Say Don’t Stop to Punk Rock

Indisputably, the world is overrun with too much content of all sorts. Of this too much content, there is way, way too much political content, which is so frenzied and doom-filled perhaps we should more aptly refer to it as discontent. While I can make no 100% guarantee as I add to the heap today, it is my hope and my goal that this will be the only (overtly) political piece I write between now and November. And really, today’s offering is more of a reminder to myself of the importance of maintaining mental health than it is some broad prescriptive solution to the political shitshow we are collectively being forced to endure. 

Let us begin with the wisdom of Joe Strummer. Last week I watched the 2007 Strummer documentary The Future is Unwritten. It’s a great doc and held some powerful reminders about the importance of punk rock and the dangers of ego. Strummer was brilliant and on point with so many of his views. He was also a human who became, for a stretch, a parody of himself—his fame and the power that came with it was antithetical to the messages he was delivering. Fortunately, toward the end of his too short life he got back into his groove. As his audience shrunk so did his ego, allowing a beautiful return to his roots—musically and politically. 

Strummer left us with a lot of great quotes. Here’s my favorite: Punk rock means exemplary manners to your fellow human being. To me that’s as challenging as any Zen koan about one hand clapping or other confusing scenarios. As with the Golden Rule, which is obviously at the root of the Strummer quote, in theory it seems pretty basic and commonsensical to play nice. Do unto others, yadda yadda. 

But there’s such a wide gap between knowledge and application sometimes. In reality when I am faced with assholery, I find it extremely difficult and often impossible to be kind. To wit—last week as I watched the RNC’s coronation of Donald The Cunt Trump—observing thousands of rabid sycophants with maxi-pads stuck to their ears cheering on an ancient wrestler’s Heil to the Chief rhetoric—a mix of fascination, horror and despondency washed over me anew. I found myself asking, as I always do when I waste time watching spectacles like this, What the fuck is wrong with these idiots? 

Then I remember I know the answer, which comes to me in three parts. Part One harkens back to a pre-Brexit conversation I had with my friend Raz, an Oxford educated astrophysicist with one of the most dazzling minds I have had the privilege of interacting with. When I asked him to explain to me in terms I could understand what he thought was driving so many of his countrymen to enthusiastically participate in making their own lives much worse, he was succinct and to the point. Driving the masses, he said, was the old home team dedication. You pick a side, you root for that side, you remain unwavering no matter what evidence exists that you are utterly delusional. (Here’s an interesting article about fans that won’t stop cheering for teams that are perennial losers.)

Raz’s answer reminds me of another powerful lesson I was taught back in the mid-80s when the HMS Southampton docked in Tampa. Answering a call in the Tampa Tribune, my friends and I signed up to take a group of English sailors around the city and show them a good time. In addition to learning the wonders of dipping French Fries in mayonnaise, how to stretch a condom over my head in a bar contest, and why never to drink multiple cans of cider whilst in the bowels of a labyrinthine ship*, I learned something else from those young lads. We got onto the topic of the Falklands War of 1982 and one of them described for me his take on fighting “the enemy,” which had nothing to do with Royalty Loyalty: “What it comes down to,” he said, “is ‘Do I get to go back to my girl, or does he get to go back to his?’” 

(*Nothing untoward happened, I simply could not navigate my way off that ship in order to get to my waitress shift on time. The sailors were very polite.)

That sailor’s sentiment offers a perverse twist on the feminist theory popularized in the ‘70s that the personal is political. It reminds me that so many people have lost sight of Barbara Jordan’s reminder about The Common Good. Instead, they are convinced that what they believe to be personally best for them is what is best for us all. Disheartening, yes, but I also find recognizing this is extremely helpful in trying to not completely lose my mind when I watch the maxi-pad ear patchers whip themselves into a joyful frenzy over a known rapist they perceive as a savior. It allows me—and I admit this is a tremendous stretch—to try to remember the commonalities between myself and these people who, increasingly, fill me with total disgust.

