After a successful run as the guest editor of The Independent last year (thanks again to Thomas for sending me a copy), Bono has taken the reigns of guest editor for Vanity Fair this month.
According to his “Letter from the Editor,” Bono did his best to rename the publication Fair Vanity, but gave up when a photographer(?) Grayden tried to rename his band, 2U.
The issue has 20 different covers with various celebrities including Oprah, Muhammad Ali, Maya Angelou, Warren Buffett, George W. Bush, Don Cheadle, George Clooney, Bill and Melinda Gates, Djimon Hounsou, Iman, Jay-Z, Alicia Keys, Madonna, Barack Obama, Brad Pitt, Queen Rania of Jordan, Condoleezza Rice, Chris Rock and Desmond Tutu.
I’ll see if I can track some of them down. Or you can order copies straight from Amazon.com:
Here’s the full letter:
Let me explain what I’m doing here, and there.
By “there,†I don’t mean my day job as singer with Irish postpunk combo U2.
By “there,†I mean data—the organization which campaigns on debt, aids, and trade in Africa.
By “there,†I mean the One Campaign in America—which is becoming like the National Rifle Association in its firepower, but acts in the interests of the world’s poor.
By “there,†I mean (Product) Red—which piggybacks the excitement and energy of the commercial world to buy lifesaving aids drugs for Africans who cannot afford them.
And by “there,†I mean Edun—the missus’s clothing line that wants to inject some dignity through doing business with the continent where every street corner boasts an entrepreneur.
These all relate to the same place and the same idea: that Africa is the proving ground for whether or not we really believe in equality.
For example, we are witnessing a general desire for and drift toward action on climate change, a very positive thing. But imagine
for a moment that 10 million children were going to lose their lives next year due to the Earth’s overheating. A state of emergency
would be declared, and you would be reading about little else.
Well, next year, more than 10 million children’s lives will be lost unnecessarily to extreme poverty, and you’ll hear very little about
it. Nearly half will be on the continent of Africa, where H.I.V./AIDS is killing teachers faster than you can train them and where you
can witness entire villages in which the children are the parents.
All over the world, countless children will die as a result of mosquito bites, dirty water, and diarrhea. It’s not a natural catastrophe—it’s a completely avoidable one. Diarrhea may be inconvenient in our house, but it’s not a death sentence.
This is happening at a time of great geopolitical unrest. The majority of people in the world no longer idolize Western ideals
of justice, freedom, and equality. They don’t believe we believe in them. I think the wider world needs to see a demonstration of
those “Western†values, through pharmacology, agro-ecology, and technological help for those in extreme circumstances, in
their hour of need. These are dangerous times—it’s cheaper and smarter to make friends of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them later. Ask the four-star general Colin Powell.
That’s the context for what you could call a “swarm-of-bees strategyâ€: ganging up on these problems from every side.
data is an advocacy and policy operation based in Washington, D.C., London, and Berlin and targeting the G-8 capitals.
The One Campaign to Make Poverty History (a member of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty) is an umbrella
group of American NGOs and activists from across the political spectrum who believe these issues are about justice, not charity.
Nearly three million Americans so far have signed the One Declaration, pledging to help the world’s poor. Students and
teachers, NGOs and C.E.O.’s, punks and churchgoers … the only place that hasn’t been active is the shopping mall.
So myself and Bobby Shriver—chairman of data and a hero on the issue of debt cancellation, who sold an arcane economic issue to congressional members on both sides of the aisle—started (Product) Red. So called because red is the color of emergencies—the only way to describe the aids epidemic. We believed that to ignore the neon and creative force provided by the corporate world was to ignore the truth about where most of us live and work. A few years ago I was with the great Robert Rubin, former U.S. Treasury secretary under President Clinton. He said if we are serious about our stuff, we will have to improve on two fronts: (1) publicizing the scale of the problem and (2) showing that the problem can be solved. He added that, if we were serious about both, we would need the kind of marketing budget Nike or Gap has at its disposal.
He was right. Without our corporate partners—American Express, Apple, Emporio Armani, Converse, Gap, and Motorola—we could never afford such bright neon, or the acres of bold billboarding. These companies are heroic (and—shock, horror—we want them to make money for their shareholders because that’s what makes (Red) sustainable). In the first nine months, $25 million has gone directly from (Red) partners to the Global Fund, which grants money to health-care organizations around the world to fight aids, tuberculosis, and malaria. That is more than Australia, Switzerland, and China contributed last year, combined.
As you read this—historic—issue of Vanity Fair, the Global Fund is benefiting, but that’s not the main reason we kidnapped this
publication’s extraordinary photographers and storytellers. We needed help in describing the continent of Africa as an opportunity,
as an adventure, not a burden. Our habit—and we have to kick it—is to reduce this mesmerizing, entrepreneurial, dynamic
continent of 53 diverse countries to a hopeless deathbed of war, disease, and corruption. Binyavanga Wainaina’s piece on Kenya
is an eye- and mind-opener. From here, what’s needed is a leg up, not a handout. Targeted debt cancellation and aid mean 20 million more kids are going to school, and 1.3 million Africans are on lifesaving aids drugs. Amazing.
So now I hope you better understand the “here,†i.e., my signing up as guest editor.
Lastly, I’ve always imagined that if I hadn’t been a singer I would have been a journalist. But in truth, my bandmates saved
me from disappointment, as I’m no natural editor. The fact that we have 20 covers for one issue bears testament to that. I am flat
out of hyperbole to describe Annie Leibovitz—a devoted mother who set out on a world tour to photograph these cover stars—and inchoate in the company of such a team of wordsmiths and imagemakers.
And then there’s Graydon, a true rock star. (Checklist: mad hair, natty dresser, de rigueur unrepentant smoking, etc. I looked like his manager.) He is the dramatist that we’ve been looking for. By the way, he tried to change the name of our band to 2U—it was his last defense against my challenge to call this issue Fair Vanity.
— B o n o