America Elected the Apocalypse so I’m Listening to The Cure (Commentary)

Dear World,

I’m sorry that America decided to elect a fascist president last week. I’m sorry that the country I was born in also voted in a Republican-dominated Congress and House of Representatives for two of our other main branches of federal government. With an already arch-conservative-controlled Supreme Court, I know how bad that is for all of us on Earth, and I’m so sorry.

Many of us here in America know that there is a storm coming. A dark, ominous cloud is rising and it looks like a dystopian sci-fi movie. One built on hate, bigotry, and division.

Half of America doesn’t understand what happened and the other half is happy about it. But everyone except for the very wealthy, powerful, and most selfish of us will lose. We are a nation of losers and many of us don’t know that we all are losing. Falling backward into a lost void.

Climate change is going to get worse and cities like mine – New Orleans – will be even more susceptible to hurricanes, floods, and sinking into the sea. Everyone, everywhere on the earth, will face natural disasters that look like the skies of Mordor. People will lose more of their human rights and freedoms, voices will be censored, and division will continue.

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I try not to write anything that isn’t a story meant to help, inspire, or entertain. I’m not here to harm, World. But I’ve been whirling in a numb haze and words have to come out.

So, I’m writing to say that I have completely and entirely embraced The Cure’s new album Songs of a Lost World. Because I’ve decided to embrace being lost, fall into the sad, broken, beautiful darkness of music, and accept the catastrophic end unfolding before us.

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The apathy, complacency, and lack of care I’ve felt for the last nine days and nights reminds me of the fourteen-year-old, new wave, punk rock teenager I was when I listened to The Cure all the time. When I painted my nails black, wore black lipstick, and hung out with people who looked just like me.

When I got to see The Cure live on their Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me tour in Minneapolis in 1987, I was among all the misfits. We were all safe from the bullies and rednecks that hunted us in their pickup trucks. Safe in unity with our black sweaters and hair-sprayed hair. Thousands of estranged, weird kids who related to each other and our love for the band’s albums like Three Imaginary Boys and The Head on The Door and Pornography and Seventeen Seconds.

Maybe the unity I felt then is the unity I feel now listening to The Cure’s new album. That there are others out there like me in this time of darkness.

I feel like there are other Gen Xers out there, who recently rediscovered our favorite band from long ago, once the soundtrack to our graveyard hook-ups and first-time cigarettes, and we’ve turned them up loud again. And there are Boomers, who used to love Robert Smith and Simon Gallup when they hung out with Siouxsie Sioux, Ian Curtis, Joy Division, and others in the late 70s punk rock scene, now listening.

And there are Millennials who grew up on Disintegration because they found it in their older sibling’s record collection, and they’ve plunged into The Cure’s new album and back catalog. And of course, there are many Gen Zers, eyes lined in black, with torn fishnets and black Doc Martens, who suddenly discovered this new band – one that sounds really good even though they’re really old – but that doesn’t matter because their music speaks to them.

All of us unified together. Lost in this strange, pre-Armageddon.

This feeling of being irrevocably lost that I have lately makes me feel comforted. Relieved. And maybe it’s making others feel relieved, too.

My country has been lost many times before, but we usually figure it out. This time, America threw in the towel.

It took a carnival carny with the worst orange hairpiece ever designed to bring us all down. A failed businessman born with a silver spoon in his mouth who barely qualified as a reality show star to divide us. A misogynistic, convicted sex offender with the smallest penis in all the land to convince a little more than half of America that he was their messiah.

You and I know he’s not the messiah, World. He’s a Nazi clown. A badly-acted evil villain from a B-movie. That’s why most people on earth can’t believe this happened in the land of the free and the home of the brave. I feel the same way as you. I’m shocked. America is suddenly the land of the imprisoned and the home of the coward.

But, you see, the powers that helped to elect this fascist leader separated us in America. And they were very good at it.

They found ways to create fissures in families, among friends, and across imaginary lines between states and parishes. They separated us by gender. By sexual preference. By age. By economic status. And they most certainly separated us by race.

They divided us by our level of education. By whether we live in an urban area or a rural one. By our beliefs and by the work we do. And they told us that we hate each other.

But we don’t hate each other. That’s just fucking stupid. Every single person on the earth wants to be happy and not suffer. To find a pocket of joy for ourselves and the people we love.

So, right now, I’m choosing to embrace my inner, gothic soul. As one who has often survived on the beauty and joy of sad music, I am listening to The Cure. That’s part of my little pocket of joy.

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I got to see the opening night of The Cure’s last world tour here in New Orleans in May 2023. My partner, Whitney, surprised me with tickets. I was apprehensive to go because many bands don’t age well and I didn’t want my youthful exuberance for the band to be spoiled.

But the concert surpassed all expectations. It mystically shook me and turned me into a 14-year-old again. Whooping, dancing, sweating, singing along, goosebumps on my arms raised high in the air. I was unified with 20,000 other people singing along at Smoothie King Arena in my magically dark and mysterious New Orleans. My city of many goths, vampires, and night dwellers united, and the thread between us was the dark, industrial, dream pop, bat-caver symphony of The Cure.

They played half of their new album Songs of a Lost World, brilliantly showing that they could still write and perform music that rattled me to my core. It was like Robert Smith had a foreboding crystal ball of what was to come for us, World.

The concert bridged 36 years of my life from the first time I saw The Cure. Bookends in a grand gothic poem, novel, or painting. T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Rothko’s Black in Deep Red.

Being able to accept the shadows has always been as much a part of me as embracing the light. The macabre. The melancholy. The darkness. I dive into it to appreciate the light. And I know there are many others out there like me.

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Now is the most dark and divided time in my country during my lifetime, and I’m doing my best to accept the events that have happened and the storm that’s on the horizon. I’m listening to The Cure to remind me that if this is the end, I am still unified with all the gorgeous, dark misfits on the earth. I may not believe in America, but I believe in you, World.

I wish I could foresee the future and tell you that it won’t be violent. That chaos and hate will subside, and sanity will overcome insanity. That all people will be treated as equals, that we’ll make renewable energy our priority, and that we’ll help and not harm each other. I wish I could say I was hopeful that it’s all going to work out, but I have nothing to go on today.

I’m just an old goth loudly listening to Endsong in my living room as if I’m still a teen goth in my bedroom. Filled with melancholia and fight. Ready to run from living nightmares even when I can’t escape them.

Here at the edge, staring out the window into the beautiful, empty shadows.