April mood: punk rock ‘politics’
Nothing makes me feel more punk rock than the utter rage I feel each year while being bullied by bureaucratic revenuers for an ever-larger slice of my annual earnings.
Mixing politics and punk rock is among my least favorite things on planet earth.
However, I was recently doing my taxes — while listening to a Spotify mix of 80s and 90s punk (as one does) — and it occurred to me: Something I hate even more than mixing punk and politics is the ridiculously cumbersome process of handing over a share of my annual earnings to a politically corrupt government run by pandering partisans and populists.
Is it “punk rock” to despise government as much as I do halfway through my list of itemized deductions — or am I emotionally confusing Johnny Ramone with Ayn Rand?
Personally, I think any indignation that encourages me to “rage against the machine” should qualify as sufficiently “punk” in the right context. And, as it turns out, I’m not alone in thinking so. The rockstar Nick Cave once opined that, in today’s world, if you truly want to be a counter-culture revolutionary, you should “go to church and become conservative.”
Even if there are reasonable disagreements to be made about the social conservative aspect of Cave’s contemporary views, he makes a pretty good point about the general rebelliousness at the heart of the movement. After all, there’s nothing inherently contrarian about fervently screaming progressive platitudes in the throes of our progressive era. It’s like complaining about the quality of caviar while dining at The Ritz — it creates the impression you don’t actually have much to revolt against.
And with this in mind, I defend my emotional outrage each April when I’m required to itemize deductions, calculate the depreciation value of business assets and scroll through travel logs to accurately categorize the percentage of travel related to business (because heaven forfend I receive a deduction on some trip to the grocery store taken in my “company” vehicle).
Or, to put it simply: nothing makes me feel more punk rock than the utter rage I feel each year while being bullied by bureaucratic revenuers for an ever-large slice of my personal wealth — and I use the term “wealth” rather loosely.
To let you know what I’m on about, here’s some actual footage of me doing my taxes:
First, the rage at the process…
What kind of third-world banana republic do we live in where the our tax revenuers have the ability to levy fines, freeze financial assets and even throw people in prison for failing to accurately follow nearly 70,000 pages of convoluted rules, regulations and niche categorical requirements — but if it turns out we’ve overpaid, we’re supposed to be happy about getting our money back (interest free) in the form of a “return.”
(Mind you, we only get that money after we pay some third party organization to calculate the government’s overcollection and submit the necessary paperwork.)
Then the rage at the political ecosystem…
What kind of horridly corrupt and populist peons thought it would be good to legalize a government-run extortion racket to prey on the American people? (The answer is: Pretty much every politician looking to win some votes — Democratic and Republican alike.)
I fully understand that referring to taxation as theft is little more than a meme at this point — but there’s a point to be made here. (And, as it turns out, doing my taxes aggravates my preexisting libertarian condition anyway, so I don’t mind the cliche.) After all, this isn’t the same as some tax on a specific product or activity — nor is it a tax on the mere act of spending.
Our current income tax is literally the government doing its best Ray Liotta impersonation:
“Oh, cool life you’re trying to build there. Now, fuck you. Pay me.”
But most of all: Rage at how complicit we’ve become…
I get it: Not everyone has a deeply harbored anger swelling inside of them every time federal revenuers require us to categorize our business and personal usage of assets on a Schedule C form.
However, no one seems particularly pleased with the state of our current tax code — and yet more anger is generated over American Idol outcomes each year than the billions of man-hours and dollars spent complying with a tax code that virtually no one believes is well written.
For Christ’s sake, one doesn’t even have to be “punk” to get a little animated by our current state of taxation-induced complexity. What ever happened to that decidedly American attitude of rebellious indignation at being told we “must” comply with arbitrary and nonsensical rules just for the sake of “law and order”?
As Tommy Five-Tone said in Hudson Hawk: “I hated cigarettes until I saw my first no smoking sign. Keep off the grass? Let's play soccer…” (Hudson Hawk is decidedly one of the worst Bruce Willis movies ever made — with an abysmally cringy acting performance by everyone involved. It has a grotesque early-90’s aesthetic, and a ridiculous directorial approach… It’s also absolutely marvelous. Watch it and cringe.)
Such reflexive antagonism used to be an inherently American behavioral trait: From “Rebel Without a Cause” to “Top Gun”, America has been riddled with an inherent love for folk-heroes who buck authority and resist conformity — and under normal circumstances, virtually no subculture of America’s social tapestry captures such instinctive rebellion better than young kids with mohawks lighting their cigarettes before jumping into mosh pits…
Hence my instinctive tendency to bristle at being told what to do — especially by the taxman.
After all, my anthems growing up were sung by Bad Religion, NOFX, Rancid and Rage Against the Machine — the latter of which has, regrettably, become “anti-authoritarian” zealots and apologists for some of the worst left-wing dictatorial ideologies to have ever roamed this planet.
On more than one occasion, the group has even “raged against the machine” on a stage adorned with the portrait of a wannabe tyrant from Latin America:
It’s hard to take the band’s anti-authoritarian message seriously when they’re idolizing a murderous, racist homophobe who wanted to eradicate human rights in the name of some glorious communist revolution… That’s like whinging about corporate profits in an advert for a Chase Money Market account: It’s hypocritical at best, and willfully ignorant at worst.
Of course, I’m sure the leftists in the punk universe would say the same about anyone who aligns themselves with the neoconservative right — of which there have been plenty. As Damon Root at Reason.com pointed out long ago, Johnny Ramone — the man who could arguably be credited with starting New York’s punk scene in the 1970s — described himself as a “Nixon Republican.” And even those of us who came of age well after the heyday of the 80’s remember Agnostic Front’s lyrical rants against the socialist nature of the welfare state.
Indeed, if one thing can be said for certain about the musical movement of punk, it’s that it is not ideologically monolithic. Instead, the common denominator in virtually every punk subculture, regardless of politics, is a profound discontent with social conformity — and to Nick Cave’s point, today’s “conformist” culture is a world apart from the days of Maggie Thatcher’s socially-conservative 1980s.
Simply put, there’s nothing inherently rebellious about chanting “Republicans are Nazis” when you’re standing in a room full of left-wing Democrats — which is essentially what so many people in today’s entertainment ecosystem are doing while pretending they’re some rebel trying to dismantle “the system.” (The same can be said for the populist celebrities on “the right” in America’s Reality-TV political universe preaching to their own choir.)
To me, punk wasn’t ever about left or right… It was about harboring an honest and righteous indignation over society’s complacency with the arbitrary rules and expectations that are thrust upon us by those in power… regardless of who’s actually in power. And in that light, anti-tax fits of rage are a decidedly punk-rock response to revenuers demanding we pony up tributes to Caesar (not to mention the political machinery that gave such revenuers legitimacy in the first place).
So, excuse me on April 15th while I blare The Ramones on my Bluetooth speaker and daydream about throwing a few boxes of tea into a harbor somewhere — it’s just my discontented inner-teenager rebelling against “the squares” in government who try to separate me from my hard-earned money.
Oh, and in regards whether or not I would like to donate $3 to the presidential election fund: How do I enter “fuck off” as my official response on the tax form?
Michael Schaus is a communications and branding expert based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and founder of Schaus Creative LLC — an agency dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change.
