-digit rates for years.

Last year's stimulus bill surreptitiously raised the budget baseline for many domestic spending programs and sent money to state and local governments -- a payoff to the public-employee unions who spent more than $100 million to elect Democrats in 2008.

Agree with the tea-party folk or not, these are substantive public-policy issues of fundamental importance.

Or look at other issues on which, as David Brooks notes in The New York Times, Americans have been moving away from positions "associated with the educated class."

The educated class thinks that gun control can reduce crime. But over the last 15 years, crime rates have plummeted thanks to Rudy Giuliani-type police tactics and while 40 states have laws permitting law-abiding citizens to get licenses to carry concealed weapons.

"The educated class believes in global warming," Brooks notes. But ordinary Americans have been noticing that temperatures have not been rising in the last decade as climate scientists' models predicted, and they may have noticed those Climategate e-mails that show how climate scientists have been jiggering the statistics and suppressing opposing views.

On these issues the educated class is faith-based and the ordinary Americans who increasingly reject their views are fact-based, just as the Obama enthusiasts are motivated by style and the tea partiers by substance.

As the educated class bitterly clings to its contempt for the increasing numbers not enlightened enough to share its views, other Americans have noticed, even in the liberal heartland of Massachusetts, where Republican Scott Brown seems on the brink of an upset victory in the special Senate election next Tuesday. That would have reverberations for the educated class an awful lot like that tea party back in 1773.

Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner.

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/obama_lovers_vs_the_tea_party_crew_QzipWUNuuODqHKXuz3zzbO#ixzz0ccM5eY3L

Is Bono the Most Popular Man in the World?

What should we make of Bono, who uses his immense platform to highlight social justice issues? Is he a hero or a hypocrite?

The money results are in from Pollstar, the concert industry tracking publication, about the financial success of bands touring the United States in 2009. And the numbers are mind-boggling. In just 20 days, U2, led by the compelling front man and world-wide personality brand Bono, brought in $123 million at the box office, selling 1.3 million tickets in huge stadiums in just 16 cities. So each night, the U2 360° concert raked in an average of $7.7 million. If you do the math, that works out to about $95 a ticket (of course, that's before the massive reselling and scalping).

The U.S. tour was but one piece of a larger "360-degrees" global tour that will continue well into 2010, and will likely surpass the $389 million that U2 raked in from its 2005-2007 Vertigo tour, which is second only to the Rolling Stones' "A Bigger Bang" trek. Billboard reports that U2 "toured Europe in July and August, the U.S. in September and October for a total of 40-45 shows this year." There are plans for "more stadiums in America in June and July next year, then August and September in Europe. The trek then tentatively will hit South America in the fall of 2010, for potentially as many as 90-100 shows over the next two years."

Bono and U2 blew other U.S. touring groups out of the water. Theirs was the only tour going over the $100 million mark, as concert revenue increased across the board, despite the recession. It seems that no matter what, music fans will find the dough to hear live music. Second on the Pollstar list was Bruce Springsteen and the E. Street band, which took in almost $95 million, but that was in 58 shows, under $2 million a show compared to the $7.7 mil for U2. Third, if you really want to know, was the irresistible combo of Billy Joel and Elton John, grossing $88 million; the Piano Man meets "Candles in the Wind."

Is there any other human being/band who could attract the kind of attention and money in the U.S. as Bono and U2 did over such a short period of time? The only possibility that comes to mind is the Pope, who of course draws huge crowds to stadiums in his very infrequent visits to the States.

Of course, those people can see the Pope for free. Could the Pope fill 82,000-seat stadiums at almost $100 a head and often much more? I doubt it. But we'll probably never find out, since it would be un-Popelike to charge big bucks.

So, absent any other competitive nominees, I have to conclude that Bono and his three U2 cohorts sit at the pinnacle of global visibility and popularity. Since the Bono brand is wrapped up in political and social messaging, what does U2's popularity mean? Does it translate to the ability to exercise power and create change? What is the relationship between fame and influence? Needless to say, I don't have the answers to those questions, which will be debated for a long time.

On the Front Lines

Thanks to my friend Erin, I was fortunate to see U2 in action at the ancient Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, in late October and even to be front-row in the stands (a real privilege, I know, and I am humble). I felt the awe of the spectacle. I loved hearing many classic U2 songs. And the show was impressive -- by far the most ambitious construction of a rock concert site, with giant screens and stage innovations designed to blow one's mind. As noted on the band's Web site, "With a cylindrical video system of interlocking LED panels, and a steel structure rising 150 feet from the floor over a massive stage with rotating bridges, the band has truly created a intimate 360 experience for concert goers." The whole shebang reportedly required 200 trucks and some 330 people to construct, and presumably a lot of those millions of dollars were paid out in expenses to produce the monster. Bono probably had more success in putting Americans to work than the TARP funds. But the sheer enormity of the thing also made U2 vulnerable to criticism ... more about that in a second.

The most moving portion of the concert was near the end, when a gaggle of Amnesty International volunteers came onto the stage in a long processional, each holding a mask of Aung San Suu Kyi, the long-imprisoned leader of Burma. The procession was accompanied by a stirring video and exhortations from Bono himself. Freeing Aung San Suu Kyi has been one of U2 and Amnesty's major causes, positioning them at the forefront of international politics while at the same time sadly underscoring their political impotence.

Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest for 19 years, with no end in sight. As Bono says, "Her crime is that if she were to participate in elections, she'd win ... We must not stand by as she is silenced again. Now is the time for the UN and the entire international community to speak with one voice: Free Aung San Suu Kyi." But despite the spotlight shone by Bono, Burma's oppressive regime doesn't seem to be budging. The awareness of many millions of concertgoers has not changed the reality in Burma. True, ridding the world of the brutal military junta is not an easy problem to solve. And not a goal the U.S. has been successful at either, although there is some question as to how hard our government has tried, given China's close relationship with Burma and need for its energy resources.

