is it really so strange

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.

this is who I am

In response to my refrigerator post, an anonymous commenter remarked:

I didn't picture you looking like that. Your hair is too short and you're too skinny. And you don't look bitter.

It baffled me a little, mostly because I am the me that I am, and I can't really envision another me, much less one that apparently resembles Glenn Danzig. (I do have recurring dreams where I have swapped bodies with Tommy Tune, but the less said about that, the better.)

Don't get me wrong; I wasn't offended by the assertion that I did not resemble this person's mental picture of what a "bitterandrew" ought to resemble, but just so we're all on the same page I would like to clarify a few salient points.

1. I am skinny. I always have been, and will probably always be, if my fifty-something father's wiry physique is any indication. I'm 6'3" and currently weigh just shy of 150 pounds. That's actually a twenty pound increase from my pre-marriage weight of 130 pounds. This means that I can no longer suck in my chest and place (and hold) a tangerine under my ribs.

Belle and Sebastian - String Bean Jean (from the Dog on Wheels EP, 1997; collected on Push Barman to Open Old Wounds, 2005)

2. I keep my hair short. Apart from the sugarbowl haircuts that were my birthright as a child of the 1970's, I have only had long hair during two periods of my life. When I started junior high, I let my hair grow long as part of an unplanned experiment to see how many times could I possibly be called "hippie" or "faggot" by my classmates. (I quit counting when the totals neared an actual infinity.)

I had it cut off in the beginning of my sophomore year, and wore my hair short (and progressively punkier) until the mid-1990's when I kept the back short, and grew the bangs down over my chin. (You can see it in transition here.) I kept it that way until I was thrown out of/quit graduate school in the fall of 1997, and have kept it buzzed close ever since.

It's partially a vestigal affectation of my punk rock days, but the buzzcuts are also due to the fact that my hair has no body whatsoever, and no matter how I try to style or shape it, I always end up looking like either George Peppard in Banacek or Hawk from Buck Rogers.

The Who - Cut My Hair (from Quadrophenia, 1973)

3. I am bitter, but I am also a happy-go-lucky guy. What the hell does a bitter person look like, anyhow? Like they're perpetually constipated? (I would have said "or like a Rob Liefeld character" but that would have been redundant.)

My cynicism has been tempered with a certain degree of fatalism so as to not mire myself in the bog of despair. It's fine to be pissed off, and there are no shortage of things to be pissed off about, but I refuse to let it stain my soul. That's just letting the bastards win. My bitterness and cynicism are the manifestations of a bruised idealism tempered by experience and empiricism but refuses to give up the last sparks of hope.

The English Beat - Tears of a Clown (from I Just Can't Stop It, 1980)

To sum up:

bitterandrew = a bloodied, but unbowed stick figure of a man with a crewcut and questionable tastes in music