I suggest that describing soldiers raping a child is going to overpower everything that comes after it—it will disrupt the album in a way from which it might not be able to recover.

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Bono says perhaps he should do it on stage—a blast of ugly truth amid all the camp, postmodernism, and irony. He goes into the other room to do an interview with Joe Jackson from the Irish music paper Hot Press, in which he continues to talk about Bosnia and how small U2's concerns seem when stacked up next to that.

He reads "In Cold Blood" to Jackson and then says, "Sometimes, in the middle of all the kitsch you have to stick the boot in. But that lyric, too, is about overload and I want to use it live, though it may only be samples or lines I like. But it's not so much about the cold blood involved in the various acts I describe. It's about the way we respond to those things."

The symbol of the terror in what was Yugoslavia is the ongoing seige of Sarajevo, a great cultural center quite Western in its ways and now ringed by Serbian guns. Sarajevo represents what is at stake in this war because it is not an ethnic enclave, it is a modern city. The Muslims there are not fundamentalists, they are as secular as British Christians or American Jews. Sarajevo is a city—like New York or London—where ethnic background is not a big subject among the citizens. It is impor­tant to understand that the Serbian nationalists who are firing mortars into Sarajevo are not only shooting at Muslims, they are shooting at Croatians and Serbians too. The Muslims, Croats, Jews, and Serbs of the city are huddling together trying to figure out why these backward fanatics are trying to kill them and why the outside world doesn't care. Imagine if your own hometown were set upon by bands of lunatic fundamentalist Christians and you'll get a sense of what they are going through. In fact, it is this intermingling of different tribes, the erasing of ethnic lines, that the reactionary Chetniks in the Serbian army most want to punish and destroy.

I suspect that the Western reluctance to defend Sarajevo has roots so deep neither Sigmund Freud nor Big Bad John could ever excavate them. Sarajevo, after all, is the exact spot where the twentieth century went off the tracks. It was in Sarajevo in 1914 that the Bosnian nationalist Gavrilo Princip managed in spite of Chaplinesque incompetence to assassinate Archduke Ferdinand on the third try, setting off World War I, which in turn set off like dominoes the Russian Revolution and the spread of Communism, the rise of Nazism in Germany, World War II and the development and deployment of the nuclear bomb, and from which all the horrors and more than a few of the marvels of our century

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descend. Every statesman making decisions now learned as a kid in history class that the world went wrong because of entangling alliances— because all the countries of Europe were nuts enough to allow them­selves to be drawn into a dispute in far-off Sarajevo.

It feels these days as if this entire century-spanning sequence of events was a big historical aberration and that as the 1900s come to a close all of those mistakes are being untangled so that the next century can begin normally. The last few years have played like a videotape of the twentieth century running backward, undoing all the detours of the decades since the Archduke got plugged: zip, there goes liberalism, zoom, there goes the sexual revolution, holy smoke, the Berlin Wall just got unbuilt, Eastern Europe is free, oh, there're those rotten Nazis, Com­munism evaporates, wow, there goes the USSR itself, the Dickensian underclass returns, and here we are, back to war in the Balkans and the whole world trying to avoid being sucked into a mess in Sarajevo. Yikes, says the battered old twentieth century, this is where I took that wrong turn! The "widening gyre" Yeats described in "The Second Coming" turns out to have a rewind switch.

Further back, behind all the historical and political baggage, I think there's another reason the West is so frightened to stick their collective nose into Bosnia. Superstition. Anyone with even a childhood memory of the book of Revelations has to get a little twitch of millennialist dread when thinking about the impending approach of the year 2000. Certainly Ronald Reagan made no secret of his belief in a coming apocalyptic confrontation between the forces of divine justice and Sa­tan's evil empire. He happily talked about it until his advisers warned him to shut up, he was scaring the horses. Bill Clinton claims to have that old-time American Baptist religion too. As Jimmy Carter did. Despite what the sophisticates in the middlebrow media think, this stuff isn't just the province of yahoos and hucksters. God or His impostors lurks in the back of brains from Washington to Teheran, from Waco to Jonestown, and whenever a century ends He starts humming loudly and clearing His throat. When a millennium ends? Even Castro checks his Holy Water.

