Almost twelve years ago, I met the love of my life. She is patient, long-suffering, and resilient beyond belief. Her taste in men is exceedingly poor, however. The evidence is her continued attachment to myself and my personal brand of insanity.
She is as patient as I am impatient. She is long-suffering while I am long-winded. What you see here is what she gets all the time. She can’t just click away from me. I follow her around. She also gets stories about my train-hopping days though, from back when I took insane risks in the pursuit of adventure.
J. R. R. Tolkien is a hell of a drug. I recommend mainlining it into your children as soon as possible. I also recommend keeping them away from train tracks.
In any event, my lady wife once asked me what punk rock was all about. The fool! She opened a gigantic can of rhetorical whoop-ass in that moment.
I’m a huge fan, not only of the music, but of the principles and behaviors attached to this particular sub-culture referred to as punk. Often all in capital letters, as PUNK. It’s just more in your face.
Still, at the time she asked I somewhat struggled to articulate any of this. It seemed to her I’d expressed nihilism or a general anarchist principle, but that was merely my own failure. Although the general anarchy thing is pretty spot on. I don’t much care for rules I don’t lay myself and I don’t care if other people ignore them.
I don’t need them to behave a certain way. They’re not my business.
I hope to correct the record here regarding my idea of whatever punk might be about. Honestly, it needs a psychologist’s treatment, but not a Sigmund Freud or a Jordan Peterson type. More of a Carl Jung type. You know, the smart one.
This essay involves some autobiography and some historical references. It helps to demonstrate ideas through example. As always, I change or simply omit the names of others to protect the guilty. Except Diogenes. Just like the much-vaunted honey badger, he simply had no fucks to give.
There is honor even among thieves, or so they say. Never mind who “they” are, I’ve already mentioned I won’t be telling.
Punk, a consumerist oriented society would have one believe, is a recent invention. Or at least as recent as the 1970’s. But this doesn’t appear to be true to me.
Instead, it seems a recent articulation and manifestation of something ancient. So long as societies exist, and so long as those societies suffocate the individual under a weight of collectivist bullshit, what we call punk right now will never die
I grew up, though I use that term rather loosely, in the simultaneously sleepy and sprawling town of Spokane. It is nestled in the gorgeous inland northwest of the United States of America. It is the second largest city in Washington State, with the largest being Seattle. The land of Starbucks and feces the council refuses to clean up.
Not too much happened in Spokane. We had dishonest mayors and a city council just as bad populated by troglodytes wishing they were mayor. The Mayor of Spokane or any place foolish enough to have one is always the least popular person in the city.
Spokane was politically diverse. It still is.
My parents encouraged a political awareness in me. During my teen years the impeachment of Bill Clinton was in full swing playing out on every channel from ABC to Spice. Watching the news every evening opened my young, impressionable eyes to the potential and possibility of both cigars and interns. You can do anything to interns, apparently.
Anything but pay them. That’s beyond the pale.
Some years prior to Newt Gingrich’s impeachment erection spraying on the news every night, I was aware of a fellow named Tom Foley. Foley was the Democratic Congresslizard for Spokane in the U.S. House of Representatives. But he was also the Lizardspeaker of the Whorehouse. This is one of the most powerful public offices in the United States.
It is officially called the Speaker of the House. They call it this is to avoid the stigma associated with lizard people.
The hardworking people of Spokane had put him there in that far distant Whorehouse of Representatives many times. But they tired of his commitment to the Party over the district and when he worked against term limits for public officials, they applied them to him themselves via the ballot box. Spokane County became the first batch of voters ever in American history to decapitate their own Lizardspeaker of the Whorehouse.
Spokane is politically diverse. This doesn’t mean they don’t care so much about which party creature cheats them in D.C. But it does mean they’ll vote for a Republican if they really feel they need to. In contrast, Seattle will never do this. Party affiliation is all it takes for those dullards to feel they’ve taken part as the good guys in some sort of grand psychodrama unfolding through history.
