Roseanne calls herself a ‘hate magnet’, but her thinking is depressingly mainstream

Can “hate-magnets” be rehabilitated? This is how Roseanne Barr described herself while talking about how she was “impaired” because of sleeping pills when she posted a racist tweet that she now regrets.

She has black children in her family. She didn’t mean it and has lost everything. Barr was once great. She gave us a smart, savvy portrayal of working-class culture. It was groundbreaking and she was loved. But, long before the new series of Roseanne was aired, she had revealed herself on Twitter to be a Trump-supporting conspiracy theorist. Her views were, as the kids say, “problematic”. Round-the-clock sleeping pills?

Hate-magnet is a self-serving term of victimhood if ever I heard one. As with Morrissey, there will be those who claim in retrospect to have seen all this coming from the get-go. It is excused, then ignored and then everyone falls over themselves to condemn the bitter old viper.

What so often happens with these people is that much is excused as simply liberal-baiting. It’s outrageous being un-PC! It’s iconoclastic! Never mind that would-be iconoclasts are ten a penny, saying racist rubbish in the rightwing press. Never mind that they all think much the same. What has changed is that such thinking is now mainstream.

So these figures must be cast into the void because no one wants to admit that culture we once valued can be made by people whose views we abhor. But the truth is it can. We can’t rewrite our own tastes any more than we can rewrite the past. Erasure of the past does not make ever-present racism go away.

Now, where is that Gary Glitter record I used to like? Oh, sorry, I mean hate.