She was brave. She was beautiful. She was brilliant.
We all found our lives enriched thanks to her gift and, as is so often the case with our most fragile and wounded artists, she suffered mightily and was gifted/plagued with an acute sensitivity that must make dealing with our world, on the best day, difficult.
She was not only bold, but prescient, calling attention to a cause that, in subsequent years, would be exposed as the appalling travesty it was (and remains), so many thousands of lives upended (or ruined) due to systemic rot from within an organized religion, a cover-up at the highest levels abetted by power, corruption and, as ever, tons and tons of money. (Think there wasn’t more than a slight element of misogyny at play? Christopher Hitchens was, years later, invited to speak about the same issue, applauded and paid handsomely for his time.)
Also, it’s well worth noting that, in our sociopolitical and cultural climate, which gets shallower by the day, like a putrid beach at low tide, we have filthy rich crybabies ranging from the opportunistic cretins like Louis CK to the disgusting Johnny Depp to the insufferable Dave Chappelle whining that they’ve been “cancelled”, all because men can no longer say and do sexist, racist, or bigoted things with impunity. Look at someone like O’Connor, who actually suffered blowback that damaged her career, and never forget that it was calculated, cowardly, and cynical blowback. She paid a serious price for exposing the scum hiding in plain sight, and there’s no other word for that but heroic.
Reasonable minds can debate that ripping up a picture of the pope, on prime time TV, was not the time or place to make such an incendiary statement (her immediate lifetime ban proved Lorne Michaels is an opportunistic, soulless weasel); in a pre-Internet world she didn’t have the chance to see the millions of people who would have rallied to her side, who would have saluted her for speaking Truth to Power. What seems safe to predict is that, despite the backlash (this moment defined her and arguably ruined her life), in the years ahead, it will be regarded as a timely—and necessary—clarion call, a rare instance when genuine moral outrage was warranted, and required. History will recall this bravery with fondness.
As is so often the case with some of our most fragile and wounded artists, they treat the world much better than it treats them. Here’s hoping she’s found lasting, overdue peace.
