…and extreme talent attracts the Angel of Death

In one of the more ghoulish elements of yesterday’s Norwegian tragedy, Islamist websites based in the Middle East have been covered in proclamations of support of the killing spree throughout today. This seems to represent an odd muddle of both revelling in the death of anyone Scandinavian (and therefore anti-Allah) and a mistaken belief that, once again, the siren attraction of 77 celestial virgins had been at work.

In fact, the man suspected of the killings – and there is talk of an accomplice – appears to be a Christian fanatic who targeted the ideas of Norwegian socialism, in that both the bomb and the deaths were closely related to the offices and activities of the country’s Labour Party. A great many people will go to their beds in Britain tonight reassured that it couldn’t happen  here. My own experience as a blogger suggests that they may well be suffering from dangerous optimism.

As a website owner, you get all sorts arriving at the comment threads. My moderation setting is at the lightest possible, but as it happens, only last week I was scanning through the thousand or so ‘contributions’ that have been automatically screened out. My purpose in doing this was to see if by chance the automatic system was censoring things it shouldn’t. It isn’t; in fact, what it hides is that there are some seriously disturbed people out there.

The element of hatred in British politics has sky-rocketed over the last five years. And for the obsessive compulsive personality with a dash of schizoid paranoia thrown in, nothing feeds the illness more effectively than a polemicist who clearly isn’t listening. It is ironic that during my youth, we had a level of radical-action political involvement far exceeding anything we see today…..but nothing like the spitting venom with which people address each other in every forum from TV discussion shows to internet threads now.

I can’t believe this is a sudden rise in mental illness: rather, it is that the mad folks have been given far more objects to despise than they ever had before. Nothing hacks off a crazy more than people paying no attention to what they think. If you look across the spectrum of UK socio-economic debate today, it often feels like none of the buggers are listening: they are like robots reading a script, with loud music blasting through their headphones so all the groans of derision can be blocked out.

Bod Diamond, Harriet Harman, James Delingpole, Andrew Lansley, Gordon Brown, Lloyd Blankfein, Alex Ferguson, Rupert Murdoch, The Unite Union, Mahmoud Ahmadinnejhad, Tesco, Herman Van Rompuy and a host of other Big Cheeses and powerful organisations seem to be constantly on transmit, with ‘receive’ switched off. One feels this about the Republican Party over the US debt ceiling; but one also gets a strong sense of the utter inability of both ageing Thatcherites and pre-Blair Labour relics in the UK to look at the evidence, and accept that they made a terrible mistake.

In all seriousness, I think all those named and shamed above should up their personal and corporate security tomorrow, at the latest. But more importantly, they should take a positive lesson from the appalling events in Norway: that rigid mentalities are like a magnet for the mentally ill.

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In a different and yet oddly related way, extremely talented people are very often attracted to anything able to relieve the pain of that angst somehow destined to accompany their genius. Tonight’s latest moth who hovered too often around the heroin flame, Any Winehouse, represents a tragic death that was as inevitable as it was pointless.

Of all the contemporary musicians I admire, Winehouse was the one whose eclectic expression of musical form most impressed, dazzled and delighted me. Although I often pilloried her as Amy Winelake, I have all her albums. Like so many of her admirers, I would’ve loved to see her get clean and go on knocking out greatness until she was eighty. But there was always something of the Judy Garland about her.

My artist chum Hugh – forever the clinical critic of form over content – rightly said to me two years ago that her work was over-produced. I’m sure that, over time, she’d have returned to the purity of her very early stuff, but we shall never know. The world has been robbed of her maturity, and that is something about which every fan of unique musical expression should be sad.