Everyday Is Like Monday

Everyday is like Sunday,

Everyday is silent and gray.

-The Smiths

When I was in junior high I started listening to this music from across the pond.  It was not like the things that I heard on the radio in the 1980's.  It was sad and beautiful and wryly humorous, and it was sung in a voice that stood out from the crowd, a silky smooth tenor with a sort of bell like clarity.  That voice was Morrissey, the band was The Smiths, from Manchester England.  A lot of their music was about the desperation of existence for the young, the poor and the misfits.  One of their most famous songs is Everyday Is Like Sunday, which talks about wanting something, anything, to change, even if it means blowing it all up and tearing it all down.  Perhaps not for everyone, but when I was in 7th grade that sounded like exactly what I wanted, I felt left out of most things, pushed past and ignored by a lot of the world.  It was not a good feeling, and I'm glad that I had Morrissey to sing me through it.

Some people feel that way and they don't just have songs about blowing up the world to sooth their souls.  They have less winsome men than Morrissey encouraging them to actually do it.  Whether it was the anger of punk music, or the raging intensity of metal, or the jangly ennui of The Smiths, music and art can give you an outlet for a lot of negative emotions that cannot be safely vented otherwise.  Listening to Johnny Rotten sneer: "I wanna destroy passers by," can be cathartic, and much safer for society than disenfranchised youth who actually go and try to do it.

Fundamentalists don't get this about art.  Which is why you constantly have concerned groups wanting to censor artists, whether it was NWA or Marilyn Manson.  The thinking goes: stifle the expression of negative things and people won't think about them.  Except that is absolutely the opposite of what really happens.  The young man who blew himself up in an Arianna Grande concert Monday night, in the same Manchester that Morrissey wryly suggested ought to be "bombed down" in his song, did not get the humor of that suggestion.  He had people suggesting to him that such artistic expressions of alienation and angst were probably of the devil, signs of the decadent and jaded demise of western culture. Morrissey would most likely agree, however his approach to addressing that decadence and decay would be writing scathing lyrics not improvised explosives.

This is not a defense of the terrorist who has committed the latest atrocity.  This is an attempt to understand him, and I guess also a defense of art as a means of trying to sort through this sort of mess.  I felt alienated in my teen and young adult years, and I had music to help me sort through those feelings.  All things considered, I wasn't as much of an outsider as I liked to imagine; I was a white (read majority population), middle-ish class kid with a stable family and a decent education in process.  I didn't have everything I could want, but I had enough of most things that I really needed.  Whether I knew it or not, I lived in the middle of immense privilege. I could not see the forest for the trees.

What if, instead of Morrissey, I had some angry white-supremacist telling me about how I ought to take back what is rightfully mine.  Skinheads (the neo-nazi type) were an actual thing then, I might really have run into some of that.  I might have been Dylan Roof, or James Holmes, please do not forget that terrorists grow in all kinds of skins.  Thinking that your people are immune from perpetrating this sort of violence is highly problematic.  There is a system in almost any culture that can create these broken pieces.  Middle Eastern Islam has ISIS and Al Qaida and suchlike, we have the Klan, and the Alt-Right, Africa has Boko Haram, there are even Buddhist terrorists in Myanmar.  All it takes is for people to feel disenfranchised and set upon by a majority.  Islam has had the most recent waves of it, because the parts of the world where Islam is the primary religion have been wracked by war and poverty, and on top of that, the values taught by conservative/fundamentalist Islam are directly at odds with what they call decadent lifestyles of the West.  The Western powers also happen to be the ones dropping bombs and Tomahawk missiles on them.

Does any of this justify, blowing up a bunch of teeny boppers at a concert?  Absolutely not.  What it points at is that we have a big problem that cannot be solved by ratcheting up our security.  These dangerous, unstable and violent people can be homegrown, and increasingly, they are. Don't get distracted by shiny objects and the desire for easy answers.  ISIS will take responsibility, and they have some claim, but they wouldn't be able to reach this young man if he didn't experience the very real isolation that besets immigrant populations. They would not have been able to hone his hate so sharply if he had other voices to assure him that other people, maybe even those kids at the Arianna Grande concert, were going through the same pile of crap he was.

One of the ways we can understand each other better is through art.  Islam has given us art.  So have all the other religions, so have atheists and agnostics, so have happy people, and sad people, stable, sane people and mentally troubled people.  If I want to understand the experience of black people in this country, and touch the anger and the trouble, I can listen to Public Enemy, KRS-One, or Ice T back in the day, it won't tell me everything I need to know, and it might not actually present me with the most fair and balanced perspective, but it will get me feeling things from a different angle.

Salman Abedi, and the people who groomed him and sent him on this path, only feel from one angle, the angle of hatred. They see an Arianna Grande concert as a way to strike out with that hatred, at the "decadent" culture they see as their enemy, they also see a way to inflict the pain of dead children on the nations that have dropped bombs on "their" cities. They are not convinced that Manchester is their city any more than Morrissey, they have the same feeling of alienation from the world they live in, but they can't just sing it away.  We need to understand that in all it's complexity and terror.

Can art save us from this violence?  I don't know, but I do know that bombs are doing a really terrible job of saving anyone, so lets try something else.