As for the concert's extravagance, as AlterNet's Vanessa Richmond wrote, "Ironically, U2 is outspoken about their commitment to the environment, but carbon output of their tour this year is far bigger even than Madonna's high-maintenance carbon-heavy tour. U2's carbon emissions will equal that of 90,000 people flying from Dublin to London, and are equivalent of the waste created by 6,500 average British or Irish people in an entire year (equal to leaving a standard 100 watt light bulb on for 159,000 years). To offset this year's carbon emissions, U2 would need to plant 20,118 trees." Before the tour began, "Live Nation, the producers of the U2 360° Tour, confirmed their commitment to producing the largest concert tour in history in an environmentally responsible manner with a goal of balancing the tour's direct carbon footprint through a comprehensive reduction and offset strategy."

I wonder if they are going to plant those 20,118 trees?

U2 has also been criticized for their decision several years back to move their assets to the Netherlands in order to take advantage of the country's lower tax rates; it seemed Bono, a longtime anti-poverty advocate, preferred a more regressive system of taxation when it came to the band's own earnings.

More recently, Bono drew the ire of net neutrality activists with an op-ed that slammed file-sharing and seemed to suggest online content should be policed. Blogger Cory Doctorow had this to say in response, according to BBC News: "If only greed and ignorance could sequester carbon, Bono could FINALLY save the planet."

So in the end what do we make of Bono? He continues his strong alliance with Amnesty International, while his ability to converse with and in some cases convince world leaders to shift policy (on Third World debt for example) is widely recognized ... and publicized. On the other hand, as the London Times noted in 2007, Naomi Klein, "the poster girl of the anti-globalization movement," attacked "the Bono-isation of protests ... which has reduced discussion to a much safer terrain." Klein called Bono's Make Poverty History campaign "the stadium rock model of protest -- there's celebrities and then there's spectators waving their bracelets. It's less dangerous and less powerful [than grassroots street demonstrations]."

Klein has a point. People talking, reading and thinking about change are not as productive as people actually creating change. On the other hand, I don't come to bury Bono. When all is said and done, I'd rather have him up there exhorting the crowd than Mick Jagger or Dave Matthews, for that matter. In the end, Bono is probably a positive force. The more educated and aware people are, the more chance there is for change. U2 makes so many people feel happy and positive -- even those in the nosebleed section, the uncomfortable but still pricey seats at the top of the stadium. That is no small thing in this period of high unemployment, underwater mortgages and onerous student loans.

Elvis Costello w/ Bono, Edge

The Carter Syndrome

Barack Obama might yet revolutionize America's foreign policy. But if he can't reconcile his inner Thomas Jefferson with his inner Woodrow Wilson, the 44th president could end up like No. 39.

BY WALTER RUSSELL MEAD | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010

Neither a cold-blooded realist nor a bleeding-heart idealist, Barack Obama has a split personality when it comes to foreign policy. So do most U.S. presidents, of course, and the ideas that inspire this one have a long history at the core of the American political tradition. In the past, such ideas have served the country well. But the conflicting impulses influencing how this young leader thinks about the world threaten to tear his presidency apart -- and, in the worst scenario, turn him into a new Jimmy Carter.

Obama's long deliberation over the war in Afghanistan is a case study in presidential schizophrenia: After 94 days of internal discussion and debate, he ended up splitting the difference -- rushing in more troops as his generals wanted, while calling for their departure to begin in July 2011 as his liberal base demanded. It was a sober compromise that suggests a man struggling to reconcile his worldview with the weight of inherited problems. Like many of his predecessors, Obama is not only buffeted by strong political headwinds, but also pulled in opposing directions by two of the major schools of thought that have guided American foreign-policy debates since colonial times.

In general, U.S. presidents see the world through the eyes of four giants: Alexander Hamilton, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson. Hamiltonians share the first Treasury secretary's belief that a strong national government and a strong military should pursue a realist global policy and that the government can and should promote economic development and the interests of American business at home and abroad. Wilsonians agree with Hamiltonians on the need for a global foreign policy, but see the promotion of democracy and human rights as the core elements of American grand strategy. Jeffersonians dissent from this globalist consensus; they want the United States to minimize its commitments and, as much as possible, dismantle the national-security state. Jacksonians are today's Fox News watchers. They are populists suspicious of Hamiltonian business links, Wilsonian do-gooding, and Jeffersonian weakness.

Moderate Republicans tend to be Hamiltonians. Move right toward the Sarah Palin range of the party and the Jacksonian influence grows. Centrist Democrats tend to be interventionist-minded Wilsonians, while on the left and the dovish side they are increasingly Jeffersonian, more interested in improving American democracy at home than exporting it abroad.

Some presidents build coalitions; others stay close to one favorite school. As the Cold War ended, George H.W. Bush's administration steered a largely Hamiltonian course, and many of those Hamiltonians later dissented from his son's war in Iraq. Bill Clinton's administration in the 1990s mixed Hamiltonian and Wilsonian tendencies. This dichotomy resulted in bitter administration infighting when those ideologies came into conflict -- over humanitarian interventions in the Balkans and Rwanda, for example, and again over the relative weight to be given to human rights and trade in U.S. relations with China.

More recently, George W. Bush's presidency was defined by an effort to bring Jacksonians and Wilsonians into a coalition; the political failure of Bush's ambitious approach created the context that made the Obama presidency possible.

Sept. 11, 2001, was one of those rare and electrifying moments that waken Jacksonian America and focus its attention on the international arena. The U.S. homeland was not only under attack, it was under attack by an international conspiracy of terrorists who engaged in what Jacksonians consider dishonorable warfare: targeting civilians. Jacksonian attitudes toward war were shaped by generations of conflict with Native American peoples across the United States and before that by centuries of border conflict in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Against "honorable" enemies who observe the laws of war, one is obliged to fight fair; those who disregard the rules must be hunted down and killed, regardless of technical niceties.

