The Shotgun Blog
« On the road with another Roadkill Radio tonight | Main | Good Taxes »
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Liberty and Freedom: Taking inspiration from the anti-authoritarian left
With some very dear libertarian friends, I took in the Green Day concert last Monday in Edmonton, which has put me in the mood for the angry, individualist lyrics found in punk rock ballads. So I jumped on Knox Harrington’s recommendation of Rancid’s new album Let the Dominoes Fall. Harrington is calling it the best album of the summer, and I agree. It’s like Hunter S. Thompson’s Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream put to music.
One song in particular in the new album would touch a political nerve in any friend of liberty. It’s called Liberty and Freedom. Catchy. The song has me thinking of our current battle against Canada’s draconian human rights commissions.
I’m going to pretend Rancid wrote this song with these commissions in mind, because, in an abstract way, they did:
Liberty and Freedom by Rancid
If your ideas are suspect,
Now you’re in contempt
Report to the committee
No one is exempt
And the zealots and crusaders,
They can't justify, with threats
and intimidation
Designed to terrify
(Designed to terrify? True, but these people didn’t count on our friend Ezra Levant, the Chuck Norris of the free speech movement. Who’s terrified now?)
Since Danielle Smith predictably came out against the censorship powers of Alberta’s human rights commission today, she may want add Liberty and Freedom to Paul Brandt’s Alberta Bound and whatever else she’s listening to on the campaign trial to keep a spring in her graceful step.
I feel confident that free speechers – a coalition of the left and the right and the sensible libertarian centre -- are going to win this battle, and if the statist Stelmach Tories are a casualty, so much the better.
Posted by Matthew Johnston
Posted by Western Standard on July 14, 2009 | Permalink
Comments
Gee. If the left, right and center are united it doesn't seem like it should be much of a battle
Posted by: GeronL | 2009-07-14 7:51:00 PM
Matthew, Greenday was in Edmonton Monday I thought. I was there too but can't seem to recall which day it was.
Anyway, I think there is enough Libertarian common ground spanning the left to the right, to win a few battles.
Posted by: TM | 2009-07-14 8:10:28 PM
I should have read my own link more carefully. It was Monday. I'm going to make that change.
Posted by: Matthew Johnston | 2009-07-14 8:18:03 PM
I don't know about Rancid specifically, but I found that a lot of rockers that have anti-authoritiarian messages also are anti-capatists and would be more accurately be called anarcho-socials.
Posted by: Scott Carnegie | 2009-07-15 9:37:49 AM
That's a fair description, Scott. Property rights are what divides libertarians from left libertarians or anarcho-socialists or other anti-authoritarian lefties.
Posted by: Matthew Johnston | 2009-07-15 10:29:28 AM
I'd like to see Ted Nugent on the same bill as Greenday. I'm thinking they'd kill each other, and spare us listening to their crap anymore.
I'll admit, the best music ever written was during times of political or social strife.
Best political albums ever?
1) Black Sabbath- Paranoid
2) CCR- Willy and the Poor Boys
3) Sex Pistols- Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols.
Feel free to add to this list.
Posted by: dp | 2009-07-15 10:53:04 AM
Post a comment