Republican congressman has faced a furious backlash after he compared the U.S. debt ceiling crisis to the tragic demise of soul singer Amy Winehouse.
Just two days after the Back to Black singer was found dead at her home in Camden, North London, Missouri congressman Billy Long chose to express his views about the state of American politics through the crudest of metaphors.
Referring to suggestions that Miss Winehouse died because of drug and drink abuse, he wrote on Twitter: 'No one could reach #AmyWinehouse before it was too late. Can anyone reach Washington before it's too late? Both addicted - same fate???'
Winehouse, who has not yet been buried, had for years battled depression as well as addiction to drink and hard drugs before she passed away, aged just 27, on Saturday.
Today's tweet by Mr Long, which he posted using his @auctnr1 account, was seen by many critics as written in the poorest taste.
Twitter, a place for fleeting and superficial communication, does not seem an appropriate place to discuss someone’s death. And yet many did just that. They tweeted to their followers that they were crying, they tweeted that they were listening to her albums in tribute.
They tweeted song lyrics. And they tweeted that Winehouse was now part of the so-called 27 Club – the group of musicians including Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain who died at the same age – a piece of information flung out and re-tweeted into the ether as if it were the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question that wins you the pink slice of pie.
Not a single person can have viewed the singer’s death as anything other than tragic and deeply sad. It is an immutable fact that barely requires saying – and yet choose this option and among the barrage of people eager to catalogue their grief, silence begins to look something approaching heartlessness.
Sarah Brown, who once admitted that her worst habit was using Twitter while talking to people, tweeted her condolences to the Winehouse family. Mark Ronson, a long- time friend of the singer, said on the site that she was his “musical soulmate and like a sister to me”.
It is not the first time that celebrities have felt the need to share their innermost feelings with their followers. Numerous stars tweeted their sympathy when Lily Allen, Amanda Holden and Kelly Brook suffered miscarriages. Would we have thought any less of them if they had instead kept quiet and sent their friends a condolence card? Perhaps, in this digital day and age, we would.
Yet the most hideous spectacle was the sight of Twitter users debating whether Winehouse’s death, or the atrocity in Norway, were bigger stories. It was mawkish, cold-hearted, cynical even. “Amy all the way,” tweeted one. “Norway is a day old”.
By Sunday, one wondered if people hadn’t taken leave of their senses completely. “A reason to love Amy Winehouse,” tweeted @PennyRed. “Not only did she make Back to Black, she apparently once spat at Pippa Middleton.”
Barely 24 hours after Winehouse had passed away, this didn’t seem like a terribly respectable thing to say. Then again, Twitter, by its very nature, does not encourage people to think before they speak.
It seems unlikely that anyone would chose to tweet about the death of someone close to them, it being an intensely private thing. So why not afford the same respect to Amy Winehouse? A 140-character obituary will never be able to do her enormous talent justice.
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