Morrissey attacks 'blustering jingoism' of Olympic Games - Guardian 6 August

Billy Bragg puts his docs in:

"I'm sure no-one will be surprised to hear that Morrissey is in the wet blanket brigade when it comes to the Olympics, but I'm posting his comments here in an attempt to nail the charge of jingoism that has been levied by those who feel unco
mfortable at the flag waving joy that has accompanied our athlete's success.

Jingoism is defined by it bellicosity, by it's blinkered assertion that we are better than everybody else and you are rubbish because you are not us. I hate jingoism, but I don't feel that's the impulse behind the flag waving that I've seen. Yes, the home crowd are very enthusiastic when our athletes perform, but they've also shown a warmth towards those from other nations and not always the winners - witness the supportive response to Liu Xiang crashing out of the 110m hurdles this morning.

We've been conditioned over the years to associate any flag waving with nazism - as Mozzer does, breaking Godwin's Law in the process. But the truth is that the waving of flags is all to do with context.

When the British National Party do it, it symbolises their bellicose, divisive views. When Jessica Ennis does it, however, it speaks of a different society, one in which all can reach their full potential no matter what their background. When our fellow citizens wave their flags with her, I feel that they are expressing their pride in the possibility of that diverse, open society."
Seal_Of_Approval_I.jpg
 
He hates it when our team become successful

Tuesday 07 August 2012

He says Britain is "foul with patriotism" and the royals have "hijacked the Olympics". Just another day for Morrissey's big mouth then... or does he have a point?

morrissey_2012_g_620_A11.jpg


Morrissey, he's the national treasure most likely to tip over the nation's treasure chest and flick V-signs at the Queen. Let's be honest, the former Smiths frontman has made a career of saying something provocative just at the wrong/right moment.

For the Diamond Jubilee he called the royal family "benefit scroungers". Now he's labelled Britain's Olympic celebrations "lethal", "foul" and "jingoistic", comparing the national mood to that of 1939 Germany.

"Some of the points he makes are valid ones - the unification of a divided nation by way of brands and corporatised flag-waving; the commodification of the young royals..." Andrew Collins

In his fan blog True To You he wrote: "I am unable to watch the Olympics due to the blustering jingoism that drenches the event. Has England ever been quite so foul with patriotism?"

He went on: "The 'dazzling royals' have, quite naturally, hijacked the Olympics for their own empirical needs, and no oppositional voice is allowed in the free press. It is lethal to witness."

And he ended with a warning of the "grotesque inevitability of Lord and Lady Beckham".

This from the man who, in 1992, was accused of "flirting with disaster" when he danced entangled with the union flag during a gig in London's Finsbury Park.

'He seeks to shock'

"Because he seeks to shock, it's natural to want not to be shocked by him," music writer and radio presenter Andrew Collins told Channel 4 News.

"Some of the points he makes are valid ones - the unification of a divided nation by way of brands and corporatised flag-waving; the commodification of the young royals - but he wilfully undermines these by resorting to shock-horror button pushing, throwing in the Nazi Germany allusion, and rewiring 'patriotism' as 'jingoism', which is quite different, but has more impact."

Mark Simpson, author of the biography Saint Morrissey, said the singer was "always a bit like the mad old uncle at Christmas, even whe he was a teenager."

He told Channel 4 News: "Vegetarian or not, he's also always enjoyed taking aim at sacred cows - and as the response to his admittedly somewhat hyperbolic remarks has shown, he's scored a direct hit with the London Olympics, which has been elevated by the London media lately to something sacred and beyond criticism."

Saint or sinner, Morrissey's attempt at puncturing the patriotic mood has successfully propelled him back into the headlines. A search on Google News returns 115 reports of his latest outburst.

Lord Beckham and dazzling Kate aside, perhaps there is a simple excuse for Morrissey's bad mood: he is sore at Danny Boyle for choosing New Order, Bowie, the Sex Pistols and many more to soundtrack the Olympic opening ceremony... but no Smiths and certainly no Moz.

http://www.channel4.com/news/he-hates-it-when-our-team-become-successful-morrissey
 
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Good grief, how come Channel 4 News approached Mark Simpson?

There are many others who could give better comments.

TTY is "a fan blog"?
Where we could find Julia's blog in there?
 
I'm bored with all this wringing and seeking for a justification. What he said was crass and stupid. Maybe in the cloistered environment of fandom he can have a pat on the back, but in Britain at large, forget it. There will be those who say he's always had an ability to garner headlines by saying things others wouldn't. All true. Doesnt stop it being massively out of step with the zeitgeist; some admire that. I don't. I like good art, good lyrics, good music. Not a bloke without a record deal trying hard to make headlines.

P.
 
Good grief, how come Channel 4 News approached Mark Simpson?

