Every few weeks, I see someone wearing this t-shirt around my neighborhood. The shirt was sold by supporters of a nearby public library branch in honor of the DC Punk Archive, which was established in 2014 to document the local hardcore scene.
I want to be clear from the start that I am not making fun of this t-shirt or anyone raising money for the public library or the existence of the DC Punk Archive. The archive is a cool resource, featuring recordings, along with zines, fliers, and various ephemera that would otherwise be lost to time. I’m glad it exists, and I’m sure it will be a valuable resource for researchers.
Fundamentally, though, the joke is that the public library is not, in fact, very punk.
The public library is quiet and orderly, a place where you get shushed. The public library is a place of reverence for the past, where a once-vital underground culture of zines and fliers is catalogued and stored away for future scholars. The archive itself exists because it turns out some of the people in the scene were actually pretty conscientious and held on to stuff. And then everyone got old and started caring about things like libraries and respectful preservation and community fundraisers. You see little kids wearing these shirts because their parents, who used to be into the music, are now boring middle-aged people who buy novelty t-shirts for our kids to support local community institutions.
That’s one of life’s little ironies.
It’s also the case, though, that the public library is a kind of alternative to mainstream capitalism. It’s just a staid, pro-social, pro-establishment alternative rather than the chaotic and disorderly one embraced by the punk scene. And I think this duality of anti-capitalist worldviews captures something important about contemporary progressive politics. On the one hand, you have the old punks aging into library fundraisers. But on the other you have the fundamentally boring and uncool work of building effective state institutions increasingly being undermined by a strain of thought that’s so allergic to rules and enforcement that it can’t make anything work.
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