Slowhand is slow-brained
So. As I'm about to enter year 3 of being deployed to perform contact tracing rather than conducting book clubs, screening movies, or having arts programming at my library, this came across my docket:
After months of railing against COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccines, and refusing to play shows that require vaccination proof, Eric Clapton has seemingly embraced a controversial theory claiming that secret messages are allegedly being hidden inside YouTube videos with the goal of driving mass compliance with COVID precautions. The 76-year-old rock icon pointed to the theory as an explanation for his divisive views on the global pandemic that has killed more than 5.6 million people worldwide.
“[I thought], ‘What’s going on here?’ I didn’t get the memo. Whatever the memo was, it hadn’t reached me,” Clapton told YouTube channel the Real Music Observer about why he decided to team up with his old friend — and fellow lockdown opponent Van Morrison — for the anti-lockdown screed “Stand and Deliver,” as well as releasing his own similar take, “This Has Gotta Stop.”
Look. I'm not going to grab the low-hanging fruit and make snarky remarks about alcohol or cocaine having ruined his mind. I don't have to. Why? Because Eric Clapton is the same guy who said this:
Do we have any foreigners in the audience tonight? If so, please put up your hands… So where are you? Well wherever you all are, I think you should all just leave. Not just leave the hall, leave our country … I don’t want you here, in the room or in my country. Listen to me, man! I think we should send them all back. Stop Britain from becoming a black colony. Get the foreigners out. Get the wogs out. Get the coons out. Keep Britain white …
He, of course, blamed the drink and drugs for his racist rant. Which is funny, because I've been drunk and high many a time, and I never unleashed such a tirade. Booze and coke don't make you into someone you're not; they give you license to be your true self.
Clapton is still regarded by many to be a lion of music. But the fact is that he's fallen in with all the other racists and know-nothings who go from conspiracy theory to conspiracy theory trying to "explain" Covid. One cannot blame addiction on this. Clapton, supposedly, has been dry for decades. The cocaine didn't make him become racist, it just made him express it. And the whisky hasn't made him into an old conspiracist, it just revealed it.
Full disclosure: Hendrix and Page blow away Clapton every day of the week, twice on Sundays. But Clapton does have a body of work of which to be proud. Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs will forever be a masterpiece. Clapton is a prime example of separating the art from the artist, the work from the human. Because as a human, he's rather a piece of shit.
So, Mr. Clapton: I would love it if we were hypnotizing people to get vaccinated. Maybe then we could have beaten this pandemic and gotten back to our lives. But just as with your racism, you're wrong, wrong, wrong. And I'm about to complete two years doing a job that wasn't in my list of tasks when I was hired as a librarian. So, maybe, just fucking stuff it. People are sick and dying, and your rancid ruminations make that worse.