There are many others who could give better comments.

TTY is "a fan blog"?
Where we could find Julia's blog in there?

I suppose it is a fan blog in the sense that it is run by a fan and that his writings on there are similar to a blog.
 
Geez Louise, have the papers got nothing else to witter about. Apparently there is an Olympics going on, why don't they write about that instead?
 
I'm bored with all this wringing and seeking for a justification. What he said was crass and stupid. Maybe in the cloistered environment of fandom he can have a pat on the back, but in Britain at large, forget it. There will be those who say he's always had an ability to garner headlines by saying things others wouldn't. All true. Doesnt stop it being massively out of step with the zeitgeist; some admire that. I don't. I like good art, good lyrics, good music. Not a bloke without a record deal trying hard to make headlines.

P.

What he said was right. Being out of step with the zeitgeist is exactly where Morrissey should be.
 
::lbf::



I haven't been following the matter closely enough, but there have been a few commentaries (like Owen Hatherley's) which make a case that the Olympics are a massive project to re-shape the city for economic reasons ("urban renewal"), and in particular to "open up" East London for investment. The other thing to point out is that the Games have allowed civic authorities to roll out even more invasive and all-encompassing security measures, many of which will remain in place long after the more visible elements-- troops and missiles-- have been removed. The Games aren't quite a traveling circus that will just up stakes and leave without a trace.

Certainly, but generally speaking things like this leave more positive imprints than negative. Hatherley's point as you refer it reads more like an endorsement than a criticism to me, although I'm sure that's not what Hatherley intended it as. :)

My beef is mainly that in the inevitable well-intentioned attempts to use Olympic games as a sort of giant public morale springboard into a better future, their significance is habitually and regularly way overblown. Occasionally this is politically problematic, as in the case of the Beijing games four years ago that lots of people were more than prepared to turn into a eulogy to China's great leap forward of late. But mainly I think it's just silly exaggeration born of the innate psychological need to invest collective experiences with significance. One could observe that this probably also says something about the relative pointlessness of the games from a sports perspective, consisting as they do almost wholly of sports nobody really cares about and couldn't normally be persuaded to watch if they were paid good money to do so. For some reason, people seem to have no need to invest the Football World Cup with any wider civilisational project in order for it to feel significant.

In the end, it's just a big organisational task, carried out more or less well. No more. Individual events or people, like Jesse Owens, might achieve broader significance through sports, but olympic tournaments per se has never changed anywhere or anything in any fundamental way, other than providing an injection of infrastructure investment and a bit of marketing. Nor do they generally tell us something important we did not already know, or could not easily discover in other ways. If anything, they are more apt to obfuscate. What, for instance, did the Beijing Olympics really tell us about China? The closing cereminy was fabulously impressive (or so I'm told) - so? Or the 1936 Olympics about Nazi Germany? Or the 1980 Olympics about the Soviet Union?
 
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Athens 2004 certainly helped leave a legacy. A country that could ill-afford to spend 4 times its original budget on a feel-good vanity project is reaping the benefits now. Literally. Of course this would never happen in London, well not to the Corporation of London anyway.

It could be a pivotal moment in the UK's history after all. We may take up handball as our new national sport.
 
hahaha. BrummieBoy is smashing the f*** out of all challengers. If this were a judged Olympic sport I'd be holding up a board with 10 on it.

I do disagree with one thing though Brummie - you label this latest outburst as the one that crossed the line on the previous page. I disagree. That line was crossed with the Utoya comments last summer. Everything now is merely the icing on the Shit Cake.
 
Athens 2004 certainly helped leave a legacy. A country that could ill-afford to spend 4 times its original budget on a feel-good vanity project is reaping the benefits now. Literally. Of course this would never happen in London, well not to the Corporation of London anyway.

It could be a pivotal moment in the UK's history after all. We may take up handball as our new national sport.

Don't you dare. That one's ours. :)
 
hahaha. BrummieBoy is smashing the f*** out of all challengers. If this were a judged Olympic sport I'd be holding up a board with 10 on it.

Really? Looks to me like he's been run off back home to cry to Mama.

http://www.morrissey-solo.com/threa...y-quot?p=1986731128&viewfull=1#post1986731128
http://www.morrissey-solo.com/threa...larker?p=1986731132&viewfull=1#post1986731132
http://www.morrissey-solo.com/threa...r-Two!?p=1986731131&viewfull=1#post1986731131
http://www.morrissey-solo.com/threa...ampage?p=1986731129&viewfull=1#post1986731129

Maybe when he comes back he can register as Mummie'sBoy?
 
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Try not to worry too much , !Viva! . We'll always have the memories - like that time he threatened to rape you. And who could forget the time he threatened to rape you ? And I'm sure you'll always remember that other post where he threatened to rape you and give you AIDS. What a shithead ...
 