There are only two places where God (alive or dead) is not consid­ered a factor in human events—England and academia. Elsewhere He figures into most equations right alongside money, sex, property, and power. In the West during this century the principle End of the World

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Myth has been the legend of the Third Secret of Fatima. According to the popular story (which flattens out or ignores a lot of ambiguities in the actual reports), the Blessed Mother appeared to three Portuguese peasant children during World War I and predicted (I) that the current war would soon end but an even bigger one would follow and (2) unless Russia was converted it would plunge the world into Armageddon in the second half of the century.

A third prediction was sealed and was supposed to be made public in I960. It never was—one apocryphal story had it that Pope John XXIII opened it, read it, and fell over dead. (Maybe it was a metaphysical practical joke, maybe it said, "Pope John will die when he reads this.") There has been all sorts of speculation about what the Third Secret of Fatima is. The most common rumor is that it gives the date of the end of the world, and the Church is afraid that if they tell the public, despairing people will go out and lose themselves in orgies and aban­don. Which actually makes no sense at all, because anyone who believed in an end of the world prediction given by the Virgin Mary to the Pope would obviously be someone who would spend all his or her remaining time going to confession and collecting plenary indulgences—not partying like it's 1999. From the Church's reaction it seems more likely that the third letter of Fatima predicted the ordination of women or the end of clerical tax breaks or something else that would really spook the curia.

Just as the Fatima visitations followed closely on the first Sarajevo crisis, the current crisis has been accompanied by reported sightings of Mary in Medugorje, a Yugoslavian village in the mountains about a hundred miles from Sarajevo. The Blessed Mother is said to have begun appearing to children there in 1981. Word spread quickly and the faithful started flooding to Yugoslavia in trains, planes, and automo­biles.

I got the lowdown on Medugorje from my uncle Gus, who journeyed there with a planeload of American pilgrims. When he got back I asked Gus how holy his hejira was. He said it was hard to get past the attitude of his fellow faithful. "When we arrived there one fella began cursing all the local citizens who didn't speak English. He yelled, 'This place is full of foreigners!' Then we got to go into the room where the children were kneeling. We all stood there watching for a while. All at once they began smiling. Their eyes moved together across the room. 'The Blessed

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Mother is here,' our translator said. The children would speak, carrying on half of a conversation with someone we couldn't see. Then they asked if any of us American visitors had any questions we wanted to ask the Virgin Mary."

"Gee, Gus," I said, "that's quite an opportunity. I hope you didn't waste it asking about the dog races."

"No, at first no one knew what to ask her. Then one lady raised her hand and said, 'Are there cats in heaven?' The translator explained to us that that was really not the sort of question with which the children wanted to pester the Mother of God and did we have anything really important to ask. So then one man raised his hand and asked, 'Are there black people in heaven?' "

The translator gave up then and Gus considered that maybe large portions of humanity had good reason to worry about being cast into hell. I guess the Black Madonna of Czestochowa was not on this group's itinerary.

Even though the country around the shrine has been destroyed by the war, pilgrims continue to arrive in Medugorje, and the children who say they've seen Mary have been given secret errands to run. To prepare for what, no one knows—maybe they're picking up groceries for the next Last Supper.

Don't think this search for end-signs is only the province of Roman Catholics, either! Protestant fundamentalists began genuflecting like Jesuits after the accident at Chernobyl, the Ukrainian nuclear power plant, in April of 1986. The Chernobyl disaster was in many ways the first public evidence of the coming collapse of the Soviet empire. Radia­tion levels shot up as far away as Norway, where the reindeer were irradiated. Bible readers freaked at the news that Chernobyl translated into English was "wormwood." The book of Revelations predicts that one of the signs of the end of the world will be the pollution of rivers and springs by a great flaming star: "The name of the star was Worm­wood; and a third of the water turned to wormwood, and men in great numbers died of the water because it was poisoned."

Next Monday Bono's wife All is going to Chernobyl for three weeks with a Greenpeace group to make a documentary about the effects of the radiation there. She brushed off Bono's concerns about the danger by telling him that he will be exposed to more radiation standing at the

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