I don’t think the French Revolution’s death wish will prevail over American individual freedom, particularly if the Lions of Freedom, the Yankee Winston Churchills of this nation, put their heads together. However, they’ll have to face a new Napoleonic face in Bono of U2. Yes, he’s got quite a look about him in that cover photo on Time Magazine (Dec. 26/05), when he was named a Person of the Year for 2005. He’s wearing sunglasses tinted a light pink and a ring in his ear, but that expression he’s giving us won’t brook any aspersions on his manhood. The pursed brow and slitted eyes mean business.

John Lennon, as Bono points out to the Time reporter, was a dreamer. Apparently, Lennon’s dreams require action and there’s no doubt but that Bono is an intellectual man of action. With Bill and Melinda Gates at his side riding corporate shotgun, Bono’s DATA Foundation is leaving Bill Clinton’s Global Initiative in the dust. Bono receives first billing in the Time story, and billing means everything these days. News empires such as TimeWarner are like movie studios in the old days. Everyone, as Sam Goldwyn pointed out, can be "fired till the studio needs them."

It would seem there’s a race to win American Idol and then there’s the biggest contest for the New World Order’s Messiah. I thought John Lennon won that prize years ago. Obviously, Bono doesn’t think so. His least favorite Lennon song is Imagine: "People have made it an anthem for wishful thinking. I hate it."

It’s a very dangerous thing to look down on a proven legend like John Lennon. Barbara Streisand looked down on Ronald Reagan and it certainly hasn’t helped her career. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois patronized Abraham Lincoln in another issue of Time and that will boomerang on him eventually.

Bono intends to prove he is "better than Lennon." I don’t think Bono has a prayer in that contest. The harder he tries, the sillier he’ll look. If Bono is as Napoleonic as he seems, he could prove to be a threat to Clinton’s image as the most influential man in the world. Bono might even end up treating our former President in the same way he treated Lennon.

God knows, I’m no fan of Bill Clinton. In terms of his stand on abortion, I think he is Mr. Death. However, since Bono hasn’t yet come out against abortion and Roe v. Wade, I assume he’s just as clever as Clinton. What I mean by that is, with the present abortion rate, the poverty and hunger which Clinton and Bono claim to be battling could well be reduced to vastly smaller pockets of grief in 10 years. It takes a lot of exploitative talent to wage a war against something that abortion and euthanasia are certain to curtail within a decade.

The Nobel Prize awaits both of these so-called Messiahs. If there’s a common denominator to the Nobel Prize-winners, it’s their belief that death can be used as a solution to the problems and challenges of life. Death and the virtual destruction of the Declaration of Independence by Roe v. Wade certainly can make miracles seem to happen. I wouldn’t want to be that kind of miracle worker if it left a body count that large. I just want to overturn Roe v. Wade. No, I’m not a progressive internationalist or a man with a "global-sized Initiative," I’m a Catholic, a "promiscuous" one like Bono’s description of his own brand of Christianity.

"God is interested in the progress of Mankind, individually and collectively," proclaims Bono.

So, I guess, God is a "progressive," like Clinton and Bono. For Mr. U2, his DATA is a double acronym for "Debt, Aids, Trade and Africa" and for "Democracy, Accountability and Transparency in Africa". That last one I could accept as desirable. Even Clinton said, on The Larry King Show, that philanthropic efforts are having a hard time with African governments. Few, though he doesn’t come out and say so, are the least bit honest, let alone "transparent."

However, to build a kind of baseball team to compete with poverty and hunger in Africa and to use abortion as your clean-up batter is monstrous. That’s like a hockey team with every other player a goon, a Gestapo expert and a Leninist bagman. Well, the progressives don’t think so and I guess DATA will have a third acronym: "Deaf Always to Abortion". Right now it seems, at least for progressives, that people are the problem, and the fewer of them there are on the planet, the better.

In the end, I just don’t think death will prove an acceptable solution to the problems and challenges of life, the discomforts of pregnancy, and the pain of poverty and hunger. I know they shoot horses, but I’ve not yet seen a set of mammals other than Man engage in a formal, institutionalized thinning of its own herd. It’s certainly un-Darwinian, not to say unnatural to most of us. But then again, we are not scientists or progressives and we are not trying to win a Nobel Prize.