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Hey Morrissey! Turning the Staples Center Vegetarian for a Night Won't Wash Away Years' Worth of Corporate Blood and General Terribleness

Meat might be murder, but protesting it in the most juvenile, pyrrhic way possible is pointless.

As Morrissey fans have no doubt heard by now, the bitterly righteous singer dropped a press release last night triumphantly crowing that he has finally, finally, finally, accomplished the herculean task that no mere mortal could achieve: the entire Staples Center in Los Angeles will halt its horrific nightly meat grind and go totally vegetarian on the night of his sold-out appearance there March 1. What's more, a percentage of the night's profits will be donated to the Honorable, Virtuous, Blameless Animal Rights-Over-People's-Rights organization, PETA. Morrissey (and his team) will have you know that not even Paul McCartney has been able to pull off such a feat.

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Putting everything else on hold for a second, Morrissey's Macca Brag had me laughing so hard that I immediately reached out to Paul McCartney's team for a rebuttal, hoping at least to get an "Ummmmm, no" from them, but, as it turns out, you don't get to be Paul McCartney over six decades by saying things like "Ummmmm, no," and he and his team declined to comment. Thus, I'd like to point out in the stead of Sir Paul, the last time he played the Staples Center solo and thus could've possibly requested said one-night-only vegetarian stand would've been 2005—almost a decade ago—and it's more socially acceptable to be vegan or vegetarian in 2013 than it was in 2005.

While it's totally cool of the Staples Center and its vendors, the largest of which are the McDonald's, Coca Cola and California Pizza Kitchen, to agree to the night-long abstinence, and while it'll no doubt be an interesting, even possibly effective, evening of corporate protest, it's pretty funny that Morrissey, a dude so misanthropic and indignant and militant as to walk off a very big stage when he so much as caught a whiff of other people cooking and eating meat (more on that in a second), would even agree to perform at one of the wealthiest arenas in the world, one that's funded in large part by the corporations responsible for some of the largest mass meat-murders occurring daily around the world in the name of fast food. Why even consent to a Staples Center show at all?

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Oh, right, insane profit.

So now that we've established that it's pretty obvious Morrissey is doing this for his own olfactory satisfaction and not really to enact change or anything, let's remind ourselves of a few things that are worse than meat being served at a Morrissey Staples Center concert:

—The $129.00 it costs to sit anywhere close enough to actually see Morrissey during said Staples Center concert. (See also: the hour you will spend looking for parking, the $30.00 you will spend on parking once you actually find a lot with an opening, the thirty minutes it will take you to walk from your car to the Staples Center.)

—The several hundred dollars overjoyed Morrissey fans paid in 2009 to watch the man walk off the stage mid-set at Coachella because he could smell meat being cooked from more than two football fields away.

—The $375 million ($523 million in 2013 dollars) that it cost to build the Staples Center in wealthy, shiny downtown Los Angeles, and the untold millions it sapped from the economy of the poorer, nearby city of Inglewood, where the Forum is located and where LA's sports teams used to play and where countless arena-level artists used to perform, as well as the impact upon LA's already-shitty ecosystem that such a large building must have had that included, yes, the death of some animals probably.

—The millions of dollars from which the Staples Center's parent company, AEG, was said to have attempted to profit from upon Michael Jackson's death and memorial service in 2009.

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—The howling laughter with which bosses at McDonald's, California Pizza Kitchen, and someplace called Extremely Loaded Dogs will be stricken with when they realize how little one single night's meat sales at one single arena in one single venue will affect the billions of dollars they'll make in meat sales on the other 364 days in 2013.

—The second bout of howling laughter with which said bosses might be stricken given the likely possibility they were handed an $ incentive $ to halt their flesh factory production for a few hours of the entire 2013.

—The other 942,616 ways Morrissey fans will be able to still snag some heart disease at the Staples Center that night, including: super-nachos, French fries, funnel cake, coronary-dipped soft pretzels, frozen cocktails, something called "zebra popcorn," $7 ice cream cookie sandwiches, garlic knots, and something called a "Double-stuffed spud."

—The miserable dilemma of being a Morrissey fan in Los Angeles, vegetarian or no, and being forced to pay a fortune to help fund PETA, the extremist, body-shaming, sexist shock organization that produced these degrading horror-shows.

—That the Shining Goddess of Everything That is Rock and Wonder and Feminine Empowerment and Truth, Patti Smith, will be performing that night at the Staples Center as well, thus participating in said misogynistic shock organization's funding.

—That Will Ferrell was probably given money by somebody to do this—not in 2006. In 2013: