On the heels of Mitt Romney's and Rudy Giuliani's ugly "more nativist than thou" showdown comes this news article (pointed out to me by pal Dorian) where the Prince of Morose Pop channels the spirit of Enoch Powell. I'd point out the quasi-hypocrisy of a child of immigrants bitching about immigration, but it's a fairly common phenomenon.
"They come over here and don't bother to learn the language or culture!"
"Oh, you mean like your great-gran, who has picked up maybe a dozen words of English since she stepped off the boat from Palermo seventy years ago?"
"Well that's different."
The unspoken difference being that the current wave of immigrants has a different skin tone than their predecessors who left their native lands in search of a better life. Just like draconian welfare reform and urban policing policies, just like the notion of the "sanctity of traditional marriage," the immigration debate is just another means of dollying up old school bigotry with euphemistic policy-speak. (I don't recommend this, but try reading the comments on any immigration-related news article or commentary for a first-hand glimpse at the twisted pathologies at work in the anti-immigration crowd.)
The same people who argue about the diversion of tax revenue and educational funds toward services for undocumenteds and their families tend to have acute myopia over the trillions of dollars being pissed away in the quixotic efforts to bring "democracy" to the Middle East. Meanwhile, the punitive approach toward dealing with immigration involves all sorts of cash-intensive and ludicrous schemes with the net effect of exacerbating the problem by creating a permanentally marginalized shadow population. Hey, but it plays well to the lumpen-ignoramuses, and that's what really matters. Plus, becoming a permanent problem means that it can also be a reliable means to rally support for decades to come!
The whining about cultural integrity is obnoxious in the extreme. The bottom line is that things change, with or without an influx of the foreign-born. The North Woburn I grew up in is gone, as is the Woburn High I attended, and so are most of the places I hung out in during my college and immediate-post college years. That the local convenience store I'm a regular at is now run by South Asians doesn't bother me one bit. (Davis and Central Squares going unrecognizably yuppified and upscale? That's another matter.)
If one's sense of identity -- cultural, social, or national -- is so fragile that it can't bear the presence of new accents, new sounds, new cuisines, then it wasn't worth having in the first place. If the new is that threatening and unbearable, the problem isn't with them, however you define the other, the problem is with you.
(It's not like the situation Moz is whining about is anything new. Colin MacInnes documented it in his "London" novels fifty years ago. Elements of it weave through the early UK punk scene Morrissey sprung out of. Christopher Priest wrote of an England overrun by non-natives in the disturbing 1973 sci-fi novel Fugue for a Darkening Island.)
Oh well, Moz. Maybe your fan David Cameron and his cronies will take power in a couple years, and restore the Thatcherite paradise you seem to miss so much.
Dread Zeppelin - Immigrant Song (from Un-Led-Ed, 1990) - Oooh-ahhh-ah-AH! I really don't hear the "reggae" part of the "reggae Led Zeppelin cover band fronted by an Elvis impersonator" conceit here. I recall them being pretty hot stuff for a while back in the early 1990's, though the buzz turned out to be very short-lived.
Manic Hispanic - Get Them Immigrated (from The Recline of Mexican Civilization, 2001) - A topical revision (and vast improvement) of Offspring's "Come Out and Play," courtesy of Orange County's tongue-in-cheek Latino punk supergroup. Blast it at the next neighborhood meeting of the Minutemen. Or not. Racist yokels with guns and poor senses of humor can be unpredictable.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
is it really so strange
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6 comments:
The problem with the latest wave of People Who Aren't Like Me is that they seem to be completely uninterested in Being Like Me. This is the reason I have no tolerance for them. If they would just recognize how superior My Way Of Life is, then maybe we could work with them, but if they insist on Not Being Like Me, then I'm afraid they don't have a leg to stand on.
I am sure the Italian press is, right now, full of scare stories about ageing, whining English singers going over there stealing their cabaret jobs and taking up space. Morrisey's comments are like Sean Connery's love of Scotland - empty. Where once there was fan, there is now only a look of disdain.
Completely forgot to say the rest of the post was spot-on as well.
Thanks, Highlander!
The irony of expressing one's discontent with immigrants through emigrating struck me as rather odd, too.
"The unspoken difference being that the current wave of immigrants has a different skin tone than their predecessors who left their native lands in search of a better life."
Not entirely correct.
Read up on the history of Italian immigration and discrimination in the U.S. It's full of things like science magazines publishing an article generations ago that Italians might be the "missing link" between blacks and whites and that "the same knife which the Italian uses to eat his dinner, he uses to slice off the ear of his fellow", predominately Irish and German Catholic schools who would not admit Italians, country clubs that wouldn't let the "olive people" in, etc. I had relatives of my own who were called n----- by white kids in the 30s. Italians were alway referred to as dark-skinned people, not-quite-white, olive skinned, etc. In short, they were (and sometimes still are) viewed as the "other."
Remember, the largest mass lynching in the US was of Italians in New Orleans in 1891. Wikipedia's article "Mass Racial Violence in the United States" contains the following:
"During the late 1800s and early 20th Century, Italian Americans were the second most likely group (next to African Americans) to be lynched. One of the largest lynchings in US history occurred in New Orleans in 1891, when eleven Italians were violently murdered in the streets by a large lynch mob. Riots and lynchings against Italian Americans erupted into the twentieth century in the South, as well as in New York City, New York, Chicago, and Boston."
It also wasn't too fun to be a Greek, Armenian, or other olive-skinned "other" immigrant back then, either.
So, many of the immigrants who came here in the 1800s and 1900s were indeed thought of as looking different -and of different (lower) metal capacities and (higher) criminal propensities.
Things still happen (though not always as bad), but when Italians and Greeks, etc. protest they get no coverage and it is swept under the rug, and they are told to "just deal with it, it's no big deal."
However, as an example of something in the modern era, none other than Queens College (in the CUNY system) was found guilty of discrimination against Italian-Americans back in the 1980s, and as a result Italians were given Affirmative Action protected-class status at that school. (The judge in the case was an African-American woman, Judge Constance Baker Motley who had much experience in matters of discrimination and civil rights).
(That said, immigration is great. What would America be without the influence of the Chinese, Greeks, Italians, Jews, etc. of 100 years ago on our culture today? Our food selection alone would be all the more lacking. Not to mention the contributions these groups made in terms of everything from physical labor to arts to commerce to education and research to politics.)
I was discussing personal exceptionalism and thinly-diguised racism as it pertains to the present debate, which certainly has historical antecedents. The use of "Palermo" wasn't an attempt to single out Italian-Americans, for good or bad, but came from an actual conversation I had with an acquaintance of mine, and I've heard similar sentiments across the spectrum of ethnicities.
Being discriminated against doesn't mean one can't discriminate others in turn, and even use many of the same hoary arguments used against them toward the current target du jour.
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