Could Life Ever Be Sane Again?

Europe sprawls a labyrinth of diverse cities and cultures, its map a puzzle of histories told and untold over centuries: inconceivable to mere human spans of time. As a North American, it’s awe-inspiring to see vaulted stone buildings erected over 1,000 years ago, so much finer than strips of box stores and strip malls and uncomplex apartment complexes abundant in my corner of the planet. It’s an okay place to be stuck in, even if you’re sad. I like distractions – and there is enough sensory distraction that, while walking down such overflowing streets, for some forgivable moments, you can even forget your own thoughts.

The magnificent old Europe: Prague

I understand why people want to conserve Europe and its cultures – even though I admittedly have a fairly non-existent sense of national identity; Canadians are really just polite people who play hockey and eat maple syrup, or so I hear. I also understand the desire, through immigration and other means, to help those who are in dire need and live in constant danger in their birth countries, and will risk their own breath, flesh, and bones, to escape. It’s also true that introducing different cultures allows us to experience a mosaic of cuisine, voices, art – and yet, no culture is perfect - and religions in particular may pose troubling, even dangerous complexities. Both an abundance of immigration and a lack of immigration have drawbacks – and this is too complex an issue to discuss here – and not the purpose of what I have to say.

Political conversations are scary. Religious conversations are scary too. People get very intense, very angry. They say these topics should always be avoided on first dates – or the divorce will likely occur before the first kiss. And yet - we are tethered to a backdrop of morals and systematic structures that are injected into unsuspecting us, from birth, so slowly it is difficult to step back and think critically about all we have been told. Absorb, absorb, absurd? Questioning these topics is productive, but uncomfortable.

A few weeks ago, it was 5 am and I was crying alone in a Manchester hotel room. I had been crying for a few hours, and the tears wouldn’t stop, which frightened me. Depressed me knows all about crying, it’s nothing new; however, sometimes a strange breed of tears occur, tears that just won’t physically stop, even when the mind and body are seemingly cried out, empty, exhausted, like the death rattle of a gas tank on a desert road trip. Sobbing, I guess would be a more specific verb to describe this, but that doesn’t quite capture it either.

For weeks I had been planning to go on the Morrissey tour, to 9 tour dates in 8 cities, in 5 countries. Train and airplane tickets would blaze me across varying countrysides and cities and languages in less than a month. Currencies and tickets in hand, I was finally going to visit continental Europe for longer than a mere 48 hours. However, as most Morrissey fans who follow him around the world would agree, sightseeing is a sweet side effect, and we are mainly here for the man who wrote the songs that saved our lives.

Morrissey singing during his successful UK tour in 2018

I touched down in Manchester after a not-so-bad flight, checked into my hotel, and was sitting in Arndale Centre finally eating some better-than-airplane food when the official announcement came.

Bad news hits in waves, the first wave comes as questions, confusion (no, it can’t be, or is not real), the next wave comes in numbness (shock and shaking hands), and the tidal wave of news eventually comes as a flow of tears. The waves crash onto the shore of your consciousness so fast your actual understanding of the situation sometimes cannot even yet grasp its reality (the worst I ever felt this was when I learned my 15 year old cat was dying: I just couldn’t make sense of it at first).

This time the bad news was cancellation of the entire Morrissey tour. My sadness wrapped around the fact I wouldn’t be seeing him, and an aching, plunging sense of missing him: for many of us, these concerts bring us pure joy – and a feeling of belonging, which we have trouble finding in everyday life. Then questions began their trek of my late-night consciousness: Is Morrissey okay? What would I do with myself alone overseas? Would I still be seeing my friends? Do I just fly back to the question mark of home? All of this upset and confusion of course stimulated more tears – but it’s the behaviour I witnessed on social media that nudged into the core of my pain – and now, on reflection, I think that’s what triggered their unstoppable flow.

It was nothing short of hypocritical, tasteless, witch-hunt level hatred.

Social media mushroomed into a hotbed of grotesque insults and twisting of words, bandwagon bullying, and hit-and-run nasty internet digs at already-hurting fans... And many people who professed to be so sensitive towards the suffering of other humans were in fact the most indulgent ringleaders of such behaviour. The schoolyard of internet anonymity was fully ablaze – and Morrissey was the target – simply for speaking his mind. Anyone who showed support was sure to be hit with the crossfire.

No wonder people are afraid to say what they think or feel.

I hurt for Morrissey and his bandmates, I hurt for my friends, and I hurt for the state of the world.

More beautiful old Europe: The Scott Monument

Our group is perhaps a microcosm for scary times... times where you must tacitly agree and say the ‘correct’ thing or face rapid-fire groupthink backlash. Intelligent debate dies and erupts into thoughtless name-calling. On Twitter, people who had never met me, never spoken with me, were calling me – and my very sweet friends - ‘racist’ because we love Moz – and continue to support him. This carried on for days, and one person I considered an acquaintance tore into me quite badly while I was trying to enjoy the Gothic magnificence of the Scott Monument in Edinburgh... Let me tell you, if you begin crying on those towering spires, you will, rightly so, attract some concerned looks. So, I turned notifications off on my phone and found sympathy from a gargoyle. Fascinatingly, or perhaps not – it was mostly white males who attacked me – and in the same sentence would throw in a sexist slur and inform me I am confused, privileged, and emotionally blinded with an invalid opinion. Sexists calling me racist for standing by my favourite artist – oh, my head.

