Republicans Are the New Punks

From the comments at Helen Rittelmeyer's post, "'Conservatism for Punks' for Punks":

Punk Rock is not conservative. True conservative movements (and not just those calling themselves such ...) have a core of stability and continuity. This stability and continuity is not characterized by the characteristics of the movement, but by the the stability and continuity of the characteristics.

Well, speaking of punk rock, stability, and continuity, Doug TenNapel argues "Republican is the New Punk (prefaced by a photo of Johnny Ramone):

The rebellious spirit of rock is dead. No better evidenced than by its formal endorsement of President Obama. Never before has rock been so central to the inauguration of a president. Bono is an ambassador in sunglasses who still knows how to pull a string and get an audience of thousands to put their fist in the air.

But rock cannot be both establishment and anti-establishment. It can’t be a rebellious underdog while endorsing and distributing the status quo. And yes, President Obama is the status quo of unlimited spending and government expansion he supposedly opposed during the election … then again, he also said he would fight to reduce abortion but couldn’t wait three days in office before throwing the pro-life useful idiots who voted for him under the bus. No change there. If this is what he meant by “reducing abortions” I can’t we to see what he meant by “reducing taxes.”

This is the mainstreaming of the bad boy, complete with rat-pack suit and cigarette in hand. A snappy skin spread over the boring, failed, liberal Democrats of the sixties. Hope and Change was nothing more than a repackaging of policies that have no right to be associated with hope or change.

Lefty politics are no longer the fringe and no matter if the voters knew it or not they carved lefty politics into stone. Bill Ayers became the system he once fought against. Sure, they still wear the earring and say “fuck” a lot to maintain street-cred among the academics, but now rock has taken sides — it is for the establishment. Same with journalism, the university and pop-culture. The left has become a cliché. They’re not “Arrested Development” they’re “Golden Girls” with a soul patch. Snore.

Now that the art nerds and punks just became the football jocks and prom queens, a new rebel is emerging from the wilderness. They are the new anti-establishment. One minority force bands together against every other branch of government swallowed by the Democrat octopus. The last evidence of a check or balance against the popular people are now the Conservative Republicans.

As a longstanding skate-punk, I find most of this amusing. When I was really punk, punk was anti-culture, seek-and-destroy against the establishment. As Johnny Rotten sung famously:

Dont know what I want but
I know how to get it
I wanna destroy the passer by cos i
I wanna be anarchy!

Or in Darby Crash's gutteral screams:

I'll get silver guns to drip old blood
Let's give this established
Joke a shove
We're gonna wreak havoc
On the rancid mill
I'm searchin' for something
Even if I'm killed...

Helen Rittelmeyer and her visitors can wax around poetically about what it's like to be punk or conservative, but some of the greatest punk rockers back in the day are now nihilist mouthpieces for the new age establishment currently proceeding to tear down the wisdom of the ages.

In any case, I miss Joe Strummer.