When the United States is attacked, Jacksonians demand action; they leave strategy to the national leadership. But Bush's tough-minded Jacksonian response to 9/11 -- invading Afghanistan and toppling the Taliban government that gave safe haven to the plotters -- gave way to what appeared to be Wilsonian meddling in Iraq. Originally, Bush's argument for overthrowing Saddam Hussein rested on two charges that resonated powerfully with Jacksonians: Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction, and he had close links with al Qaeda. But the war dragged on, and as Hussein's fabled hoards of WMD failed to appear and the links between Iraq and al Qaeda failed to emerge, Bush shifted to a Wilsonian rationale. This was no longer a war of defense against a pending threat or a war of retaliation; it was a war to establish democracy, first in Iraq and then throughout the region. Nation-building and democracy-spreading became the cornerstones of the administration's Middle East policy.

Bush could not have developed a strategy better calculated to dissolve his political support at home. Jacksonians historically have little sympathy for expensive and risky democracy-promoting ventures abroad. They generally opposed the humanitarian interventions in Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti during the Clinton years; they did not and do not think American young people should die and American treasure should be scattered to spread democracy or protect human rights overseas. Paradoxically, Jacksonians also opposed "cut and run" options to end the war in Iraq even as they lost faith in both Bush and the Republican Party; they don't like wars for democracy, but they also don't want to see the United States lose once troops and the national honor have been committed. In Bush's last year in office, a standoff ensued: The Democratic congressional majorities were powerless to force change in his Iraq strategy and Bush remained free to increase U.S. troop levels, yet the war itself and Bush's rationale for it remained deeply unpopular.

Enter Obama. An early and consistent opponent of the Iraq war, Obama was able to bring together the elements of the Democratic Party's foreign-policy base who were most profoundly opposed to (and horrified by) Bush's policy. Obama made opposition to the Iraq war a centerpiece of his eloquent campaign, drawing on arguments that echoed U.S. anti-war movements all the way back to Henry David Thoreau's opposition to the Mexican-American War.
Like Carter in the 1970s, Obama comes from the old-fashioned Jeffersonian wing of the Democratic Party, and the strategic goal of his foreign policy is to reduce America's costs and risks overseas by limiting U.S. commitments wherever possible. He's a believer in the notion that the United States can best spread democracy and support peace by becoming an example of democracy at home and moderation abroad. More than this, Jeffersonians such as Obama think oversize commitments abroad undermine American democracy at home. Large military budgets divert resources from pressing domestic needs; close association with corrupt and tyrannical foreign regimes involves the United States in dirty and cynical alliances; the swelling national-security state threatens civil liberties and leads to powerful pro-war, pro-engagement lobbies among corporations nourished on grossly swollen federal defense budgets.

While Bush argued that the only possible response to the 9/11 attacks was to deepen America's military and political commitments in the Middle East, Obama initially sought to enhance America's security by reducing those commitments and toning down aspects of U.S. Middle East policy, such as support for Israel, that foment hostility and suspicion in the region. He seeks to pull U.S. power back from the borderlands of Russia, reducing the risk of conflict with Moscow. In Latin America, he has so far behaved with scrupulous caution and, clearly, is hoping to normalize relations with Cuba while avoiding collisions with the "Bolivarian" states of Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia.

Obama seeks a quiet world in order to focus his efforts on domestic reform -- and to create conditions that would allow him to dismantle some of the national-security state inherited from the Cold War and given new life and vigor after 9/11. Preferring disarmament agreements to military buildups and hoping to substitute regional balance-of-power arrangements for massive unilateral U.S. force commitments all over the globe, the president wishes ultimately for an orderly world in which burdens are shared and the military power of the United States is a less prominent feature on the international scene.

While Wilsonians believe that no lasting stability is possible in a world filled with dictatorships, Jeffersonians like Obama argue that even bad regimes can be orderly international citizens if the incentives are properly aligned. Syria and Iran don't need to become democratic states for the United States to reach long-term, mutually beneficial arrangements with them. And it is North Korea's policies, not the character of its regime, that pose a threat to the Pacific region.

At this strategic level, Obama's foreign policy looks a little bit like that of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. In Afghanistan and Iraq, he hopes to extract U.S. forces from costly wars by the contemporary equivalent of the "Vietnamization" policy of the Nixon years. He looks to achieve an opening with Iran comparable to Nixon's rapprochement with communist China. Just as Nixon established a constructive relationship with China despite the radical "Red Guard" domestic policies Chinese leader Mao Zedong was pursuing at the time, Obama does not see ideological conflict as necessarily leading to poor strategic relations between the United States and the Islamic Republic. Just as Nixon and Kissinger sought to divert international attention from their retreat in Indochina by razzle-dazzle global diplomacy that placed Washington at the center of world politics even as it reduced its force posture, so too the Obama administration hopes to use the president's global popularity to cover a strategic withdrawal from the exposed position in the Middle East that it inherited from the Bush administration.

This is both an ambitious and an attractive vision. Success would reduce the level of international tension even as the United States scales back its commitments. The United States would remain, by far, the dominant military power in the world, but it would sustain this role with significantly fewer demands on its resources and less danger of war.

Yet as Obama is already discovering, any president attempting such a Jeffersonian grand strategy in the 21st century faces many challenges. In the 19th-century heyday of Jeffersonian foreign policy in American politics, it was easier for U.S. presidents to limit the country's commitments. Britain played a global role similar to that of the United States today, providing a stable security environment and promoting international trade and investment. Cruising as a free rider in the British world system allowed Americans to reap the benefits of Britain's world order without paying its costs.

