1,946 words / 12:43

Blacks make up nearly a third of United States postal workers, and I don’t care if someone tries to punch me for suspecting that this is one of the main reasons our postal service is going to hell.

I make part of my living by selling my books through the mail, and skyrocketing postal prices combined with plummeting postal service means that no matter how meticulously I package the books I send out — they’re lovingly cocooned in a bubble envelope that is cradled inside a rigid cardboard mailer — sometimes they wind up damaged, anyway.

Thanks to the glorious Negroes who run the postal service in my neck of the woods — and, judging from where he lives, probably his neck of the woods, too — a customer recently emailed me to announce that his hardcover book had arrived partially crushed, almost as if the Nazi-punching antifa member lampooned on the back cover had been kicked square in the balls and the boot had left a dent in his crotch.

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When I told him I’d send a replacement copy, he informed me that I rock:

You rock! I know you said you hate punk but I was a roadie for [semi well-known American punk band] for 3 years.

I told him that I’d known the singer of that band, who used to be irreverent and funny, and what a shame it was that he’d turned into a humorless “liberal fag.” He replied:

It was like 30 years ago. We are all liberals to the max. Fuck the right. As it says on your book. I punch nazis. Truthfully I used to kick them in the face. Nothing like a good old fashioned boot party to straighten out someone’s political affiliation.

I told him that if he’d actually assaulted people for their political beliefs, he’s an idiot. He asserted that not only do I rock, but that I’m punk as fuck:

You are hysterical and punk af! Idiot or not I’ll boot stomp the fuck outta right wingers. Let someone talk that religious or conservative control shit around me. . . . Violence was never my first answer. However with the skinhead scene in the eighties, those motherfuckers were violent as shit. Swift action is the only language they understood. Also my grandmother is Jewish and my mother is Irish. We are feed the homeless tolerant. But when it comes to people talking fascist bullshit, my tolerance ends. I hate hate

I said that if he’d “boot stomp” someone just for talking, he clearly wasn’t for free speech. I also informed him that having Jewish and Irish ancestors wasn’t an accomplishment:

People can have free speech but if they talk that hateful shit around me ima stuff my boot all up in their ass. I don’t feel accomplished in any way. I was just bringing it up so you know i won’t be on the side of fascists.

I let the conversation end there, realizing how fruitless it is to engage with someone so deeply brainwashed. But as someone who’s written about my own encounters with punk rockers who felt it was their holy mission to assault other white people for racial wrongthink, it got my steel-plated noggin a-thinkin’ about how punk rock — which in its early days was deeply iconoclastic, and many of whose early luminaries openly sported Nazi iconography, however ironically — became a rigidly humorless musical nostalgia act that formed the behavioral template for what is now known as antifa.

The best thing about punk rock was that anyone could play it. That was also the worst thing about punk rock. I enjoyed punk rock, especially its irreverence, for a year or maybe two, but as it rapidly ossified stylistically and got increasingly strident politically, I looked more toward American roots music from the 1950s and early ‘60s. Most of the music and movies I wound up loving throughout my life were made before I was born. I operate on the assumption that when a culture starts a slow decline, so do its cultural artifacts.

Since I was in my mid-teens when punk started getting alarmist coverage on shows such as 60 Minutes and in periodicals such as Parade magazine, I understood early punk as mostly a musical and stylistic rebellion — not a political one — against the sort of “youth culture” that directly preceded it. Musically, its short, loud, hi-energy blasts of anger were a rude counterpoint to the gross excesses of mid-1970s prog rock as typified by bands such as Yes and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. Stylistically, its short haircuts and open fetishization of rage, decay, death, and all things ugly were a reaction against how squishy, soft, and passive the hippie movement had become.

If you look at early interviews with punk rockers, they were especially hostile toward hippies. They hardly ever mentioned Nazis in a negative light; they were too busy appropriating Nazi imagery.

So how did a movement that seemed like a somewhat organic cultural reaction against hippies and Leftism become a decades-long, carefully managed jihad against Nazis and fascism?

A book called The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s details the uniquely Jewish flavor of early New York City punk. Hillel “Hilly” Kristal, owner of CBGB’s, was the son of an alleged “Russian pogrom survivor.” Richard “Blank Generation” Hell, first a member of Television and then leader of his own band The Voidoids, had a Jewish father. Both members of pioneering electroshock duo Suicide were Jewish. Two of The Ramones — the quintessential punk-rock band — were Jewish. Ironically, guitarist Johnny Ramone, inventor of that buzzsaw guitar sound that became the sonic template for punk rock that refuses to die even now, in its sixth decade — was an Irish/Polish mutt and lifelong Republican who was rumored to have a Hitler painting hanging over the fireplace in the Los Angeles house he bought after The Ramones made it big.

