Who would have thought The Smiths and the US Presidential candidates would make such good bedfellows?
Though the rainy streets of Morrissey’s gloomy Manchester are miles away from the packed-out American auditoriums that punters are filing into in order to bear witness as their chosen windbag unleashes jargon, it turns out hate and crushing sadness are universal. So, although Mozza might not have been thinking about psychopaths like Ted Cruz when he put pen to paper all those years ago, the weight of human suffering is a beautiful thing, a lofty theme with the ability to span time and place.
To that end, here is a list of the sad sacks and sadists dominating the news cycle at the moment and The Smiths songs that fit them best. Read and weep. Literally.
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Hillary Clinton – ‘Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want’
Poor Hillary. She’s like America’s perennial middle child – the poor duck who had to sit and watch while her older brother Barack unwrapped a brand new bike for Christmas a few years ago, and now has to stare on in horror while her balding baby bro Bernie hogs the Nintendo Wii that Santa should have brought her.
‘Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want’ perfectly sums up her frenzied desire for America’s top job, and the line “See the luck I’ve had, could turn a good [wo]man bad” correlates nicely with her eagerness to sell her soul to so many devils.
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Ted Cruz – ‘Unloveable’
Unloveable is as unloveable does. What better way is there to describe someone who will openly consume his own lip froth/tonsil stone/whatever the fuck that thing was on national television? Oh, and his anti-women stance on pretty much every issue doesn’t help either.
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Bernie Sanders – ‘The Boy With The Thorn In His Side’
Given “a murderous desire for love” is such a perfect way to describe Bernie and his emphatic, dogged desire for national unity and wealth redistribution, I’m surprised that he isn’t already using it as a slogan. Let’s just hope “still they don’t believe me” aren’t the words escaping his lips in a few months, as he loses the nomination to a candidate as flawed as Hill-dawg.
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John Kasich – ‘Never Had No One Ever’
Wait, maybe I don’t need to include Kasich in this column: didn’t he drop out of the race months ago? What? He’s still running? Are you sure? Wow. OK, well let’s look at the positives: at least that means he hasn’t said anything racist enough to get him on the news. Right? So I guess he’s the winner in that regard. That slim, arguably irrelevant regard.
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Donald Trump – ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’
Hey, America: when this whole Presidential race kicked off, what feels like a lifetime ago, we weren’t laughing at you. We were laughing at a man named Donald Trump, a hideous spray-tanned potato with delusions of grandeur. Then, as he began to blurt out increasingly ridiculous things, gaining followers along the way, we didn’t just chortle at him – we chortled at the brain dead hatemongers stupid enough to support the man.
So yeah, it was funny for a bit. Satirists worldwide rubbed their hands together and got to work.
But here’s the thing. We live in troubled, pivotal times. Last month the planet reached temperatures hotter than those ever before recorded in history, leading some scientists to declare a state of climate emergency. Kim Jong-un – North Korea’s answer to Trump – is busy throwing his dummy from the pram once again, miniaturising warheads and preparing for war.
America faces a choice. And it’s a choice that affects the whole goddamn world. So forgive us if we’re not laughing, America. We’re not even smiling. We’re begging you: rise above hate. Cause that joke isn’t funny anymore. It’s too close to home. And it’s too near the bone.
Donald Trump image courtesyFlickr/Gage Skidmore, Morrissey image courtesy Flickr/JD Lasica.
That’s all folks. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to put my head between my knees in the brace position, preparing for the worst.
