Without Googling it, who is Mehmet Ali Agca?
It’s okay if you didn’t know. I didn’t even know and I had to look it up.
On May 13, 1981, Agca, a Turkish man, shot at Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square and struck him twice. Agca was apprehended, convicted and sentenced to a life in prison. The Pope later forgave him after he recovered, even requesting to Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi for a pardon, which was granted. Agca was pardoned in 2000 and deported back to Turkey. When John Paul II died in the spring of 2005, Agca was one of the many people who visited the Vatican City to pay their respects. Agca had reportedly sent Pope John Paul II a letter earlier that year wishing he’d get better.
And yet Sinead O’Connor was forever demonized for ripping up a picture of the Pope on a Saturday Night Live broadcast on Oct. 3, 1992. O’Connor’s career would never recover as much as it did. She was never thought of in high esteem to begin with. She had a shaved head and a thick Irish accent that was often the subject of parody. She was 25 on the night she ripped apart the photo and screamed, “Fight the real enemy!” after performing an a capella version of Bob Marley’s “War.”
During the next week’s show when Joe Pesci hosted, he mentioned how he would’s slap her if he saw her do it. The audience applauded. Did Pesci slap his friend George Carlin who spoke out for years against Christianity, the Catholic Church and organized religion in general? Of course not. Because Pesci knew he’d have his ass whupped by Carlin. I hope today especially Pesci looks back at that moment with a lot of regret that he said the wrong thing at the wrong time.
It was a picture. She didn’t burn the Pope in effegy. She didn’t call for the release of Agca. She didn’t do anything but tear up a picture. And yet, people in America lost their minds over it. Why? Because Pope John Paul II was so popular. How dare someone criticize him? It’s typical Christian hypocrisy. They can criticize us. We can’t criticize them.
Nine years after the SNL episode, the Pope whose health was declining had publicly denounced the sexual abuse that had been going in the church. Maybe it was because the Catholic Church had received word the Boston Globe was interviewing victims of sexual abuse in the Boston archdiochese. About six weeks after the Pope acknowledged the sexual abuse, the Globe‘s Spotlight department published the first of many stories about the abuse. What was often considered a cruel sick joke for years was now coming out.
It may also have been because Fr. John Geoghan was going to trial in the winter of 2002 on child sexual abuse charges. The Catholic Church had defrocked Geoghan in 1998 but the damage had already been done. Geoghan, who was later strangled and stomped to death in prison in 2023, had been accused of sexually assaulting 130 people as he was bounced around from parrish to parrish for decades. Allegations went back to when Geoghan had just started out as a priest in the early 1960s. And he was just one of a many priests.
But O’Connor was the problem because she didn’t play nice like a good girl? She didn’t play by the “Boys Club Rules” like other singers of the era did. Whitney Houston turned herself from a lesbian singer who looked intimidating to white people to a bubbly pop singer with curly hair who could pass as their child’s kindergarten teacher. O’Connor’s true crime was being herself in a time when women weren’t allowed to be strong, but supporting of whatever man was in their lives.
O’Connor called herself a “protest singer.” She kept her head shaved because this was against traditional standards for women. People assumed O’Connor was a lesbian. She later said she was but mentioned she’s probably mostly heterosexual but a quarter queer. And yet when The Hunger Games movies came out, women shaved a side of their heads because that’s the way it was done in the movies. She was married four times, the first to record producer John Reynolds, and later to musician Steve Cooney.
Two weeks after the SNL incident, she had appeared at a 30th anniversary tribute to Bob Dylan at Madison Square Garden. People began to boo and jeer her. Kris Kristofferson came on stage and gave her a hug and said for her not to “let the bastards get you down.” Her response was “I’m not down.” But the comments from the audience were so deafening that she again sung an a capella of “War” before leaving the stage in tears.
And from then on, she mainly remained in the shadows. But I don’t think a singer like O’Connor would’ve ever appealed to the masses. You have to make music everyone wants to hear, not music people need to hear. No one is going to buy a protest song. If they do, they’re gong to misinterpret it as something else, such as Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” or pretty much the entire music catalogue of Rage Against the Machine.
O’Connor also didn’t fit the public persona of a musician. She struggled with mental issues admitting on Oprah Winfrey she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2003 and then later suffered from complex post-traumatic stress disorder and borderline personality disorder. She also suffered from agorophobia. On her 33rd birthday, she attempted suicide and following the suicide of her son, Shane, in January of 2022, she still felt suicidal and had to hospitalized.
As of this posting, no cause of death has been released. But one thing is certain, knowing what we know now, if a singer had done it in 2023, they would’ve been hoisted up and applauded for being outspoken, especially if they were a man. Someone like Jason Aldean can talk about beating up protestors or those that don’t fit a certain demographic and people like it. Women musicians still have a long way to go but they’re treated a lot better than they did in 1992. Ted Nugent is threatening to kill Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and more Democrats and people cheer. Even Bill Maher said on his show Real Time that we owe O’Connor an apology.
We do. We’re sorry.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 