It’s all the Adderall in the salmon. Fucks them right up. You can see it in their shit.
Spokane on the other hand will send an individual to D.C. No doubt a crook. But an individual crook. Many identify as a Republican or a Democrat, flashing their Party cards under your nose. But they’ll break bad if they’re mad enough. They’ll punish a douche, and they’ll discard their collective identities to do it.
I saw this when it happened. I was young. Too young to understand the intricacies of the situation. But I sort of understood what happened and by now I definitely do.
This informed my political identity. It groomed me and conditioned me for punk when I encountered it in The Queers’ Love Songs For the Retarded. That’s a band, by the way. They still play and they still wreck. Still haven’t met Ursula, though I’d love to. She sounds great. For reasons.
But my political identity is something one day before changing completely on another. I put no stock in Party membership. Gives me the willies.
I never saw a club or an institution that didn’t make me want to go smoke a cigarette in a galaxy far, far away from their melodramas and catastrophist sympathies.
I’ve been told this fiercely individual identity is merely a phase and it certainly could be. But one must wonder at the definition of phase, since it has endured thirty years.
Punk at its core has very little to do with music, ironically. That is merely the preferred medium of transmitting its ideas now. It isn’t about fashion, despite the mohawks and nose rings, either.
These are methods, behaviors, which assert and signal a couple things. These things are the principles of punk and the receiver of them can either take them and ingest them or get fucked and die in a fire of insulted indignation. They signal a derision of the norm. A boredom with the established order.
Now obviously, punk is associated with music and fashion in many ways. It seems likely this is due to the fact those things can be marketed and sold. We live in a business society and those things which are business-oriented are the most readily available. Like sex, drugs, and rock n roll.
But most the punks I met couldn’t be picked out of the police line ups they often found themselves in. Jeans, tennis shoes, t-shirts, and a haircut that didn’t resemble the outcome of a woman's indiscretion with a rooster. These kids were punks, through and through. Their minds are what made them, not their wardrobe.
Their clothes were somewhat accidental, in fact. Half the time they didn't even bother with clothes at all.
I could be accurately described as willful and mischievous. At least if one were to ask my longer-suffering parents.
Many years before encountering Dead Kennedy’s Stealing People’s Mail, I was stealing people’s mail on my walk home from elementary school. I once rode my bicycle into the back of a parked truck, presumably assuming the truck would give way to my sixty-pound bulk. I don’t recall what I was thinking at these times. I likely wasn’t.
But I remember walking in the front door, blood streaming out of and down my face, as my mother freaked out. I scored a few stitches that day and a scar where my eyebrow refuses to grow. My wife thinks it's cute. The truck is largely ambivalent about it.
An idea of the will - specifically the individual will - is the cornerstone of punk philosophy. You’re not the boss of me, Parked Truck. I am the boss of me. It may be so I am a hopelessly incompetent manager. But neither that fact nor ownership of myself changes.
I decide what I do and anyone who behaves otherwise is a fool. But I’m cool with them doing them. That’s the plural them, by the way. The blob. The Borg. The assimilators.
The collective will of any committee, any society, any organization, gets no inherent respect from me. Nor do I recognize their authority.
That is poor luck for them, as these various collectives seem to believe they are due the respect I refuse to give them. It likely has to do with my belief they are silly twats merely occupying puffed up positions of power they neither deserve nor competently wield.
Social media “mavens" and politicos can similarly suck chode in their quests for likes for The Company or The Party. I don’t care about their pet projects nor the phantoms dominating their minds. They are fascinating, though.
I quest for likes for me. And my bank account, admittedly. Feel free to share this by the way.
Readers of Friedrich Nietzsche may be familiar with this idea of the will, as would anyone else with a brain who may not have read the cantankerous bastard. I certainly hadn’t read Nietzsche at the time but when I got around to doing so, most of it just seemed like common sense.
Of course, I viewed the idea of inflicting one’s will on others to be atrocious and evil, a pursuit and application of tyranny. But hey, that’s politics, is it not? It is.