In England, the managers of The Clash (Bernie Rhodes) and The Sex Pistols (Malcolm McLaren) were both Jewish. An article titled “Never mind the swastikas: the secret history of the UK’s ‘punky Jews’” recalls that in 1976, Bernie Rhodes nearly shut down a gig by demanding that McLaren, the Sex Pistols, and Siouxsie and the Banshees rid themselves of their swastikas, or else they couldn’t use The Clash’s musical gear: “The gig went on. No swastikas.”

Also in 1976, an organization called “Rock Against Racism” was formed — but more as reaction to pro-fascist statements glam rocker David Bowie had made and anti-immigration statements classic rocker Eric Clapton had made than anything the punks had said or done. In 1977, along with other “anti-fascist” groups, Rock Against Racism violently clashed with 500 members of Britain’s National Front in what became known as “The Battle of Lewisham.”

In 1979, rock critic Lester Bangs, who’d moved to New York and stopped writing for Detroit’s anarchic and hilarious CREEM magazine, pecked out an essay for The Village Voice titled “The White Noise Supremacists.”

Bangs reminisces about how during his time in Detroit writing for CREEM, he’d use the word “nigger” to startle people at parties:

We believed nothing could be worse, more pretentious and hypocritical, than the hippies and the liberal masochism in whose sidecar they Coked along, so we embraced an indiscriminate, half-joking and half-hostile mindlessness which seemed to represent . . . a new kind of cool. “I don’t discriminate,” I used to laugh, “I’m prejudiced against everybody!”

Bangs confesses his guilt and agony about a recent situation in a NYC record store where he drunkenly said “nigger” again, not realizing there had been a black couple standing behind him. After being informed of his faux pas, he says he ran outside to make a fumbling apology for causing them pain.

But rather than privately wrestling with his own hypocrisies and deeply-layered guilt complexes, Bangs indulges his own white liberal masochism to scold a female member of the NYC punk scene for her unapologetic whiteness:

I opened up a copy of a Florida punk fanzine called New Order and read an article by Miriam Linna of the Cramps, Nervus Rex, and now Zantees: “I love the Ramones [because] this is the celebration of everything American — everything teenaged and wonderful and white and urban. . . .” [T]he same issue featured a full-page shot of Miriam and one of her little friends posing proudly with their leathers and shades and a pistol in front of the headquarters of the United White People’s Party, under a sign bearing three flags: “GOD” (cross), “COUNTRY” (stars and stripes), “RACE” (swastika). . . .

Sorry, Miriam, I can go just so far with affectations of kneejerk cretinism before I puke. . . . If that makes me a wimp now, good, that means you and anybody else who wants to get their random vicarious kicks off White Power can stay the fuck away from me.

Bangs then takes his “stay the fuck away from me” personal disgust up a notch to the point where he cheers the specter of white people, even CBGB’s regulars, getting beaten up for racial insensitivity:

More recently, I’ve heard occasional stories like the one about one of the members of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks yelling “Hey, you bunch of fucking niggers” at a crowd of black kids in front of Hurrah one night and I am not sorry to report getting the shit kicked out of him for it.

Lester Bangs, who glorified being a drunken, drugged-out fuckup, died at 33 because overdosing on drugs has always been cooler than racism in punk-rock circles.

The first punk-rock single I bought was “California Über Alles,” the Dead Kennedys’ 1979 debut. Not only did it ironically appropriate Nazi imagery, it parodied what would happen if California Governor Jerry Brown became president and turned the US into a hippie nightmare. Sample lyrics:

Zen fascists will control you
Hundred percent natural
You will jog for the master race
And always wear the happy face . . .

The hippies won’t come back, you say
Mellow out, or you will pay

Only two years later, the enemy had switched from hippies to Nazis. In 1981, the Dead Kennedys released a single called “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” that not only had a “No Swastikas” logo on the record label, it came with a “No Swastikas” armband. (I’ll never stop being amused at the fact that to create a “No Swastikas” symbol, you still need a swastika.) Sample lyrics:

Punk ain’t no religious cult
Punk means thinking for yourself
You still think swastikas look cool
The real Nazis run your schools . . .
In a real fourth Reich you’ll be the first to go

But forget about “thinking for yourself.” In the Punk Reich, Nazis were the first to go. The junkies, trannies, and terminally unhappy were encouraged to stay, but the “Nazis” — who were basically defined as anyone who didn’t fall blindly in line with far-Left rhetoric — had to go. Much of the ‘80s were involved with punk’s own internal “optics war,” where white-power punks who’d show up at gigs to harass others were ritually and violently purged. Punk politics had ossified on the hard Left. Even the ironic Nazi symbolism had to go, although it wasn’t nearly as bad as the non-ironic type. The leaders of the New Punk Reich were absolutely aghast at those who seemed to really mean it, as if it’s somehow much more immoral to be sincere than insincere.

And that is how a youth movement whose pioneers adorned themselves in ironic swastikas and iron crosses morphed from trying to piss off hippies to trying to exterminate Nazis. It’s how a fledgling anti-authoritarian musical culture was made to goose-step in lockstep with global authoritarianism.