i woke from a dream

 

I awoke from a semi-post-apocalyptic dream this morning in which I was talking to this really scrappy but enterprising teenager who was telling me about how he hustled his way into a cab ride with the manager of a factory farm distribution center so that he could find out where their empty milk jugs and meat scraps ended up.  The meat scraps were for food, maybe for his dog, maybe for him, I don’t know, the jugs were for whatever project he was working on which I think involved me working with him in some way or trading with him.  I said, “Damn, that’s intense…” without thinking, starring at a pile of bloody discarded meat bits sitting in a bowl on his floor, and he immediately reacted to the word: “Intense—!?”  I could tell the word struck him in that emotional way where he didn’t know whether to be upset or intrigued, so I quickly responded to the effect that I was just impressed by how resourceful he was able to be (which was the truth of what I meant, in using the word.)

He was the type of shaved-head lower class scrappy that the southern California street punk/skinhead scene attracted a lot of when I was growing up, and you never knew if the kid would be a fiercely loyal racist or a fiercely loyal anti-racist.  Occasionally, even in those days—although it was far more common in earlier punk scenes—fights would break out or somebody would get stabbed at a show… more I think because of how much pride some of those kids had than any sense of misguided politics in particular.  You could have superimposed a lot of different ideologies onto that sense of prideful reactivity, sadly, and in part that’s what makes “ideology” both scary and mundane.  It becomes a proxy tool for our emotional angst.  A lot like a weapon, or any tool, you know?  If you don’t have guns, you’ve got knives and bombs and bats and bricks and fists and all the rest.

 

 

You might ask why we didn’t “bash the fash” all the way out of our scene, like the internet fairytale goes?  Maybe because it’s easier said than done IRL.  Essentially you’re saying: “Why not start a fight with the Nazi boneheads before you know if they’re Nazis or not, and before they’ve actually caused any trouble!?”  So, in other words, start drama before there is drama in order to resolve drama/. …  (A fight which you’re just as equally likely to lose, BTW, depending upon the shake-out).  Oh yeah, how wise and clever.

That’s the thing about male culture, and our evolution out of the historical aeons of humanity’s “physical-strength-supremacy” (which often took the form of tribal wars &/or colonialism) in which you couldn’t keep what you couldn’t defend…

It’s not always so easy to control a population of people, and often the best technique is to give people the freedom to coexist and work out their differences with intense dialogue, education, and inspiration, before physical force becomes necessary.  It’s why the founding fathers of America felt that their self-evident “rights” were the basis for a healthy Constitution.  Not because they imagined 1776 was the year of Utopia, but because they believed that a well-informed democracy could and would inevitably guide us there eventually.

I’m not choosing sides, only explaining the mindset.

This is the age-old question punk scenes have grappled with from day one.  I think it was ironically Jello Biafra who shouted, “When you ape the cops it ain’t anarchy!!!”  And although it was meant to be a jab at the fash side, it also represents the OG problem of “control” that anarchists have to deal with.  If we strike first, then we aren’t the anti-fascists, we’re the fascists.  Everybody understood this more intuitively when we lived in physical reality rather than virtual reality, and it’s why freedom of speech was so contentious.

The “venue” was a public forum.

We allowed it because we ourselves wanted to be allowed in.

 

 

It isn’t just a matter of policing other folks’ right to self-expression, but also the incredibly difficult logistics of that policing, and the extreme likelihood of it reverting back into the unchecked dogma, repression, and oppression we were supposedly fighting so hard against.

What I woke up thinking about, &/or maybe what I went to bed thinking about, was how wrong it rubs me when a lot of the younger generations come into this “punk scene”—created by, inspired by, and pioneered by extremely dysfunctional people…  And they want to be able to appropriate all of their innovations, take inspiration from all their music, creativity, and angst, co-opt the DIY distribution and excitement surrounding their work, borrow their image and lineage of rebellion against the status quo—but then throw them under the bus at the same time for every imperfection.  Streamline the movement into something more komrade-friendly, rewrite the history, replace artists in the canon at whim if they said or did something too offensive by today’s sanitized standards.

It’s such a cop-out.  If you’ve never been as esoterically fucked up as those kids were, you are incredibly privileged and don’t have a clue how hard and raw their lives were at an alchemical level, how their nervous systems were constantly on fire and they were self-medicating just to cope.  Punk was (IS) a celebration of the human spirit in all its messy glory and tragedy.  It is also a counterculture, meaning it will forever exist in direct confrontational rebellion to stagnant mainstream narratives.  It’s not meant to be perfected and pristine in its finite political awareness, it’s meant to be messy and eternal.  I’m not saying you can’t improve upon the culture or clean up the trash littered all over… healing, empowerment, and/or evolution was always part of the original mission statement.  But this movement will never belong to you, or your people, regardless of whether you’re a white supremacist or a black supremacist, queer, straight, fascist, socialist, a nihilist, a whateverist, a monarch, a matriarch or a patriarch.

Punk is (A) fuck you to all your “arched” up eyebrows.

