I've gotten so much shit for this, this week - with its putative subject taking time out to gay-bash me on his boring Canadian politics weblog (note: I'm not gay, but whatevs) and setting off a little mini-blogwar Canadian-style (ie., not much of a war) - that I'll just indulge myself and post this whole article. It's my column from last weekend's Globe and Mail:
The short neocon trip between punk and Karl Rove
OVERTONES
By CARL WILSON
The Globe & Mail
Saturday, Aug. 27, 2005
The most intriguing aspect of Warren Kinsella's new book, Fury's Hour: A (Sort-Of) Punk Manifesto, barely makes an appearance between its covers. Which is both rather punk and very self-serving, if that's not the same thing.
It's a lively goulash of potted music history, analysis, semi-memoir and motivational speech. But the people who buy this book don't really need his mini-bio of the Ramones. They want an account of how this prominent late-1970s Calgary punk, a member of The Hot Nasties and proprietor of Blemish Records, ended up a notorious strategist in the Liberal regime of Jean Chrétien. Does he credit punk for the "attack dog" tactics that made him the Karl Rove of the Canadian middle of the road? [...]
Kinsella isn't dim enough to imagine he can dodge the issue completely. Instead, he flips us off: "Yes, I have become that which I once sought to destroy. . . . Piss off, as a punk might say, if you don't approve."
(All very bold, except that Kinsella later rips ex-Sex Pistol John Lydon a new one for having "become the embodiment of all that punk sought to change or, failing that, hoped to destroy." And all because Lydon wouldn't give him an interview.)
Kinsella needn't be so conflicted. He's now a member of another group that also could be called the Hot Nasties -- the North American power elite.
When Kinsella quotes Lydon barking, "If you get in my way, you're going to have a serious bad time," Canadian readers might recall the author's ex-boss's near-identical statement after manhandling a protester. (The throttling itself was more punk than the rationalization.) Even after leaving office, the Chrétien punks continued to show their middle fingers to the public at the Gomery inquiry.
If that seems a stretch, it's because most people, including Kinsella, tend to think of punk as a progressive youth movement. But really, punk is an ink blot -- you see in it what you want. From drunk racist frat boys to anarcho-feminist straight-edge vegan art geeks, all sorts of characters have claimed the mohawk and leather jacket (or vinyl jacket for the vegans) for their own.
Kinsella's shock over this, as in a well-reported chapter about Canadian punks' entanglements in both neo-Nazism and radical leftist bombings, seems risible coming from someone who's just spent 100 pages extolling punk's basis in generalized adolescent rage.
His own high-school crowd took up the cause after reading about the Pistols' supposed antics -- "throwing up on old ladies in airport waiting rooms . . . sounded pretty good to us." Hmm, how could that life-affirming impulse possibly go awry?
Kinsella misunderstands two things. The first is art. Specifically, punk as a late-late modernist art movement. When he responds to the Sex Pistols slogan "no future" by tut-tutting that there really is a future and punks should try to make it brighter (and vote Liberal?), he displays his tin ear for punk's Dadaist paradoxes.
He sneers at artist Andy Warhol's "hippie" (huh?) influence on the New York scene and on the Pistols' despised manager, Malcolm McLaren. Kinsella reviles the Warholian cynical hyper-boredom of early punk, but that attitude was what made it more than just sloppy heavy metal or folk singing on overdrive - its grand negation, flattening every sign and symbol into an interchangeable flux of disdain.
Deep down, the core of punk is the howl of the Freudian death drive, the gestural suicide of an exhausted youth culture - a thrilling annihilation that's repeated till its very emptiness is emptied. This inherent death wish is why the question "is punk dead?" is perpetual and unanswerable. As songwriter David Berman of the Silver Jews encapsulated it: "Punk rock died when the first punk said/ 'Punk's not dead, punk's not dead.' "
Of course, after that initial liberating shock, converts have to figure out what to do with life-after-punk-death. And that's where the contradictions come in.
Kinsella realizes punk was a purgative convulsion against the perceived decadence of the 1970s, but overlooks how closely that origin binds it to the neoconservative backlash that brought putative punk (and Liberal) foes Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Brian Mulroney to power. It's Kinsella's second big blind spot.
He enthuses over punk's do-it-yourself (DIY) ethic, for instance. But call it an entrepreneurial work ethic and you've got a neo-con sacred cow. (Vancouver punk Joey Shithead points this out, but Kinsella shrugs it off.) Punk also partook of Cold War apocalyptic fantasies parallel to those that would soon drive the mass revival of Christian fundamentalism -- "no future" meets the Rapture down on Death Drive.
Neo-cons hated the sixties, and punks hated hippies. In many ways punk anticipated the knee-jerk, know-nothing disdain for collective input and consequence that would become standard-issue conservative politics and culture - extreme individualism and atomized democracy.
How great a leap is it from barfing on old ladies to cutting their pension cheques?
Rush Limbaugh is punk, the Oxycontin-snorting, neo-con version of Henry Rollins. The blithely rude Paris Hilton is punk, kid sister to Courtney Love; much punk music now echoes her entitled, self-involved whine.
Punk-in-chief George W. Bush metaphorically gobs on the dead soldier's mother as he blasts past her in his motorcade. And Chrétien figuratively pelts Mr. Justice John Gomery with golf balls in a Kinsella-conceived bit of punk theatre.
Ashton Kutcher, MTV's idiot king of random cruelty, the pope of "can't you take a joke?", gives it its proper name: Our culture has been royally punked.
I'm not denying punk's salutary effects on many lives, including my own. But it's been too loyal an opposition, too close to emerging dominant values, for its own good.
The DIY model remains useful, but it just restates what countercultures always have done. And today, with far broader information within easier reach, white outsider youth culture is finally superseding punk.
By these fresher standards, Kinsella's "manifesto" is merely the nostalgia trip of a punk dinosaur and, oh yeah, total sellout.
― carl w (carl w), Thursday, 1 September 2005 21:59 (twenty years ago)