Turning One Love into Band Aid only sanitised the horror
Celebrity mourners turned terrorists into stars and the Manchester concert into a display of egotism, writes Donal Lynch
‘The grief police, led by Piers Morgan, were gunning for Ariana...’
IT was a letter signed by a long list of stars you wouldn’t have even thought knew each other, from Blondie to Paloma Faith to Anna Friel.
And its sentiments, on the aftermath of the terrible attacks in Manchester, were laudable: “Let’s not do the terrorists’ job for them.”
By this was meant, let’s not be cowed, let’s continue to hold large public events, including the follow-up concert, and thereby “show” would-be bombers that life goes on, even in the face of their orchestrated mayhem.
Ariana Grande wrote similar messages in her own letter to Manchester fans and after the London attacks earlier this week ever more stars, including a Kardashian, piled in with exhortations to love not hate, to be resilient. “By showing that we won’t be cowed, that we can come together in the face of adversity, we nullify their message,” Kym Marsh, Shaun Ryder and others wrote.
Is it true to say that having a galaxy of starry chief mourners “coming together” helps the situation though?
Public beacons of stoicism are important in a dark time — one thinks of the dignified leadership of the Norwegian prime minister during the aftermath of the Anders Behring Breivik attack in 2007 — but perhaps there is a misunderstanding about the role that media and celebrities have in abetting the “job” of the terrorist.
Even five years ago, we could count the major post9/11 attacks in Western countries on one hand, and knew every date on which they had been perpetrated. They were known by names like 3/11 or 7/7 (references to attacks in Madrid and London, respectively). In mid-2017 it’s probably unlikely that even the dimmest lone wolf with a backpack genuinely believes that society will completely come to a halt once they carry out their awful plan.
What they can bank upon, however, is that their disgusting bids for infamy will not get lost in the news round-up of worldwide atrocities. Their names will live on. They might even end up on the cover of a magazine, like the Boston marathon bomber did.
Or perhaps they will go live on social media during an attack to check what the real-time response to the whole thing is, as the Orlando shooter did on Facebook during his murderous rampage (Twitter recently got serious about shutting down pro-Isil accounts, but establishing a real social-media brand is a strategy all 21st-century organisations must effect).
The writer Judith Colen argues that terrorists “crave … what Paris Hilton and Madonna crave for when they have sex in public. What they long for… is an obsessive audience that will turn everyday terrorists into media celebrities”.
Morrissey, who added to the chorus of outrage after Manchester, once sang that “those who kill, the news world hands them stardom”. That is a powerful incentive for the next generation of self-exploding, radicalised nerds. And it is amplified, not lessened, by the critical mass of stars tweeting about them around the clock.
You can’t blame Ariana Grande for wanting to do something for Manchester. She is a young entertainer doing the best she could and the grief police (led by Piers Morgan) were gunning for her almost from the moment the attacks took place, accusing her of not doing enough to help the young victims. And there was probably an important symbolism for her and her young fans in performing again in Manchester. It would have been important to go back at some point.
But the tone and timing of One Love was all wrong. In turning the response to the attack into a Band Aid-style feel-good singalong, complete with Miley Cyrus and her alien Lolita act, Grande and Co sanitised the horror of what had just taken place.
Did a city in the teeth of grief really need Robbie Williams looking like he was recovering from a stag party, or an Oasis brother sounding like a dodgy tribute act?
Did a world in shock really want such a flagrant festival of egotism, cliche and mawkish, sugary sentiment?
For once Donald Trump sounded like the saner option when he questioned how there could be a return to normalcy so quickly. And the British police obviously agreed with him. The reported “ring of steel” of heavy security around the concert-goers gave evidence to the fact that pop might soothe but it doesn’t quell official paranoia.
It sounds like something from a Wilfred Sassoon poem to say “we will not be beaten” when there are 23 people who lost their lives.
The concert also turned an atrocity, which was obviously designed to have the maximum impact, into an even bigger global event, which meant that far from “defying” the aims of terrorism, or providing “medicine” for it, as Grande herself called it, the well-meaning show and its stars were just another facet of the problem.
In transmuting public pain into a pageant, a performance and a chart-topping hit, the pop stars showed that they had learnt their lines just as well as the politicians who concoct rationales for the attackers.
The real problem might be that this ups the stakes. The Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh was described by one US academic as having achieved a level of fame equivalent to OJ Simpson or Princess Diana. With each passing terrorist attack the stakes and the targets become bigger and more tragic as disturbed young men clamour to match this level of visibility and notoriety.
Salman Abedi’s worldwide infamy was as pre-planned as the Manchester attack itself. A concert with young girls might strike us as the lowest of the low but there are undoubtedly new nadirs ahead, and we will have to decide if installing stars as chief mourners is really the way to go.
They might write letters assuring us that they stand in the way of terrorists but between the lines is the clear message: if you bomb it, we will come.