During a concert in Dublin last week, Morrissey apparently announced the news of Reagan’s death, and then followed this comment by remarking how he wished it had been the current President Bush who had died instead.
The story was printed in the Manchester Evening News: ‘Bush should have died, not Reagan’: Morrissey. It was greeted with outrage by many American readers, who learned about the story after Drudge linked to it.
The comments section for the online article are quite entertaining to read (the Evening News was flooded with so many posters that they’ve had to close it to any new posts). Predictably, most of these are along the lines of “I wish it had been Morrissey that had died instead of Ronald Reagan!”, “If Ronald Reagan had not defeated communism, Morrissey wouldn’t be free to express his opinions today,” and “You Europeans would all be speaking German/Russian/Arabic if it weren’t for America’s involvement in WWII/Ronald Reagan’s defeat of communism/Bush’s war against terrorism in Iraq” etc.
The funnier ones are the posters who claim to have been devout Smiths and Morrissey fans until they read this story–now they proclaim that they will never buy a Morrissey album again!
Come on–Morrissey was the same guy who composed the lovely “Margaret on the Guillotine” in honor of Prime Minister Thatcher. No one who’s ever bothered to listen to his lyrics could be genuinely surprised about his political opinions, nor by his over-the-top manner of expressing those opinions.
It sounds like the way Moz announced Reagan’s death, he wasn’t exactly mourning it. According to the original article, the announcement was greeted with cheers, and I doubt he tried to discourage that in any way–he certainly wasn’t expecting a moment of silence.
It was a tacky thing to say, but given the deluge of Reagan whitewashing I’ve been inundated with in the news all week, I can’t get anything louder than a “Meh” in response.
What is it about a certain sector of the US public that specializes in getting its panties in a bunch? Morrissey has received death threats about the comment according to Irish radio. :rolleyes:
Meanwhile he’s currently got a single in the UK charts that urges us to “Denounce this Royal line / and spit on the name of Oliver Cromwell”. And I haven’t heard a murmur about it.
“Tacky”? Not even. He wasn’t disrepecting Reagan, he was disrespecting Bush, which is a noble cause… And he was doing it Ireland, where in a recent survey, 2/3 of those polled don’t want Bush even to set foot on Irish soil (which he will do later this month)… And it was at a Morrissey concert, which is hardly a bastion of pro-US-conservatism.
I guess if people get upset about that concert in Dublin, they’ll go apoplectic about this one.
(Or this British cartoon. Please send all death threats to the following address: bite@me.com)
I can just see some Americans burning their Christy Moore CD’s now
sings The Christy song
*Hey Ronnie Reagan, I’m black and I’m pagan,
I’m gay and I’m left and I’m free.
I’m a non-fundamentalist environmentalist,
Please don’t bother me.
You’re so cool, playing poker with death as the joker,
You’ve nerve, but you don’t reassure us.
With those paranoid vistas of mad Sandanistas,
Are you really defending Honduras?
You’ll be wearing the green down at Ballyporeen,
The town of the little potato.
Put your arms around Garret and dangle your carrot,
But you’ll never get me to join NATO . *
Actually, ther isn’t any “mass” American outrage. I’d say that 2% of Americans are sort of amused by or in agreement with Morrissey. About 5% of Americans of Americans are outraged. And 93% are asking, “Umm… who’s Morrissey again?”
For fuck’s sake, the guy names an album “Viva Hate”, fantasizes about nuking dreary English cities, tells his sweetness he’d like to smash every tooth in his/her head, admitting there were times when he could have strangled/murdered her (him?), et cetera, and people don’t see the sardonic humor in almost every utterance the man makes?
Hey, just because your nation can’t be as clever, insightful, sensitive and deep as you, doesn’t mean you should hate it. Oh sure, the nation doesn’t “get” Morrisey, but it picked up a Cure album last week, and it’s almost finished Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s trying to understand, but not everyone has the gifts you have.