This idea of individual will infuriates collectives - particularly political groups - as it places a petty, selfish individual in opposition to their petty, selfish, collective reason. Never mind the law of the lowest common denominator, or sense, or anything else which has been pretty useful to individual human beings throughout history. These people would throw me in a mulcher if they could.
They are forever seeking the legal authority to do it.
Authority is a drug more addictive than the heroin and meth habits I courted in my youth. Unfortunately, it is rare for the authority-addict to overdose. Eventually, they are strung up by their own bootstraps in the town square. But this doesn’t happen nearly often enough and is by no means guaranteed. Not like taxes.
I think it sad the warmongers in the US government don’t die on the battlefield with honor when their poor decisions don’t work out. Instead, young men and women die on behalf of despicable and dishonorable individuals with no skin in the game. Lindsay Graham comes to mind. So, does Adam Schiff. And hundreds of others.
There is no collective identity in punk rock. Perhaps one sees another punk and feels a kinship, a preference for their company over coke-fueled club-wanker orienting their lives around one-night stands and unattended drinks. But that’s about as far as it goes. Just friends, never “allies.” I got my friends’ back, but I don’t have their front when it comes to politics. That’s my own and that’s their own.
Unless they’re hot. Then I probably had both of those at some time or another. I’m “incorrigible” or something. Also, quite attractive. Back in the day. It’s all the scars, I think.
Eric Hoffer - a fascinating and brilliant American man known as the Longshoreman Philosopher - knew quite well one must sacrifice their individual identity in order to join a collective identity. The collective has no time for it and nothing but contempt otherwise. Just watch an angry mob form. You’ll spot people resisting at first before being swept away with the herd. Becoming nothing more than belligerent bovines.
Perhaps one enjoys the same music as you do. But there is no political identity which is shared, outside of individual anarchism. Sounds real scary to someone uncritically reared on Plato and Aristotle. It just means live and let live. Stay out of my business unless I invite you in. The part which infuriates the Platonists and related totalitarian authority-addicts is the understanding their rules simply don’t apply to me.
To be sure, there are many who consider themselves punk rockers who advocate the idea of utopian socialism or other totalitarian schemes, but these wankers are merely confused. They have no individual identity. They’ve already given up. Their thoughts are not their own, they are the collective’s. They are deeply critical of the established order but cannot contemplate a future where their own order mulches them into dust.
They don’t have as expansive a reading list as I do. I’m boring. So, while they were marching in protests and burning down local businesses, I was reading their book lists. Their heroes are always violent chodes like Che Guevera, executing people in jungles or deserts for some “cause" or other. Politics again. I’m not a big fan of murder, personally. Their mileage varies based on who is being murdered.
I wish the death of no human being in this world. Only monarchs. This would seem a contradiction to anyone who hasn’t read Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. But trust me, it isn’t contradictory at all. Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur. There is no power on earth which can be compared. Except a guillotine. That seems to work.
Just need to make sure to catch the military dictators next time, too.
To repeat, I wish death upon no human. But I have read some obituaries with some small satisfaction. That’s a Mark Twain quote. As usual, he has already said it better.
Now, here as in most other inquiries, one can find rumblings and warnings of things which are modern in the past. Historians make a career out of this and wherever the job becomes difficult and a preceding event to their subject cannot be found, they make one up. I risk that here and leave it to the reader to judge for themselves how close to the mark I come.
Well over two thousand years ago there lived a strange man called Diogenes of Sinope, or Diogenes the Cynic. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. I certainly never stop talking about him.
This man was, according to highly respected philosophers both of his day and subsequent centuries, utterly and completely free. He lived in Corinth but derided citizenship with that city. He denied citizenship to any place smaller than the entire world. He was without doubt the first and most genuine cosmopolitan in history. Not only in behavior, but due to having coined that phrase in the first place.
As someone deeply concerned with liberty and freedom, he was not attached to anything.