My opinion is simply this – I do not have to precisely agree with someone’s politics to continue to care for them and admire them. I do not throw away my friends for disagreeing with their political opinions, so why would it be any different for the artist who has given me so much joy and inspiration? It just doesn’t make sense. You do not start a hate campaign against a family member because you disagree with their politics – if you have such a problem with a political party or viewpoint – would it not make far more sense to focus your energy towards the party itself? Morrissey has guided me through hard times, and helped me feel understood when I’ve felt lost -  how could I not love him? He has created timeless songs, tirelessly promoted animal welfare, and yes, he's saved human lives as well. The worst of the keyboard warriors, who in words claim to be so virtuous, let their actions speak otherwise: what have they done other than spread misery, anger, even slander?

This isn’t to say one must always agree – it is fine to disagree because that stimulates thoughtfulness and change. However, as I said earlier, intelligent debate appears to be sputtering and dying in its last breaths. There is nothing wrong with openly discussing varying opinions – but somehow along the line we have lost this ability. Name-calling, personal attacks, unjustly calling people ‘racist’ - do not promote discussion of complex issues – and the terrible, unfortunate truth is, it will hinder other people from speaking their minds

So, my sobs were intensified by what I saw as a vicious witch-hunt directed at someone I truly care for, and - even if I have never met him personally, I do love Morrissey. He interacts with kindness towards his fans and at heart I believe him to be a kind person with good intentions – but he is also a challenging person – a person who is not afraid to say things that some may find abrasive – things that confront our thoughts and beliefs – things that make us question the world around us. This is rare in popular singers, but it has been known to happen: other artists from John Lennon to Kanye West have also experienced reactionary response to their outspokenness.

The reaction to Morrissey, however, has been particularly virulent and bitter: which begs the question, why? Part of it is, undoubtedly, an increasing obsession with ‘political correctness’ - which verges on censorship. But another factor, I believe, boils down to relationships – and people understandably feel they have a very personal relationship with Morrissey, because he exposes so much of his soul in his art. I may be wrong in the following observation, but it seems that older fans especially, those who grew up with the Smiths, have been the most vocally antagonistic towards Moz. I personally cannot wrap my head around how these fans can, with brutal fickleness, throw away what has been such a big part of their life and development, but my hunch is that they built too much of their own reflection into Moz, thus ignoring that he is also human with a right to his own unique views. I have probably been guilty of this myself at times, and likely, most of us do this to the people who strike the strongest chords in our souls. Humans long to feel less alone, so we look to others to help explain the complications of being alive, of existence, to us. Beings who touch us so deeply are rare discoveries, and sometimes we spend our entire lives looking for them. Therefore, if we find an artist who can break down our barriers, we might expect something terribly unrealistic, which is, for them to become an object; in simple words, we want the artist (or friend, or lover – whoever it may be) to become an exact mirror to ourselves. This is an undeniably unfair position to put another human being into, and artists are human beings (not 40% paper mache!) So, the forlorn teen, who, in the 1980’s, lay on their bed looking up at Smiths posters - the teenager that still exists in many fans - seems unable to cope with their idol holding differing views to their own. At some point, the artist has been dehumanized, and is not permitted the right to his or her own opinions. As we all know, break ups can get very nasty.

No wonder most artists are afraid to express their own views.

But the things you once loved Morrissey for: his braveness and boldness - which he so humanly, so beautifully, so eloquently exposes simultaneously with his own vulnerability and fragility, are now the things you condemn him for.

So, while trying to make the best of my undoubtedly saddened time in Europe, these thoughts would drift in and out of my head as I walked down cobbly streets throbbing with July heat. Cemeteries filled with monuments to lives lived before ours, squares surrounding crumbling statues, and cathedrals stretching towards the sky with hope of a better beyond – all of these altered stones hold secrets of history’s faults and flaws and ravages. Do we learn from them? Or do we repeat ourselves in seemingly endless cycles of confusion?

Censorship and destruction of free speech cannot bring peace – one only needs to visit the Museum of Communism in Prague to see the devastation this can create for art and the questioning mind. It wasn’t so long ago that even fairly tales were dismantled and reconfigured. Our artists ought to be the ones who help us better understand ourselves and the world by challenging our views. By viciously attacking those we disagree with, rather than – simply disagreeing and trying to learn more – we will only promote monotony, stagnation, decay, and more hatred and division.

Has censorship helped us in the past?
Via the Museum of Communism, Prague

I admire Morrissey’s courage to speak his mind. In these times, this is an incredibly brave thing to do.

I will continue to support and love him: peer pressure cannot change my feelings and thoughts, and the beauty he has created will stand the test of time, of this I feel sure.