Still apolitical?

Today at the record store just plopped down between aisles I found a crate of old issues of Maximum Rocknroll, the monthly bible of my teenage years, the virtually undisputed voice of punk culture. I thumbed through the big stack and ended up picking up a few of them, each by the list of bands interviewed within. Scrotum Grinder, R.A.M.B.O., Tragedy, The Oath, etc. (I was looking for a Spits interview but no luck). Yellowed newsprint from the years of punk that I missed, too busy at being a mature college student. I sat down with coffee to read them, not for nostalgia’s sake or a quarter-life crisis thing, but because I still like punk rock, maybe more now than I ever did. Punk, it seems, has survived irony when it seems like nothing else has been spared.

Maximum Rocknroll isn’t really known for its variation: MAXIMUMROCKNROLL, invariably, at the top, a list of bands inside, sometimes a special feature; “Marriage, Mortgage, and Punk” for instance. Always newsprint, always black and white, always left. I didn’t really notice until I flipped through them that one of the issues I bought was from November 2001. On the cover, the band list, usually dominant, sits tiny, right beneath the title; rather than somebody screaming into a microphone, the main image is of a standing soldier with no helmet, loosely holding a rifle, looking down, with the words “still APOLITICAL?” This was the first issue to go to print following the World Trade Center attacks; the second, now better-known, infamous September 11th on record.

I won’t be the guy who talks about what that day was like. Honestly, I was bored. But reading the news clippings in MRR now five years later, ones like “Bush is Walking Into a Trap” and “Terrorism, Television and the Rage for Vengeance,” I feel l ike even the biggest pessimists, the most strident anarchists, and the most zealous critics at the time undershot how wide in scope American vengeance would reach. Over the past five years the global war has ground on and deepened, each step seeming more normal than the last even as many of us resisted. Now that we seem to have grown used to the Iraq war, like one might grow used to the worsening cough of a terminal disease, are we still undershooting how much worse it can still get? We’re still apolitical..