Comments on: Culture Wars Revisited

By: ToddSeavey.com » Blog Archive » Jazz, Race, Punk, and Electronicizing the Eschaton

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 02:08:18 +0000

[...] 4. I always thought Lesley looked a lot like my friend who sometimes comments here under the handle Xine — and who most recently did so to explain why girlfriend Helen Rittelmeyer and I might have somewhat opposing yet equally positive views of punk. This has prompted Helen to reply with an entry on her blog called “‘Conservatism for Punks’ for Punks,” defending her brutal, tribalistic view of the musical genre (as opposed to my individualistic one). I wonder, sometimes, if the sorts of things that typically cause Helen to declare something conservative — such as embracing suffering, violence, and intense rule-adherence — would even be recognizable as conservatism by most conservatives. I can’t picture Buckley in a mosh pit. (If Helen weren’t so lovely, I’d be scared sometimes. But she also makes brilliant suggestions like us being Thora Birch and Steve Buscemi from Ghost World the next time we have a costume party to go to.) [...]

By: Todd Seavey

Todd Seavey — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:23:11 +0000

Oh, and my favorite property-violation-related headline today:

Portly ‘ninja’ tries to steal Florida ATM machines

By: Todd Seavey

Todd Seavey — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:26:33 +0000

P.S. And as it happens, evolutionary psychology expert, egg donor, former co-panelist with Kerry Howley, and sometime critic of feminism Diana Fleischman informs me that Will Wilkinson and Kerry Howley are engaged. Rather than calling it a triumph of traditionalism, I will anticipate news that they’re writing their own vows (and no doubt writing them well).

My wedding gift to them will be to stop criticizing them (and to wish them many utils).

P.P.S. By contrast, my gift to Diana is to declare that February will be an overdue Month of Evolution on this blog, as befits the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth.

By: Todd Seavey

Todd Seavey — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:08:05 +0000

And the means of squaring the circle here (or scrawling a sloppy “A” in the circle, if you will), for political purposes, is to recognize that we should appreciate _both_ the comfort people find from immersion in densely rule-bound communities _and_ their freedom to leave such communities, the latter facilitated by not turning such communities’ particular rules into actual laws enforced by cops.

This in turn is why I think libertarians should be much quicker to talk of property rights than about individualism or, say, “free-spiritedness” per se. Over the long haul, a complete free market may produce a population nearly all of whose members decide to become strict Mennonites, for instance.

And with that, I hope many things that may sound contradictory in my philosophy and rhetoric start to make a bit more sense…

By: Xine

Xine — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:11:47 +0000

You might be interested to know that most of the bands profiled in Michael Azerrad’s *Our Band Could Be Your Life* side strongly with you in your disagreement with Helen about punk (you=individualistic, Helen=rigidly rule-bound and tribalistic). HÃ¼sker DÃ¼, Minutemen, Minor Threat, even Black Flag…they all complained in the book that what was born as a movement of fuck-you freedom and individualism quickly became co-opted by fans into — yes — an intolerant checklist of required looks and attitudes justifying a tribal mentality that permitted taunting and beating up anyone who didn’t fit its narrow confines, and that was just as stifling and oppressive as anything early punks rebelled against. This was a key reason why Greg Ginn and Grant Hart grew their hair out (and let it be known they admired the Grateful Dead) and why D. Boon and Mike Watt kept flying the flannel, and something that contributed to Ian MacKaye’s embrace of straight edge. One of them comments (I can’t remember who and don’t have the book at hand), unsurprisingly, that the rapid development of such orthodoxy and tribalism often produced incredibly crappy second- and third-generation punk bands, who not only betrayed punk’s original spirit of individualism but also thought that all you needed was a name like “Reagan Death” and a shaved head to be a good punk band.

Granted, these are American bands, and I have no idea if English punk bands felt similarly. But perhaps we can frame this as a generational difference between you and Helen: you are indeed reflecting the original genius that animated the founding fathers; she reflects what indeed eventually became (albeit to the dismay of those founding fathers) the dominating ethos of American punk.