He had exactly two possessions to his name. A cloak and a drinking bowl. Once upon a time, he saw a little street urchin drinking out of a well by cupping the water in his hands. Diogenes immediately smashed his own drinking bowl, recognizing he didn’t need to carry that baggage around nor use it at all.
He was homeless by design. Time after time he was invited to sleep under some concerned citizen’s roof, offered jobs, etc. He refused them all stating he didn’t need them nor the social debt he would incur by accepting their offers. His commitment to freedom was, so far as one can tell, utterly unparalleled among any philosopher, anywhere, and at any time. Only Benedict Spinoza or Eric Hoffer come close.
Individuals like John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, or John Stuart Mills couldn’t even conceive of practicing this absolutely free lifestyle. Nor could Aristotle. They preferred their comforts, their wines, their civilizations, even as they wrote of its evils.
Yeah, sorry. This turned into philosophy real quick didn’t it. I do that sometimes.
Diogenes is one man who can never be accused of hypocrisy. This is something one can level at just about any other philosopher. His authenticity cannot be questioned, though his lifestyle and philosophy itself absolutely have been. He, like any modern punk, would have simply given them the finger. Or the ancient Greek equivalent. I’m not sure what it was, but I call it The Dog. Give ‘em the dog, Socrates!
He is the embodiment of a formal Cynic philosophy; that is to say, hopelessly free and utterly honest. This was so even at what others considered personal cost, but Diogenes never cared. That is what made him exceptional.
That and his sense of humor. He also had a tendency to demonstrate how absurd the society he lived in had become. Greek Civilization had given philosophers license to behave in ridiculous ways. Plato once defined man as, “a featherless and flightless bird.” Diogenes immediately seized a chicken, plucked out its feathers, and hurled it at Plato, exclaiming, “Behold! Plato’s man!”
He did this in the middle of a dinner party. Plato had been enjoying himself. basking in the approval and applause of the circus seals he lectured. Enter Diogenes and the rest is history.
Plato never did modify his definition of man, though his acolytes a generation later were more reasonable than he in the face of evidence. Plato never cared for evidence. I have never cared for Plato.
Diogenes on the other hand always struck me as immensely similar to Gotama Buddha. If the Buddha insulted random people all day long, anyway.
The punk finds themselves pushing back against society’s standards a little now, maybe more later, but always pushing. Often, these individuals are painted as rebels without a cause in some derisive fashion. But the punk doesn’t need a cause society would recognize, the punk’s cause is their own.
There is no required justification for this to be found outside the individual’s mind and person. The desire to push back, the will to behave as one’s own person, as an individual human being. What more justification is required? There is none. The individual is paramount from any reasonable individual’s view. It all comes down to that.
One can throw themselves away. Or one can keep themselves. A binary choice made every minute and every second of every single day.
The loud music, the loud fashion whatever it might be, the violent dancing, these are all reactions to a society claiming the right to dictate how one behaves. One may read this article and find themselves disagreeing as to how one should behave. Good! Don’t let some asshole you’ve never met seize your mind.
Don’t let anything but your own reason dictate your path. Allow others informative roles if you must. But never relinquish the wheel.
A person is their own person, regardless of race, gender, sex, or any other insanities stating who has a right to lecture whom based on unimportant shit no one can help. This is evidence those people have abandoned reason entirely. Trust your reason.
Robert A. Heinlein once wrote in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, “I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”
In an age of political correctness, digital social media cabals, and political idealism masquerading as realism, the cynic is the rebel. Anyone claiming otherwise doesn’t understand how deeply entrenched in collective trash they have become.
So, give them all the finger - or The Dog - and you do you, girl. The personal rewards are deeper and more personal than status or position or money. I suspect I shall never have status, or position, or even a great deal of money myself.
But what I always already have is equal parts defiance and gratitude for your attention through this entire thing. I hope you look forward to more.
Sic Vivitur.
Unfortunately punk ended up becoming as dogmatic as what it despised