If you haven’t read Bono’s op-ed piece in the New York Times this past Saturday, you can check it out here. In that article the lead singer of U2 discusses Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, and the importance of the Presidents’ comments about the Millennium Development Goals in his UN speech last month. This phrase in particular stood out to Bono:

“We will support the Millennium Development Goals, and approach next year’s summit with a global plan to make them a reality. And we will set our sights on the eradication of extreme poverty in our time.”

Bono addresses the perceived European projection of unrealistic hopes upon our President by confessing to it, and then offering some legitimate reasons why. He also defends such sentiments by being candid about the value of celebrity. Something he knows very well.

What struck me more than anything in this article was Bono’s argument about the global value of America as an idea. He ends his article with a rather rousing paragraph that initially evokes a measure of pride in this reader, followed by an upsurge of questions. Bono writes:

“But an America that’s tired of being the world’s policeman, and is too pinched to be the world’s philanthropist, could still be the world’s partner. And you can’t do that without being, well, loved. Here come the letters to the editor, but let me just say it: Americans are like singers — we just a little bit, kind of like to be loved. The British want to be admired; the Russians, feared; the French, envied. (The Irish, we just want to be listened to.) But the idea of America, from the very start, was supposed to be contagious enough to sweep up and enthrall the world.”

At first blush I agree with this, and even like the way it makes me feel. I too would like an America that is more love and less, well, obnoxious. As I let his comments sink in, however, the first question that comes to mind is, “What is the idea of America?” The trouble for me in Bono’s last sentence above is that it assumes there is a foundational idea of America. As an American, I struggle to get at something like that.

Our traditional history gives us some clues about an idea of America: a pilgrim land for those seeking freedom; a place of manifest destiny, rugged individualism, and ingenuity; and a participatory democracy. Recent history has its share of clues as well: a land of consumptive waste-makers; a community of distrust, cynicism, and abdication; and a greedy capitalist state. It would seem to me that the idea of America often depends on the time and circumstances within a given period of history.

However, that would be too deterministic for my liking as well. Almost as bad as saying, “Here is the idea of America right here, plain as day.” History can teach, but it doesn’t have to control. What’s more, history is made up of our interpretations of the past, and what we selectively remember in the process of telling it. Finding the one idea of America there is tricky, if not altogether impossible.

As I see it, the idea of America we each have is one that we have chosen. From that choice comes fruit. This is how I can read a comment like Bono’s and not be afraid of yet another western hegemonic imposition of our way of life on the rest of the world. The very problem he sees the Obama administration addressing.

The value to the rest of the world is not the idea of America per se, but rather America’s relationship to her understandings of that idea. If the idea of America is something we claim to possess definitively, we will protect it at all costs, and replicate it without respect to dissent. If the idea of America is something we all glimpse in our own way, but remains more than what we can contain, then the possibility of welcoming new understandings of that idea, or expanding that idea are there. When those possibilities are present, protection and replication can give way to hospitality and sharing. That would lead to the love Bono and other global eyes are looking for.