As British power waned in the 20th century, Americans faced starker choices. With the British Empire no longer able to provide political and economic security worldwide, the United States had to choose between replacing Britain as the linchpin of world order with all the headaches that entailed or going about its business in a disorderly world. In the 1920s and 1930s, Americans gave this latter course a try; the rapid-fire series of catastrophes -- the Great Depression, World War II, Stalin's bid for Eurasian hegemony -- convinced virtually all policymakers that the first course, risky and expensive as it proved, was the lesser of the two evils.

Indeed, during Franklin D. Roosevelt's first two terms, the United States pursued essentially Jeffersonian policies in Europe and Asia, avoiding confrontations with Germany and Japan. The result was the bloodiest war in world history, not a stable condominium of satisfied powers. Since that time, Jeffersonians have had to come to terms with the vast set of interlocking political, economic, and military commitments that bind the United States to its role in the postwar era. Jeffersonian instincts call for pruning these commitments back, but it is not always easy to know where to cut.

The other schools are generally skeptical about reducing American commitments. Wilsonians interpret Jeffersonian restraint as moral cowardice. Why, they ask, did Obama refuse to meet the sainted Dalai Lama on his way to kowtow to the dictators in Beijing? Jacksonians think it is cowardice pure and simple. And why not stand up to Iran? Hamiltonians may agree with Jeffersonian restraint in particular cases -- they don't want to occupy Darfur either -- but sooner or later they attack Jeffersonians for failing to develop and project sufficient American power in a dangerous world. Moreover, Hamiltonians generally favor free trade and a strong dollar policy; in current circumstances Hamiltonians are also pushing fiscal restraint. Obama will not willingly move far or fast enough to keep them happy.

The widespread criticism of Obama's extended Afghanistan deliberations is a case in point. To a Jeffersonian president, war is a grave matter and such an undesirable course that it should only be entered into with the greatest deliberation and caution; war is truly a last resort, and the costs of rash commitments are more troubling than the costs of debate and delay. Hamiltonians would be more concerned with executing the decision swiftly and with hiding from other powers any impression of division among American counsels. But Obama found harsh critics on all sides: Wilsonians recoiled from the evident willingness of the president to abandon human rights or political objectives to settle the war. Jacksonians did not understand what, other than cowardice or "dithering," could account for his reluctance to support the professional military recommendation. And the most purist of the Jeffersonians -- neoisolationists on both left and right -- turned on Obama as a sellout. Jeffersonian foreign policy is no bed of roses.

In recent history, Jeffersonian foreign policy has often faced attacks from all the other schools of thought. Kissinger's policy of détente was blasted on the right by conservative Republicans who wanted a stronger stand against communism and on the left by human rights Democrats who hated the cynical regional alliances the Nixon Doctrine involved (with the shah of Iran, for example). Carter faced many of the same problems, and the image of weakness and indecision that helped doom his 1980 run for re-election is a perennial problem for Jeffersonian presidents. Obama will have to leap over these hurdles now, too.

It is not only Americans who will challenge the new American foreign policy. Will Russia and Iran respond to Obama's conciliatory approach with reciprocal concessions -- or, emboldened by what they interpret as American weakness and faltering willpower, will they keep pushing forward? Will the president's outreach to the moderate majority of Muslims around the world open an era of better understanding, or will the violent minority launch new attacks that undercut the president's standing at home? Will the president's inability to deliver all the Israeli concessions Arabs would like erode his credibility and contribute to even deeper levels of cynicism and alienation across the Middle East? Can the president execute an orderly reduction in the U.S. military stake in Iraq and Afghanistan without having hostile forces fill the power vacuum? Will Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez be so impressed with American restraint under Obama that he moderates his own course and ceases to make anti Yanquismo a pillar of his domestic and international policy? Will other countries heed the president's call to assume more international responsibility as the United States reduces its commitments -- or will they fail to fulfill their obligations as stakeholders in the international system?

A Jeffersonian policy of restraint and withdrawal requires cooperation from many other countries, but the prospect of a lower American profile may make others less, rather than more, willing to help the United States.

There is an additional political problem for this president, one that he shares with Carter. In both cases, their basic Jeffersonian approach was balanced in part by a strong attraction to idealistic Wilsonian values and their position at the head of a Democratic Party with a distinct Wilsonian streak. A pure Jeffersonian wants to conserve the shining exceptionalism of the American democratic experience and believes that American values are rooted in U.S. history and culture and are therefore not easily exportable.

For this president, that is too narrow a view. Like Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Martin Luther King Jr., Barack Obama doesn't just love the United States for what it is. He loves what it should -- and can -- be. Leadership is not the art of preserving a largely achieved democratic project; governing is the art of pushing the United States farther down the road toward the still-distant goal of fulfilling its mission and destiny.

Obama may well believe what he said in his inaugural speech -- "we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals" -- but as any president must he is already making exactly those tradeoffs. Why else refuse to meet the Dalai Lama? Why else pledge support to the corrupt regime of President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan or aid Pakistan despite the dismal track record of both the civil and military arms of the Pakistani government when it comes to transparent use of U.S. resources? Did the administration not renew its efforts to build a relationship with the regime in Tehran even as peaceful democratic protesters were being tortured and raped in its jails? Is Obama not taking "incentives" to Khartoum, a regime that has for more than a decade pursued a policy in Darfur that the U.S. government has labeled genocidal?

It is hard to reconcile the transcendent Wilsonian vision of America's future with a foreign policy based on dirty compromises with nasty regimes. If the government should use its power and resources to help the poor and the victims of injustice at home, shouldn't it do something when people overseas face extreme injustice and extreme peril? The Obama administration cannot easily abandon a human rights agenda abroad. The contradiction between the sober and limited realism of the Jeffersonian worldview and the expansive, transformative Wilsonian agenda is likely to haunt this administration as it haunted Carter's, most fatefully when he rejected calls to let the shah of Iran launch a brutal crackdown to remain in power. Already the Wilsonians in Obama's camp are muttering darkly about his failure to swiftly close the Guantánamo prison camp, his fondness for government secrecy, his halfhearted support for investigating abuses of the past administration, and his failure to push harder for a cap-and-trade bill before the Copenhagen summit.

