Did Bono Prank Pelosi With That Awful St. Patrick's Day Limerick?

Far be it from me to pick on an elderly woman twice in one week, but Nancy Pelosi just won’t leave the world alone for that long.

Worse, neither will U2 frontman Bono.

“I got this message this morning from Bono,” Pelosi told the attendees of the White House’s annual Friends of Ireland luncheon. She said that Bono “has been a very Irish part of our lives,” whatever that means.

Before we get to the meat of the matter, let me admit my cultural bias right up front: I don’t care much for U2. This makes me a bad child of the ’80s, I’m sure, but U2’s sound is not for me.

Give me some upbeat ’80s rock/pop/New Wave, or some mopey emo ’80s alt-rock, and I’m a happy man. U2 falls somewhere between those cracks. Also, rock is supposed to be fun, not pretentious. U2 is less “sex and drugs and rock and roll” than “We’re so very oppressed and important.”

I feel like I would have liked lead guitarist The Edge a lot more if he’d never met Bono and joined a band with a lot less pretension. Freshman year at Mizzou I had a roommate who owned a copy of The Joshua Tree and apparently no other albums. Can’t remember where I hid the body. (Kidding. Mostly.)

Major respect to U2 for their longevity and creativity, but when they come up on Spotify I’m more likely than not to hit Skip.

Major laughs at Bono for this self-important tripe in the form of a triple limerick:

Oh Saint Patrick, he drove out the snakes
With his prayers, but that’s not all it takes
For the smoke symbolizes
an evil that arises
And hides in your heart as it breaks

And the evil has risen, my friends
From the darkness that lives in some men
But in sorrow and fear
That’s when saints can appear
To drive out those old snakes once again

And they struggle for us to be free
From the psycho in this human family
Ireland’s sorrow and pain
Is now the Ukraine
And Saint Patrick’s name is now Zelenskyy

Maybe it sounds better in the original Junior High School English?

Bono’s stinker of a poem barely scans. It only sometimes rhymes. And Bono tried to take the limerick — a format meant for dirty jokes — and elevate it into… well, whatever that was supposed to be.

Kill me. Kill me now. I’d rather be forced to listen to The Joshua Tree turned up to 11 on endless repeat for the rest of my life than listen to Nancy Pelosi read this stinker of a poem to a luncheon crowd of the deeply uninterested.

And yet I did.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that the life of a blogger isn’t filled with danger.

Maybe — just maybe — Bono was pranking Pelosi. His writing style might not be to my personal taste, but that doesn’t mean the man can’t write a lyric, occasionally even a stunning lyric that I enjoy listening to now and then.

It seems almost impossible that the same man who wrote “Desire” could have written that triple-stack of ill-considered limerick-ish dreck.

I almost have to believe that Bono pulled a prank on one of the most powerful people in the world, for all the world to see.

If it was a prank, Pelosi fell for it, hook, line, and stinker.

If you’re so inclined, here’s the video. It has all the production value of an ’80s dad with a Sony VHC-C Handycam taping Junior’s school play.