 

 

Point being, speak your peace, if you don’t like the way you’re being treated.  But once you remove empathy towards other strained voices from that analysis, from that equation, from that conversation, you’re an absolute fool and a coward who is betraying everything we’ve ever stood for.  Once you start talking in that generic streamlined bell-hooks-wannabe college professor jezebel tone of voice about how underprivileged you are, congratulations—you’re so incredibly privileged you’ve lost sight of it, and think your canonical discomfort is the greatest most pressing social concern of all.

Kathleen Hanna has been quoted as saying, “We love punk, that’s why we want to change it.”  Then maybe be a little more willing to show respect for the aggressive/active male energy principle (not to mention our long brutal lineage of male cultural heritage that is so often both miserable and insightful to inherit)… that quintessential energy that so drew you to “love” punk’s self-expression in the first place…  Instead of just throwing it under the bus at whim every time you’re inconvenienced by it?  The thing is, a lot of us “men” (as if we’re some kind of conglomerate rather than ~50% of the population) don’t like those “problem guys” either.  We didn’t want them around either, just as often as you didn’t.  We were just as torn about what to do with it as you are; and it’s often other men who end up getting shot, stabbed, beaten, betrayed, seduced, slandered, and robbed by the depraved and deprived.

Feminist women in particular have this tendency to carry on their legacy of passivity by just blandly stating, “Meh, I don’t like this!” or “This makes me uncomfortable!”  Y que?  What about it?  This whole fucking world is uncomfortable, and it always has been.  Men are supposed to just neatly solve all of men’s problems for you, which often arose from very real and dangerous historical precedents, unavoidable wars and cataclysms of animalistic dominion—while you passively deflect any responsibility away from women and simultaneously want to dump all of your own problems into our laps?  It’s your duty to just lazily demand that men change the world to better suit your sensibilities and sensitivities?  And how is that supposed to work, logistically, tactically, systemically?

Say what you need to say, but don’t expect your pearl clutching to resonate with a bunch of kids who are barely making their psychological ends meet, let alone their material ends.

In many ways I really admired Riot Grrrl growing up, and always have ever since, because women like Kathleen Hanna did what a lot of women are too afraid and too passive to do:  actually create something wholly their own, and instead of begging men to accept you and support you and distribute you and promote you—fuck that—make an impression on them and let your art be your undeniable statement of self-worth.  Those women actually put their own actions on the line, which is precisely why they’re easy to take shots at in retrospect.

That’s *exactly* what punk did in the first place, including the many women who were prominent at its inception; and if you’re too cowardly to make the same commitment, you’re not part of that movement and never will be.  Period.  It doesn’t matter if you like the music and think it would make a neat little socialist vessel if it could just be cleaned up a bit to be your tokenizing “safe space” for representation.  Either throw your lot in with the gladiators and become a freedom fighter for yourself, or stop trying to appropriate something that never belonged to you into a more palatable package.

This idiotically viral concept of universal “male privilege” and “white privilege” has led to a generation that’s completely naive and ignorant of how hard a movement like punk had to fight to be heard.  How hard men have always had to fight to be heard…  You’re not the only ones who suffer, you’re just the only ones who are so oblivious, cushioned, and aloof to the world’s suffering that you think your shakey voice is the epitome of marginalization.

One reason I still respect influential voices like Kathleen Hanna and James Spooner, despite being lumped in with the sickly frail direction neo-SJWism has tried to take punk in, is because they still remember its origins and still show some respect for where their influences actually came from, instead of trying to censor, re-center, and streamline every conversation.  I think if the counterculture still reflected those values rather than being assimilated into a mainstream caricature of “social justice,” it would have been even more intuitive to them to fight for their truth rather than play the victim in a culture that fundamentally rejected the narrative passivity of victimhood.

The reality is “social justice” is easier said than done.  It is rarely formulaic in true application… and that’s something a lot of you will never understand because you rely upon technical terms, collegiate abstractions and obfuscations, maladapted statistics, and tone deaf book knowledge, rather than actually confronting our collective messy truth directly at the source.

You are too afraid to do the very things that made punk so relevant.

 

 

The fact is, women and people of all orientations and ethnic backgrounds have ALWAYS been essential to punk, and present in its most primal origins.  Just look at how many artists cite X-Ray Spex as an influence, a band who made “riot grrrl” punk songs 20 years early (or Crass Records for that matter).  Having said that, you don’t get to take credit for other people’s work now that it’s a lot safer for you to act like you were part of something that you never were.

Those people were not your “representation,” they were fully *present* with the moment as individuals.

 

 

Complaining is easy, blame is easy, working out the messiness of life is a much more interactive demanding process.  Don’t assume that anybody and everybody who didn’t try to streamline what’s “allowed” and “isn’t allowed” didn’t get the memo or understand what you do.  In reality, they may have understood a much deeper truth in freedom of speech: the fact that “control” is largely a house of cards.  You can build a big tall monument in its image, but it won’t be long before that precipice collapses back into the “anarchy” you were in denial of in orchestrating/instituting a false paradigm of order to replace it.

If punks are disgusted by modern “socialism” maybe it’s because the word sounds more like an illness than a cure.