Over time, these rumblings of discontent will grow, and history will continue to throw curveballs at him. Can this president live with himself if he fails to prevent a new round of genocide in the Great Lakes region of Africa? Can he wage humanitarian war if all else fails? Can he make these tough decisions quickly and confidently when his closest advisors and his political base are deeply and hopelessly at odds?

The Jeffersonian concern with managing America's foreign policy at the lowest possible level of risk has in the past helped presidents develop effective grand strategies, such as George Kennan's early Cold War idea of containment and the early 19th-century Monroe Doctrine. If successful, Obama's restructuring of American foreign policy would be as influential as these classic strategic designs.

Recent decades, however, have seen diminishing Jeffersonian influence in U.S. foreign policy. Americans today perceive problems all over the world; the Jeffersonian response often strikes people as too passive. Kennan's modest form of containment quickly lost ground to Dean Acheson's more muscular and militarized approach of responding to Soviet pressure by building up U.S. and allied forces in Europe and Asia. The Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente was repudiated by both the Republican and Democratic parties. Carter came into the White House hoping to end the Cold War, but by the end of his tenure he was supporting the resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, increasing the defense budget, and laying the groundwork for an expanded U.S. presence in the Middle East.

In the 21st century, American presidents have a new set of questions to consider. The nature of the international system and the place of the United States in it will have to be rethought as new powers rise, old ones continue to fade, and attention shifts from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The rapid technological development that is the hallmark of our era will reshape global society at a pace that challenges the ability of every country in the world to manage cascading, accelerating change.

With great dignity and courage, Obama has embarked on a difficult and uncertain journey. The odds, I fear, are not in his favor, and it is not yet clear that his intuitions and instincts amount to the kind of grand design that statesmen like John Quincy Adams and Henry Kissinger produced in the past. But there can be no doubt that American foreign policy requires major rethinking.

At their best, Jeffersonians provide a necessary element of caution and restraint in U.S. foreign policy, preventing what historian Paul Kennedy calls "imperial overstretch" by ensuring that America's ends are proportionate to its means. We need this vision today more than ever: If Obama's foreign policy collapses -- whether sunk by Afghanistan or conflicts not yet foreseen -- into the incoherence and reversals that ultimately marked Carter's well-meaning but flawed approach, it will be even more difficult for future presidents to chart a prudent and cautious course through the rough seas ahead.

Walter Russell Mead is Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He blogs at The American Interest

Finding God on Your iPod - Part 5: Moment of Surrender

Pastor Brian Zahnd presents a message entitled "Finding God on Your iPod: Moment of Surrender".

Stealth Care Reform

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After attempted airline bombing, effectiveness of intelligence reforms questioned

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 7, 2010; A01

The failure of U.S. authorities to detect a plot to bomb a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day has reignited long-simmering concerns that intelligence reforms implemented five years ago remain inadequate to prevent terrorist attacks.

With disaster aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 averted by the bomb's malfunction, rather than by astute analysis of available information, some intelligence officials have suggested that the reforms were the cause of such lapses and not the solution to them.

President Obama has not singled out anyone for blame and has said that everyone involved has "taken responsibility" for their shortfalls. But the most intense scrutiny has been directed toward the centerpiece of the 2004 intelligence reorganization: the National Counterterrorism Center.

The NCTC and its parent, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), were created to force the 16-agency intelligence community to share information in ways that eluded it leading up to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. As the central repository for "all-source" intelligence on international terrorism, the NCTC is tasked with connecting the dots and advising the government on threats.

If dots were not connected concerning the airline bombing allegedly attempted by Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on behalf of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Obama "knows where to look" for the culprit, said one intelligence official who, like many others across the intelligence community, is worried about where the blame will fall and appeared anxious to direct it elsewhere, but would address the subject only on the condition of anonymity.

Other intelligence officials defended the NCTC, countering that some agencies appear less interested in fixing the problems than in concealing their own failure to interpret and flag information they had that might have prevented the holiday incident.

"Anyone who believes that a relatively small organization like NCTC is going to connect every electron in each of those 30 databases is either disingenuous or naive, and certainly knows very little about how intelligence analysis actually works," said a second official who was similarly reluctant to speak for attribution.

In a statement released Saturday, NCTC Director Michael E. Leiter said that al-Qaeda continues "to refine their methods to test our defenses" and that thwarting the group is "our most sacred responsibility." After Obama said Tuesday that "the system failed," Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair released a statement saying that the intelligence community "got" the president's message and acknowledged failure.

Regardless of where fault is ultimately assessed, several officials and experts said the failure to uncover the plot confirmed fears that the massive amounts of terrorism-related information being gathered since the 2001 attacks might outgrow the capacity to manage it. The CIA, the FBI, the military, and numerous Cabinet departments and independent agencies are flooded every day with new data from the field that is available to the NCTC.

"The single biggest worry that I have is long-term quality control," Russell E. Travers, in charge of the NCTC database of terrorism "entities," said in a 2007 interview as his list topped 400,000 and continued to expand. "Where am I going to be, where is my successor going to be, five years down the road?"

Travers is still there, and the database has grown to about 550,000. Beyond connecting the dots, "the challenge we now face is that we are collecting so much information," Rep. Peter Hoekstra (Mich.) said last week of the system he helped devise as the top Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean (R), co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission, which first proposed the reorganization, said the solution was not reducing the powers of the DNI and the NCTC but enhancing them. "Does the DNI have the proper tools?" he asked in an interview. "Does the DNI need to be strengthened?"

