I wrote this when the album turned 24....
"Looking back on that decade of decadence that was the 1980s, some music critics have spoken of The Joshua Tree as a kind of voice crying in the wilderness, a rebuke to those who thought they had found what they were looking for in the dollar bills peeled off and slapped down by the suit-and-tie whose face was red like the rose of a thorn bush, with all the colors of a royal flush.
"U2 surely heard the promises of American capitalism as well, but they could also hear those fighter planes whose mission was to protect it. They witnessed the triumphalism of Reagan’s America, but they also saw the sky of San Salvador ripped open, and the rain pour through a gaping wound pelting the women and children, pelting the women and children. For Bono, painted roses and bleeding hearts were no solace amid the bullets that rape the night of the merciful.
"Through the walls of wealth and materialism they heard a city groan under the red-orange glow of missile fire; they felt the heartbeat of the mothers of the disappeared whose children’s laughter was only heard in the wind and whose tears were only seen in the rainfall, but every time they’d turn the key and slowly unlock the door, the result was the same: Outside It’s America."