The RNC Took My Baby Away

MSNBC discovers "conservative punks," i.e., kids who like loud rock music but don't necessarily fall in line with the politics of, I don't know, Jackson "No Nukes" Browne or The Beastie Boys, who are in favor of a Free Tibet and an dethroned George W. Bush (side question for Dalai Lama boosters: From a Buddhist perspective shouldn't it be self-evident the DL and the Tibetans are getting exactly what they deserve for past sins in former lives?).

The MSNBC story, with mandatory Ramones pic and pro-American Johnny R quote, is here.

Without getting into too lengthy a bit, shouldn't it be self-evident that a person's aesthetic tastes don't necessarily translate into political ones, especially at the partisan level? David Weigel made that basic point in his Reason review of Danny Goldberg's crapola Dispatches from the Culture Wars and Brian Doherty and I made it in our obit for Joey Ramone (warning: both of these pieces include the mandatory Johnny R right-wing quote). And Doherty made it at length in his wonderful story about the "strange politics of millionaire rock stars" (this probably has a Johnny quote in it, too, but I can't remember off-hand).

And lest anyone forget, punk, in its earliest forms, was alternately anti-political or as likely to be right-wing as left (anyone else remember Stiv Bator's unabashed jingoism during the Iranian hostage crisis?). One of the reasons punk was liberating was precisely because it mocked hippie-ish social uplift and message music, replacing it with a pure nihilism that was fun, fun, fun until your daddy took the Carbona away.