"We're not going to be so lucky next time," Kean said.

Others have drawn the opposite lesson from the failure. The CIA -- which lost its position as head of the intelligence community and analyst of all-source intelligence in the reorganization, as well as its direct role as intelligence adviser to the president -- has barely restrained itself from shouting, "We told you so."

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the federal government was radically restructured to emphasize counterterrorism, with new agencies and divisions established. Twenty-two other domestic agencies were combined under a new Homeland Security Department.

The government's intelligence components were placed under the new umbrella of the DNI after the 9/11 Commission inquiry and other investigations determined that the cultural and electronic firewalls between them had prevented information-sharing in the days before the 2001 attacks. Under the new system, agencies were restricted largely to intelligence-gathering and instructed to contribute analysts to rotating duty at the NCTC. Intelligence officials at the CIA and other agencies argued against separating collection from analysis.

At NCTC headquarters, in a massive office building not far from CIA headquarters in Langley, analysts from the CIA and FBI; the Defense Intelligence Agency and others under the Pentagon umbrella; the departments of State, Homeland Security, Treasury and Energy; and other subsidiary agencies such as the drug enforcement and transportation security administrations sift through raw and processed intelligence.

In agency-integrated teams assigned by subject matter and geography, they turn out reports disseminated to thousands of policy and intelligence officials across the government. Agency representatives sit around a table three times daily -- at 8 a.m., 3 p.m. and 1 a.m. -- to update the nation's threat matrix.

A smaller group of analysts maintains the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, the entities database into which thousands of pieces of intelligence information about terrorism suspects from around the world are downloaded each day. Every evening, TIDE dumps what it deems the most important of the day's gleanings into a separate database at the FBI-run Terrorist Screening Center -- a master watch list that is used to determine who is not allowed to obtain a U.S. visa, cross a U.S. border, or board an airliner in or destined for the United States.

The failures that might have uncovered the Christmas plot occurred when analysts failed to connect a Nov. 20 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, reporting a visit in which Abdulmutallab's father expressed concern that his 23-year-old son had fallen in with extremists in Yemen, with intelligence last summer and fall about an al-Qaeda plot.

The intelligence included communications intercepted by the National Security Agency indicating that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was planning a holiday attack and referred to a Nigerian being groomed for the mission. At least part of Abdulmutallab's name was thought to be included in the communications.

It is unclear whether the NSA, in the parlance of the community, "formally disseminated" the information in the intercepts to the NCTC or others. Although initial reform plans to combine all intelligence databases into a one-stop searchable system remain incomplete, NSA databases are available to NCTC analysts, as is the CIA database, in which agents began compiling a biography of Abdulmutallab after his father visited the embassy.

Some of the finger-pointing centers on claims and counterclaims about who should have flagged what for others to pay attention to and who should have looked where without being prompted. Travers, the TIDE chief who also serves as deputy director of the NCTC, predicted the problem even earlier than his 2007 expression of concern about the volume of terrorist information.

"If an organization posts something to its webpage, it can claim to have shared information," he wrote in the forward to a 2005 book published by the Joint Military Intelligence College. "Whether the right people know the information/analysis is there, and actually make use of it, is entirely another matter.

"Indeed, we'll almost certainly be dealing with precisely this problem in the post mortems of our next intelligence failure; the relevant intelligence will have been posted, but the right analysts never found it among the terabytes of available information."

Edge talks new U2 album with Hot Press

It's been out for a couple weeks now, but we're just getting a chance to see the full text of Edge's December interview with Hot Press magazine. It's pretty lengthy and covers a lot of topics, but here are the pertinent parts relating to U2's plans for new music in 2010. Olaf Tyaransen is conducting the interview.

The last time we spoke, you mentioned the possibility of a new U2 album coming out before the end of the year. That's obviously not going to happen, but when can fans expect a new record?

We would like it to be sooner rather than later. We are working on some stuff that sounds amazing, but it's hard to say when it'll actually be done. Well, certainly I don't, and I know Bono doesn't want to leave too long of a gap between the last record and the next one.

What's the feel of the songs you're working on at the moment?

It's too early to say, but because the last record was an experiment writing with Brian [Eno] and Danny [Lanois] in that kind of free-flowing workshop, Bono and I -- we're really kind of songwriting in a much more formal way at the moment. We've got some stuff, more abstract stuff that we could put together as a release, but right now what's really intriguing me is plain, old-fashioned songwriting, and we have some amazing stuff.

How about the Spiderman musical? It's been reported that, thanks to the recession, it's run into problems. Is it going ahead?

Well, it's all ready to go. We're just waiting for the word that we can ... we've pretty much done our job. We're waiting for the word that our director, Julie Taymor, can get back and get into the theatre and start putting the show together. We're told it could be any day. We've got new producers involved: Michael Cohl is coming in, to become an additional producer. So they're busy working on raising finance and getting all that stuff in order. I'm really happy with the music and the script, and the cast that we have are fantastic, so I don't have any concerns, ultimately, but it's kind of frustrating that it's taking so long.

(Edge also answered some questions about U2's plans for the 360 tour in 2010, and you can read those on U2tours.com.)

Ten Ideas for Bono and his New York Times Op-Ed on Ten World-Changing Ideas

"Another fucking Bono op-ed," a tipster astutely notes! The U2 frontman has Ten Ideas to Change the World, and they're in the Times' Op-Ed section "in the spirit of rock star excess." So how 'bout ten ideas to change Bono?

1. Stop writing Op-Eds. Don't be one of those people, Bono.

2. Stop licensing your songs out. Especially "One." You have enough money and we still like some of them.

3. Stop it with the lasers. You don't need lasers. "Ultraviolet" is awesome enough without them.

4. Save the drama for your concerts. Yes, like you say, it would be nice if Nelson Mandela came out to drop the first ball on the line at the World Cup or whatever. But

If he shows up, the world will weep with joy.

isn't entirely necessary.