Am I to gather from what I've read a few posts up that C4 had Andrew Collins and Mark Simpson on their news show discussing what Morrissey wrote? Jeez! All involved really need to get something more worthwhile to do with their time!
 
Try not to worry too much , !Viva! . We'll always have the memories - like that time he threatened to rape you. And who could forget the time he threatened to rape you ? And I'm sure you'll always remember that other post where he threatened to rape you and give you AIDS. What a shithead ...

:lbf: :thumb:

Now that he's gone, I wonder if I can get a refund on this chastity belt?
 
Am I to gather from what I've read a few posts up that C4 had Andrew Collins and Mark Simpson on their news show discussing what Morrissey wrote? Jeez! All involved really need to get something more worthwhile to do with their time!

Riddle me this:

What does a bitter, closeted, middle-aged pop star with no recording contract do with 2 months of free time?
gorshin_riddler.jpg
 
Certainly, but generally speaking things like this leave more positive imprints than negative. Hatherley's point as you refer it reads more like an endorsement than a criticism to me, although I'm sure that's not what Hatherley intended it as. :)

Ha, no, I assure you, it was not an endorsement. There are losers in the bargain who are swept under the carpet. But I won't get into that.

My beef is mainly that in the inevitable well-intentioned attempts to use Olympic games as a sort of giant public morale springboard into a better future, their significance is habitually and regularly way overblown. Occasionally this is politically problematic, as in the case of the Beijing games four years ago that lots of people were more than prepared to turn into a eulogy to China's great leap forward of late. But mainly I think it's just silly exaggeration born of the innate psychological need to invest collective experiences with significance. One could observe that this probably also says something about the relative pointlessness of the games from a sports perspective, consisting as they do almost wholly of sports nobody really cares about and couldn't normally be persuaded to watch if they were paid good money to do so. For some reason, people seem to have no need to invest the Football World Cup with any wider civilisational project in order for it to feel significant.

In the end, it's just a big organisational task, carried out more or less well. No more. Individual events or people, like Jesse Owens, might achieve broader significance through sports, but olympic tournaments per se has never changed anywhere or anything in any fundamental way, other than providing an injection of infrastructure investment and a bit of marketing. Nor do they generally tell us something important we did not already know, or could not easily discover in other ways. If anything, they are more apt to obfuscate. What, for instance, did the Beijing Olympics really tell us about China? The closing cereminy was fabulously impressive (or so I'm told) - so? Or the 1936 Olympics about Nazi Germany? Or the 1980 Olympics about the Soviet Union?

I think they're useless as well, but the problem I have with recent Olympics is that the message harmonizes with the ideology of globalization a little too perfectly. The marketing going on is the same marketing we see here in the States for football and basketball; in basketball, especially, there is a concerted effort to grow the sport's popularity around the world. You may have seen a commercial for Nike or Adidas, I forget which, featuring a Chinese kid and an American kid growing up, developing as players, and then facing off in the 2032 Olympiad as fierce (but friendly) competitors. The idea is that sports solve problems governments cannot and should not be expected to solve, which is of course, at one and the same time, common sense and, at this point in human history, incredibly reckless and dangerous. But as you say, there's no reason to get too exercised (excuse the pun) about the Olympics. People will forget them by September.
 
To me it means something like what Billy Bragg described.

Bragg was also right when he said "The truth is that the waving of flags is all to do with context". Part of that context is recognizing who's doing the flag waving, and why. It's obvious from Morrissey's statement that he blames-- if I may borrow a quaint old term-- the ruling class of England (the royals, the bankers) and their boot-licking lackeys (the press) for the pestilential atmosphere. "Foul with patriotism" means people cannot avoid being hit in the face with salvos of neoliberal ideology.

None of this wipes out the glory of the athletic competition itself or besmirches the national pride many English people are feeling. His complaint centers around the way the Olympics are relentlessly sold; with apologies to The Sex Pistols, "Your Olympics dream/Is a shopping scheme". I'm not English, but I remember Atlanta in '96, and in '12 I'm battered on a nightly basis by my own country's "patriotic" Olympics broadcasts, and I assure you I'm well well aware of what Morrissey's talking about. He isn't attacking the man in the street.

@Worm

It's 'Team GB'!

Maybe for the last time.

Maybe not.

You may find these links helpful.

best
susan

Sir Chris Hoy rules out separate Scottish and British Olympic squads

http://bit.ly/MyTmgL

Leading article: The welcome return of the Union Jack.The flag has been rescued from the connotations of lost Empire or unpopular Union

http://ind.pn/TddtjD

Scolympians" or Team GB?

http://reut.rs/OSxKdX

Terminology of the British Isles

http://bit.ly/1ujWLV
 
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