Re: Article: "NME says sorry to Morrissey for the misunderstanding over 2007 article"
It is, though, a chosen ambiguity that he doesn't apply in all matters. In fact, we know him to be a man who has very clear, very strident opinions and he's been at pains for years to communicate to the public precisely what those opinions are. Meat-eating? Barbaric. Royalty? Unjust and dictatorial. Fellow pop singers? Talentless. Falkland Islands? Argentinian. George W. Bush and Tony Blair? War criminals. Barack Obama? A set of teeth. And so on... On all of these matters and many others, we know exactly where he stands and we don't need to ask twice (in fact, we didn't need to ask at all since his opinions were all spelt out for us, unsolicited).
I respectfully disagree. I recall an interview in which he admitted to wearing a leather belt and shoes. Just recently a user posted a link to a video in which, at the end, Morrissey said on BBC radio, in 1986, that leather was fine. He has publicly forgiven Oscar Wilde for eating meat. His hatred of royalty is somewhat mitigated by his deeper love of England ("The Queen Is Dead" is not a simple anti-royalist rant). He likes plenty of contemporary pop singers and always has. He was photographed wearing a Barack Obama t-shirt in 2008. On and on.
Add to this his penchant for camp overstatement and it's not at all clear that we know exactly what his views are. The one thing we can be reasonably sure of is his hatred of animal cruelty and his passion for vegetarianism, but everything else he believes is a question mark. He's admitted to lying to interviewers for no apparent reason. It's obvious he plays games with the press and says things for effect. He frequently
appears to change his mind, such as calling the New York Dolls "stenchers" in the mid-80s or claiming to enjoy the Trojan record label despite calling reggae "vile".
He is one of the least consistent voices in the public arena. What makes him fascinating are the many ways he contradicts himself. It is in this way he can truly be called Wildean: he interests us precisely because all of his changing, self-contradictory views somehow seem to belong to the same personality, without conflict, and he makes us want to know why that is. That's been true since 1983. Books have been written, magazine articles have been published, video documentaries have been made, all highlighting his ambiguous, contradictory, slippery nature. This isn't me wiggling out of a tight corner.
Did Jonze (or whoever was responsible for the article) "wilfully coarsen and decontextualize his words to serve the cause of political correctness"? I don't know. If that's your claim though, give us a link to the unedited, unexpurgated transcript so that we can check for ourselves.
My claim is based on the fact that Morrissey's statements were not framed properly by the magazine. There was no attempt made to contextualize them. You have to understand, Tim Jonze has said-- and I believe him-- that he doesn't think Morrissey is a racist, per se. He believes Morrissey is a middle-aged man in love with an England that probably never existed outside his mind. He thinks Morrissey says things which have ramifications in the real world that he can't see or understand. His view, like the NME's in 1992, is that Morrissey isn't racist but his language is frequently inflammatory and therefore a matter of public concern. That isn't a horrible view of the situation at all. It's probably very sane and smart. But that isn't the way the NME presented Morrissey's remarks in 1997, and this is the basis for my claim.
If you want to correct me and say these were the doings of Conor McNicholas, not Tim Jonze, fine. I just have Jonze in my sights because his role in the affair is pretty shady all around, and ultimately I believe it was his choice not to pursue a conversation with Morrissey that would have defused this entire issue and made McNicholas' editorial decisions much easier. He was there. He had Morrissey in front of him. Morrissey may have brought up the topic of immigration, but Jonze could have pursued the subject.
And y'know what? If Morrissey's reputation and career were to become a casualty of "the cause of political correctness", seemingly because he cannot be arsed to articulate his views on immigration clearly, then I think I can live with it. I'm relieved to see that British culture has evolved to a point where, if somebody makes an apparently racist/xenophobic comment, they're likely to be criticised or challenged. If Morrissey or anybody else has difficulty accepting that British society has developed in that way, I really don't care.
First off, if you want to believe that, okay. I'm all for a healthy, polite society in which inflammatory language has no part. If you think Morrissey deserves what he got, fair enough. I think you're wrong, but I get where you're coming from.
Morrissey knows this perfectly well, yet he still chose to adopt the rhetoric of the extreme right. ... Talking inflammatory nonsense from his privileged position and then scuttling off to hide behind lawyers' letters when he gets criticism, though, is pretty pathetic.
I don't have an objection to most of the broader points you've made.
The fundamental problem which never seems to be addressed in the media, to which I alluded above, is this: can one love one's country and not be a racist? Can one love one's national identity and not be a xenophobe?
Globalization has forced this question on Britons and on everyone, everywhere. There are incredible problems in the acceptable, establishment-left attitude toward globalization, and they're obvious. For example, we all know that English or Americans trying to "open" an indigenous population in, say, Africa, for financial gain is frowned up on as imperialism. But in England and the United States, immigration (according to left orthodoxy) is completely fine; if immigration changes the "indigenous" population of a given nation, that's all for the good. Crudely: it's not okay for an indigenous tribe to be swallowed by an invading Western population, but it's okay for an indigenous tribe to migrate to the West and change the population there.
Before you tear that paragraph to shreds, let me just say that I already know that imperialism-immigration is a false equivalency, and I'm aware of other problems in what I've written. My only point is to illustrate that the problem is a messy, complicated one. It has many different sides and many different arguments. We are seeing this unfold in the United States with immigration from Mexico. Good citizens from both countries have to understand that while immigration is fine, for both nations, it has to be controlled, rational, and responsible. But it must be seen, first, that the issue is not an unambiguous one. We have to come to the problem with good sense and more than a little courage, because we have to address difficult questions in a way that allows for nuance. If we don't, we abandon the field to radical, polarizing, dangerous influences, such as the crazies in the States who wander around the Mexican border with rifles trying to enforce their own brand of "American justice", as well as their "respectable" counterparts in suits who sit on the boards of corporations, run PACs, and sometimes even hold seats in state and national legislatures.
All of which is to say that while it's fine and dandy to stand tall and proclaim an unambiguous, "no tolerance" policy toward these difficult problems plaguing our societies (e.g. hate crimes, violence against minorities, etc), it's actually counterproductive to the greater cause. The conversation has to start with the recognition that every one of us is flawed, to some degree, and comes to the table with biases and blind spots. The conversation has to be more complicated, not less. If we can't do that, our dialogues devolve into useless shouting matches-- or worse, the real villains step in and seize control. We actually need to talk to each other, not slap labels on people. While I find Morrissey's statements worrisome and certainly inflammatory to some degree, I also think he raises an important point, which I'll repeat: is it possible to love England and disapprove of the way immigration is changing the country, and yet not be a racist? Is there really nothing we can learn from that point of view?
I don't know if Morrissey really is the paradoxical figure I'm painting him to be. I don't know if he's a soft-hearted guy who genuinely loves England, genuinely gets along with people of other races, and yet has indefensible, troublesome views about immigration which echo those of extreme right-wingers. Maybe Morrissey really is a nationalist asshole and I'm totally wrong to give him the benefit of the doubt. The thing is, I don't know. And neither does the NME, because at every turn they've cut off any useful conversation about race and immigration and instead sensationalized the matter to sell papers. Circling back, this is frequently the problem with political correctness: it is a policing action, often mindlessly punitive, which stops conversations before they start. No decent person disagrees with the causes political correctness seeks to champion. The issue is with how it's done.
Practically, start by acknowledging the need for regulated immigration, seek to make that work better, and then start to grapple with the larger questions relating to globalization, starting with a simple one: why are so many people moving around?