5. You have enough money to figure out how to follow through with some of these ideas. So do it. Especially the one about making cars more like iPods, which, besides being awesome-sounding, is certainly on the right track. And about getting rotavirus vaccinations to everyone in Africa. This requires money, which you have, and can get out of your rich friends. Do it.

6. Take a difficult position. Balls out, Bono. Noting that there are bad places like "North Korea, Myanmar" in the world who need their Ghandis is nice, sure. But what about Iran? And why not take a stance on Israel-Palestine? Geopolitical conflicts that need opinions now more than ever, as they're constantly on the cusp of either solution or total chaos. You can only spread the good will for world peace for so long before the message starts to become rhetoric in and of itself.

7. Stop looking in the past. Especially like this:

Dr. Anton Zeilinger, an Austrian physicist, is becoming a rock star of science for his work in quantum teleportation, which I know very little about but which I think I may have achieved backstage one night in Berlin in the early 1990s.

Unless it's in regards to recording another Achtung, Baby. While we're at it, don't ever—ever—count in Spanish again. Ever.

8. If you're going to write an Op-Ed, write it for the Las Vegas Sun. Do I think it's ridiculous that you have an Op-Ed page in the New York Times? For fuck's sake, absolutely. But do I think it'll get some people who didn't read the New York Times yesterday to read it today? Yes. That's not a terrible thing. Hell, write for the Las Vegas Sun. They won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service Journalism this year and had to lay off the editor who oversaw the reporting on the prize-winning piece. If you can't, get The Edge to do it. What's he doing right now, eating bananas? Call his ass.

9. Get new sunglasses. Do it for the Children. We're okay with them because we're just used to you but I can imagine you're scaring the children by looking like the future model of SkyNet Terminators. And the children are our future. I'm serious. A pair of Clubmasters would do you just fine.

10. Stop it with the Jesus complex. Are you Bono? Yes. Are you Jesus? No. Your intentions are excellent and at least 60% of your music catalog is still indisputably great. But if you were to play the whole "Bono Thing" a little more low key, tipsters and I might not laugh every time you talk about changing the world like it's the pop culture punchline it is—regardless of the excellent work you've already done!—if you keep on delivering it to everyone year after year.

Ten for the Next Ten, by Bono

IF we have overindulged in anything these past several days, it is neither holiday ham nor American football; it is Top 10 lists. We have been stuffed full of them. Even in these self-restrained pages, it has been impossible to avoid the end-of-the-decade accountings of the 10 best such-and-suches and the 10 worst fill-in-the-blanks.

And so, in the spirit of rock star excess, I offer yet another.

The main difference, if it matters, is that this list looks forward, not backward. So here, then, are 10 ideas that might make the next 10 years more interesting, healthy or civil. Some are trivial, some fundamental. They have little in common with one another except that I am seized by each, and moved by its potential to change our world.

Return of the Automobile as a Sexual Object

Peter Arkle

How is it that the country that made us all fall in love with the automobile has failed, with only a few exceptions, to produce a single family sedan with the style and humor and grace of the cars produced in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s? Put aside the question of whether those models were male (as in longer, lower and wider, Dr. Freud) or female (as in fender skirts, curvy belt lines and, of course, headlights). Either way, they all had sex appeal. (In Ireland in the ’70s, it was the E-Type Jag that made sense of puberty.) Today, however, we have the mundanity of our marriage to the minivan and the S.U.V. and long-term relationships with midsize cars that are, forgive me, a little heavy in the rear cargo hold.

Are aerodynamics to blame? Economics? Or that most American of inventions, design by committee? It hurts me to say this about democracy (and I know because my band is one), but rarely does majority rule produce something of beauty.

That’s why the Obama administration — while it still holds the keys to the big automakers — ought to put some style fascists into the mix: the genius of Marc Newson ... Steve Jobs and Jonny Ive from Apple ... Frank Gehry, the architect, and Jeff Koons, the artist. Put the great industrial designers in the front seat, right along with sound financial stewardship ... the greener, the cleaner, the meaner on fossil fuels, the sexier for me. Check out the Tesla or the Fisker Karma car, designed by the same team that gave the world the Aston Martin.

Intellectual Property Developers

Peter Arkle

Caution! The only thing protecting the movie and TV industries from the fate that has befallen music and indeed the newspaper business is the size of the files. The immutable laws of bandwidth tell us we’re just a few years away from being able to download an entire season of “24” in 24 seconds. Many will expect to get it free.

A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators — in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us — and the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business.

We’re the post office, they tell us; who knows what’s in the brown-paper packages? But we know from America’s noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it’s perfectly possible to track content. Perhaps movie moguls will succeed where musicians and their moguls have failed so far, and rally America to defend the most creative economy in the world, where music, film, TV and video games help to account for nearly 4 percent of gross domestic product. Note to self: Don’t get over-rewarded rock stars on this bully pulpit, or famous actors; find the next Cole Porter, if he/she hasn’t already left to write jingles.

An Equal Right to Pollute (and the Polluter-Pays Principle)

Peter Arkle

In the recent climate talks in Copenhagen, it was no surprise that developing countries objected to taking their feet off the pedal of their own carbon-paced growth; after all, they played little part in building the congested eight-lane highway of a problem that the world faces now.

One smart suggestion I’ve heard, sort of a riff on cap-and-trade, is that each person has an equal right to pollute and that there might somehow be a way to monetize this. By this accounting, your average Ethiopian can sell her underpolluting ways (people in Ethiopia emit about 0.1 ton of carbon a year) to the average American (about 20 tons a year) and use the proceeds to deal with the effects of climate change (like drought), educate her kids and send them to university. (Trust in capitalism — we’ll find a way.) As a mild green, I like the idea, though it’s controversial in militant, khaki-green quarters. And yes, real economists would prefer to tax carbon at the source, but so far the political will is not there. If it were me, I’d close the deal before the rising nations want it backdated.

A Person (Dr. William Li) and a Word (Angiogenesis)

Peter Arkle

Angiogenesis is the process by which new blood vessels grow. This is good — except when it’s very bad, as in the case of cancerous tumors. Blood vessels are their supply lines. Dr. William Li of the Angiogenesis Foundation has called research in this realm the “first medical revolution of the 21st century,” and he should know. (I shouldn’t, given my lack of a medical pedigree, but I learned about it from my bandmate the Edge, who supports Dr. Li’s foundation.) Work on angiogenesis inhibitors is at the vanguard. In a world worrying about whether it can afford health care, advances in prevention are at a premium.

Factoid: Cancers start as tiny nests of malignant cells that do not enlarge until they recruit new vessels to deliver oxygen and nutrients; then a cancer can expand 16,000 times in only two weeks.

Matter Doesn’t Matter

Peter Arkle

God, it appears, is a Trekkie. (God help us.)

Dr. Anton Zeilinger, an Austrian physicist, is becoming a rock star of science for his work in quantum teleportation, which I know very little about but which I think I may have achieved backstage one night in Berlin in the early 1990s. At any rate, it seems to have something to do with teleporting properties or bits of information, not physical objects; even though Dr. Zeilinger plays down the possibility of a “Star Trek” moment, his breakthroughs are catching the attention of the nonscientific world for their metaphysical implications. His own version of E=mc2 ends in a cosmic punch line: that when it comes to the origin of the universe, information matters more than matter.

Could it be that God is a nerd?

Festival of Abraham

Peter Arkle

Here’s something that could never have happened in the Naughts but will maybe be possible in the Tweens or Teens — if there’s a breakthrough in the Mideast peace process. The idea is an arts festival that celebrates the origin of the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Every year it could be held in a different location; Jerusalem would obviously be the best place to start.

In Ireland, at the height of the “Troubles,” it was said that the only solution for rabid sectarianism was to let 1,000 punk-rock bands bloom: music helped create a free space for dialogue (of a high-volume variety). So no politicians allowed. Artists only.

People Power and the Upside-Down Pyramid

Peter Arkle

A lot of us have seen or lived the organizational chart of the last century, in which power and influence (whether possessed by church, state or corporation) are concentrated in the uppermost point of the pyramid and pressure is exerted downward. But in this new century, and especially in some parts of the developing world, the pyramid is being inverted. Much has been written about the profits to be made at the bottom of the pyramid; less has been said about the political power there. Increasingly, the masses are sitting at the top, and their weight, via cellphones, the Web and the civil society and democracy these technologies can promote, is being felt by those who have traditionally held power. Today, the weight bears down harder when the few are corrupt or fail to deliver on the promises that earned them authority in the first place.

The world is taking notice of this change. On her most recent trip to Africa, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton bypassed officials and met instead with representatives of independent, nongovernmental groups, which are quickly becoming more organized and more interconnected. For example, Twaweza, a citizen’s organization, is spreading across East Africa, helping people hold local officials accountable for managing budgets and delivering services. (Twaweza is Swahili for “we can make it happen.”)

Taking the Fight to Rotavirus

Peter Arkle

The thing is, they exist, these vaccines. They’re not a mere hope, like an AIDS vaccine. And one of the brightest bits of news in 2009 is that rotavirus vaccines have been shown to work not only in nations with low child mortality, but in the poorest countries, where diarrhea (not a killer in our house) caused by rotavirus infections takes the lives of 500,000 children a year. The World Health Organization just this summer issued a strong recommendation that rotavirus vaccinations be part of every nation’s immunization program. From this vantage point, I like the look of the next decade.

Viva la (Nonviolent) Revolución

Peter Arkle

“As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work,” President Obama said in his Nobel acceptance speech, “I am living testimony to the moral force of nonviolence.”

So, he might have added, are the Germans and Eastern Europeans who came out a couple of months ago to celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Wall. And so are the brave Iranians who continue to take to the streets despite the certainty of brutal repression. Like Neda Agha Soltan, they are living (and bleeding and dying) testimony.

The start of the decade ought to be a time for a little bit of hope — not the wispy stuff, but battle-hardened hope, forged in the grim, purposeful spirit of the times. So I’ll place my hopes on the possibility — however remote at the moment — that the regimes in North Korea, Myanmar and elsewhere are taking note of the trouble an aroused citizenry can give to tyrants, and that people in places filled with rage and despair, places like the Palestinian territories, will in the days ahead find among them their Gandhi, their King, their Aung San Suu Kyi.

The World Cup Kicks Off the African Decade

Peter Arkle

It’s getting easier to describe to Americans the impact of the World Cup — especially the impact it will have in Africa, where the tournament is to be held this summer. A few years ago, Ivory Coast was splitting apart and in the midst of civil war when its national team qualified for the 2006 jamboree. The response was so ecstatic that the war was largely put on hold as something more important than deathly combat took place, i.e. a soccer match. The team became a symbol of how the different tribes could — and did — get on after the tournament was over.

This time round, for the 2010 World Cup, naysayers thought South Africa could not build the stadiums in time. Those critics should be red-faced now. South Africa’s impressive preparations underline the changes on the continent, where over the last few years, 5 percent economic growth was the average. Signs point to a further decade of growth to come. Canny investors will put more capital there. This in turn has the potential to shore up fragile young democracies across the continent.

It would be fitting if Nelson Mandela, who has done more than anyone for Africa’s rising, would kick off the opening ceremonies. If he shows up, the world will weep with joy.

Bono, the lead singer of the band U2 and a founder of the advocacy group ONE and (Product)RED, is a contributing columnist for The Times.