Which brings me to my second point. I believe that striving to comprehend why so many people behave this way, rather than simply condemning them, is not a futile exercise. I’m never going to cross the bridge and join the cult, but understanding the cult mentality helps me to turn the volume down on my own hatred. Allow me to explain.

Just as I write far less about politics anymore, I also write far less about my “father.” the violent narcissist. But I am going to briefly revive the topic and trot out his sorry ghost once again, in the interest of helping myself (and maybe you, if you want) practice that very punk rock ethos about extending good manners even to those we loathe. 

I am sixty years old now. When I was nineteen, my “father,” a bully of the sort that would make Trump proud, disowned me for the first time. He had a way of luring me back in—bait I took not because I had any interest in his approval but because it was excruciating to be cut off from my mother and my eight siblings, all of whom fell in line with his command that I was no longer a member of the family. Times I did return to the fold briefly, it was this ache that drove my foolishness. And it was foolishness because it was only ever a matter of time before he again kicked me out for some perceived sin on my part. (The first time he exiled me was because of my punk rock haircut.)

It took me a long time to understand that I needed to cut him out. Even when I managed this, in my early thirties, the damage he inflicted was so thorough and seemingly unshakeable that I somnambulantly stepped into one relationship after another with men who, like my father, were raging narcissists. 

It’s been seven years now since my last entanglement with one of these guys. I don’t like thinking about him. I don’t like thinking about the version of myself I was back then, and how readily I walked right into his trap. I certainly don’t like recounting how when he hit me in the face, that was not enough for me to come to my senses and leave. Oh no. I stuck around, got hit in the face again, and even after that, when he ended things to go public with the woman with whom he’d been cheating, I was by then so utterly fucked up that I thought I needed to somehow win him back.

These memories cause me genuine anguish. But I’m happy to say they no longer cause me shame. Thanks to an absolute shit ton of therapy, I am crystal clear on the power of indoctrination and how brainwashed I was, from the day I was born, to buy into the notion that I was less than, and that, like my mother, I must submit, I must make excuses for such terrible behavior, I must stand by my man. 

The cycle was so very hard to break. Once I did break it, once I learned to see red flags and avoid them instead of running toward them like a bull, I noticed an impatience well up within me. Observing others continue to engage in what I had finally thrown off, I admit judgment crept in. Why can’t other people get it like I do? Why do they keep going back for more?

I have often felt this way about my own siblings, several of whom continue to kneel down to the memory of the man who left every single one of us doomed to a life of PTSD, chronic anxiety, fear, hypervigilance, and suspicion. Despite my ongoing pleas to be left off of group texts, I have one sister in particular who delights in including me in messages that proclaim His Goodness. It has taken me so long to get to a place of compassion for this sibling and the others who cling to the myth.

At some point, a simple analogy visited me that has been very useful. It’s like we were all in the same train wreck, but we were each in different cars and so the impact of being bullied and abused by this man whose job it was to love and protect us manifested differently. Some of us got hit (literally and figuratively) much harder. None of us escaped unscathed. As with any group of witnesses asked to describe a traumatic scene, our reports vary and often contradict.

The greatest tool in my “father’s” narcissistic belt was Divide and Conquer as he pitted us against each other at every turn. United we stand, divided we fall—there is not a single sibling among us who gets along with all of the others. There are internal conflicts between some of us that stretch back half of a century now. This is his legacy.

In the last couple of years, to my surprise and delight, I have gotten close with some of my sisters in a way we could not manage as children, when each of us was too busy struggling for our own individual survival to be able to help the others. I’m certain I will always be the most vocal one decrying the severe abuse we suffered, but at least now some of them are opening up to hearing how life has gone for me, how much it hurt to be so cut off. When they hear me out, when I feel my own existence acknowledged, I can better listen to them and understand their experiences and beliefs, of why they did not, as I did, break away. Because for as fraught and fucked up as the family is, to them it is still family and no matter what, you do not turn your back on that. They will never get me on board with that sentiment, just as I will never convince them to follow my lead. Still, finally after all these years, we can begin to understand each other’s choices without instantly condemning one another. 

This brings us to the third piece of the puzzle I turn to when I try to understand the maxi-pad ear patchers. To step away from the home team, to open one’s eyes, to acknowledge buried truths—it’s too terrifying. Lots of people, maybe a majority, will do whatever they have to in order to justify their choices, to keep from being kicked out of the club, even if the club they’re clinging to was built on a foundation of hate.

To be clear, in no way am I condoning the cruelty of MAGA fanatics. I, personally, was on the receiving end of their violent and relentless attacks and death threats for the seven hellish months I lived in Shitville. I still look forward to reading with glee future obituaries of the psychos that took it upon themselves to “teach” me that I did not deserve to live in peace in my own house because I did not want to goose step beside them. 

But in working to understand what drives them to blindly embrace their Evil Daddy, I can sometimes engage in what I refer to as Compassion from a Distance. This is the same technique I use to keep from telling my sister, the one most entrenched in glorifying the man who wrecked our minds, to go fuck herself. She latched onto the fear he instilled in us and has not been able to let go. To expose herself to the truth would necessarily destroy the myth she must maintain in order for her to make sense of her existence. If I bully her about how she embraced the bully that sired us, what good is that going to do? 

Narcissists love chaos. They love pitting people against one another. It is so easy to get sucked into their drama and, as they know, when we get sucked in this prevents us from focusing on anything else. When I make myself remember this, I tear a page from the Book the MAGA misguided all claim to live by, words from the man whose message they distort on the regular:  “Forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do.”

In order to make the hard-won progress I’ve made against the narcissistic abuse that has hurt me so much, I had to learn the very, very hard lesson that narcissists never change. That all those times I stuck around and yelled back and engaged was only me pouring fifty-pound sacks of salt into my own gaping wounds. I had to learn to shift my focus and strive toward living that bumper sticker about being the change I wish to see. 

It’s a daily battle, and given the current state of politics, it’s very easy to forget, to want to get back in there and start screaming some more, which admittedly I still sometimes do. Mostly though, I find that the more fucked up shit gets, the more clear-headed I become. Leaning on another analogy has helped me focus. I have come to see Donald The Cunt Trump as a literal cancer on humanity—a swift moving, devastating cancer with a dismal survival rate if he is not defeated. 

Having had cancer cut from my body, I can tell you that the diagnosis is devastating, It can also be a huge wake up call. When you are told that your own body is attacking itself, possibly to death, if you’re lucky the news alerts you to all the beauty you previously took for granted. The leaves on the trees grow more vibrant in their green finery. A blue sky again takes on the dazzling wonder many of us leave behind in childhood. 

Lately I’ve been in the practice of stepping away from the news each evening to go outside and brush my donkey Levon. It’s a simple soothing act for both of us. I whisper sweet nothings in his big goofy ears. This gentle bonding softens my heart. When my heart softens I am able to move away from all of the contagious hostility in the world. Which in turn allows me to fortify my practice of Compassion from a Distance for those I still can’t imagine ever getting along with. And it helps me to extend exemplary kindness when I am out in the world, offering smiles and Good Mornings freely, without stopping to consider who is voting for whom. Is this going to fix all that’s broken? Nah. But I find that it helps quiet the calculated chaos engineered to keep us all swirling in the cesspool of hate.

What are y’all doing to cope in these trying times? 

NOTES:

Thanks for reading y’all. If you’re a weekly reader and can swing a paid subscription, please consider it. It’s $5 per month or $50 per year. Your financial support helps me keep it rolling over here. You can also help by sharing this with others you think will dig it. One time tips gladly accepted on Venmo: @spike-gillespie 

Please don’t give up. Please don’t sit out the election because you don’t like our choices. Please think of Barbara Jordan—remember THE COMMON GOOD. If you’re not registered to vote, I strongly encourage you to visit VOTE.org and remedy that. Thank you.

If you’re in Austin and looking to rehome stuff you no longer need—I am always accepting donations of adult clothes and shoes, toiletries, linens, EYEGLASSES (readers) and gently used reusable water bottles to distribute to Austin’s downtown homeless population. Happy to pick up. Give me a holler. Thanks.