Last week, on St Patrick’s Day, the world was greeted with the stomach-churning news that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi would read a poem about Ukraine by Bono over a lunch in Washington DC. Bono, I think, comes under a lot of harsh and undue criticism. Most of all from his fellow Irishmen. But even the most unfairly maligned people deserve to be a little bit maligned sometimes.
Bono’s poem to Pelosi – an annual tradition as it turns out (weird) – was a series of conjoined, half-rhyming, arrhythmic limericks musing on St Patrick’s reverberations through history, and most recently how that has found its expression in the invasion of Ukraine. So far, so deeply tonally inappropriate.
“The snake symbolises/an evil that rises” reads a particularly wince-inducing couplet. But if the rhetorical flourish of using snakes as a metaphor for Putin and Russian imperial expansion was not boorish and glib enough, the great kicker comes at the end: “Ireland’s sorrow and pain/Is now the Ukraine/And St Patrick’s name now Zelenskiy.”
As Bono attempts to loop Ireland's mythology into the long, swooping arc of history he has managed to both undermine the severity of the crisis unfolding in eastern Europe and turn Irishness into a caricatured punchline
There is an awful lot to unpack. But the problem is not Bono, nor his strange limerick-sharing tradition with one of America’s most powerful Democrats. Nor is it his pathological uncoolness – that is actually one of his most charming qualities, and if being uncool were a crime there would be far more Irish superstars than him in the dock. And nor is it his profound lack of aptitude for poetry – no one is good at everything, most people aren’t even as good at one thing as Bono is.
Nor is it even the preening, self-interested, navel-gazing gaucheness of a Friends of Ireland luncheon marking St Patrick’s Day with a parochial ditty about a tragic war thousands of miles away – unpleasant and unserious an image though that is. No. The problem is the tyranny of the bad analogy.
As Bono attempts to loop Ireland’s mythology into the long, swooping arc of history he has managed to both undermine the severity of the crisis unfolding in eastern Europe and turn Irishness into a caricatured punchline. And somehow he has decided that snakes and saints are the easiest medium to explain the seismic historical significance of Putin’s rapaciousness and Zelenskiy’s heroism. It was as though someone attempted to euphemise a complicated and hard to understand war for a room of six year olds.
But it is hard to feel patronised by something so patently silly. Rather the analogy failed on two counts: it did not tell us anything about the world and it did not adopt the base-level seriousness required to talk meaningfully about an ongoing war. Which is surprising given Bono’s divinely gifted capacity for earnestness.
The result is crass and immature and aesthetically displeasing. But in the very least it is a nice active reminder to avoid bad analogies. They are worse than saying nothing at all.
If bad history screws up our understanding of the past, then bad historical analogies limit our capacity to fix things in the future
But someone was not paying attention. Boris Johnson just a few days later provoked ire across Europe after he compared Brexit and the Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion. It was – if it were a contest – markedly more offensive and a lot less amusing than comparing Zelenskiy to St Patrick.
The world, he said, faced a moment of choice “between freedom and oppression” before explaining that he knew the Ukrainians shared the same instincts for freedom as the British: “When the British people voted for Brexit . . . it’s because they wanted to be free to do things differently . . .”
It might have worked, if we exclude the important details that voting in a referendum called by an elected government is not exactly of the same tenor as fighting and potentially dying in a resistance against a foreign invasion. And let us not forget the awkward implication that the European Union is somehow a tyrannical regime to be escaped, in spite of Ukraine’s recent attempts to join. Apart from all of that, no notes.
Just as analogies can be insensitive, diminutive and lazy – as this one is – they can undermine our understanding of the world. If bad history screws up our understanding of the past then bad historical analogies limit our capacity to fix things in the future. They obfuscate rather than illuminate the truth. And they are popular with the likes of Johnson precisely because they are imprecise and muddying.
Think of the popular comparisons made between former US president Donald Trump and the fascism of 20th-century Europe. In the first instance, insinuating Trump is on par with some of the worst dictators the world has seen leaves us bereft of language to describe the unique evil of the likes of Hitler and Mussolini. And it works in the other direction too – such absurd analogies detract from the real wrongs of Trump. It is an unhelpful and impoverished way to think seriously about the world.
So we should beware of bad analogies – ubiquitous though they are. History and mythology, even St Patrick, have much to tell us about the world. “Not everything warrants comparison” would be a good place to start.