A chorus of boos

Sinéad O'Connor died a year ago.

The news at that time focussed on the uproar following her appearance on Saturday Night Live, where she tore up a photo of the Pope.  She got booed at Madison Square Gardens shortly afterwards - at a tribute for that renowned protester Bob Dylan, of all people.

Now, the reports in July 2023 were all about how ahead of her time she was in decrying the prevalence of child abuse and sexual exploitation by the Catholic Church -- years before it was seen as a widespread problem. True enough, I guess. This was in 1992, but I'd been watching CODCO, the Newfoundland-based comedy sketch series that aired on CBC between 1988 and 1993, where Andy Jones took several swipes at reports of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, in light of the Mount Cashel Orphanage scandal of 1989, so the sort of abuse Sinéad O'Connor was calling out was not unknown - just not widely acknowledged.

Still, it seems Sinéad took the brunt of the attacks - she was a woman, after all.  Bob Dylan and Andy Jones, as men, certainly weren't spared criticism, but somehow, it never got quite as vitriolic, did it?

Spotify startled me, some time after O'Connor's death, by sending me this song by Kris Kristofferson, who approached Sinéad O'Connor on the Madison Square Gardens stage, having been sent to escort her off, and instead said, quietly, "Don't let the bastards get you down." 

I'm singing this song for my sister Sinéad 

Concerning the god awful mess that she made 

When she told them her truth just as hard as she could 

Her message profoundly was misunderstood 

There's humans entrusted with guarding our gold 

And humans in charge of the saving of souls 

And humans responded all over the world 

Condemning that bald headed brave little girl 

And maybe she's crazy and maybe she ain't 

But so was Picasso and so were the saints 

And she's never been partial to shackles or chains 

She's too old for breaking and too young to tame 

It's askin' for trouble to stick out your neck 

In terms of a target a big silhouette 

But some candles flicker and some candles 

fade 

And some burn as true as my sister Sinéad 

"He didn't carpet-bomb Cambodia"

Shane MacGowan and Henry Kissinger had pretty well nothing in common, except for dying within twenty-four hours of each other.

Because I'm a Canadian, and therefore blocked from news organizations on social media, I learned about the demise of MacGowan from actor Christopher Eccleston, who posted his picture on Instagram.  My heart sank, because I was rather a Pogues fan.  (I was rather surprised to hear that Henry Kissinger wasn't dead already, to tell you the truth; he was 100 years old, after all.)

Someone on Twitter - I continue to refuse to refer to it by its rather Teutonic rebranding - was nonplussed, not that either of the men had died, but that MacGowan had received rather more coverage and longer articles.  The wags were quick on their keyboards: "He wrote better songs."

One of them, and my personal favourite, is "Haunted" which was first recorded in 1986 with Cait O'Riordan.  Some years after getting kicked out of the Pogues for his legendary benders, MacGowan re-recorded the song with his friend Sinéad O'Connor (who later would report him to the police when she witnessed his taking heroin, but they were still friends when O'Connor died earlier this year.) 

You were so cool, you could have put out Vietnam.

Another tenuous link to Henry Kissinger?  (Nah.)