The Specials - Whoo Boy it's special

You know who lived 2020 for their entire career? The Specials. No seriously, from a structuralist perspective there is literally no difference between Thatcher era England and Trump era America. People are fleeing metropolitan areas in droves because A) they can't afford to live there, and B) they can't afford the actual cost of handing your city over to major corporations. Bottle version of their bio in 3, 2, 1... 

What was the driving force behind Punk/New Wave in England? C'mon, you remember. Why?.... why are?... Ok, fine. Why are all you people so goddamned racist?! 

Ozzy told you his story about the skinheads around Birmingham, Red Rider gave you their unhelpful synopsis of the lunatic fringe from a Canadian perspective, but let's hear it from the band with actual stab wounds. Side note, everyday Brits don't have the right to keep and bear arms, so they stab each other instead. The shape of the weapon is relatively unimportant when you've reached the bottom rung of killing each other. 

The Specials became a band because A) there wasn't any meaningful work in Coventry, and B) night clubs paid their entertainers. One of their goals though was to be actively anti-racist, so they blended early Punk with Reggae, formed their own record label Two-Tone, and conquered the English pop charts all on their own. Then the skinheads started literally attacking them and wrecking their shows. The normal drugs and alcohol and touring broke them up, but they eventually got back together, with Terry Hall on a successful treatment regimen for his bipolar depression. 

Thatcher, oh yeah, right. See, one of the things you can learn from history is that people generally feel like governments exist to take care of the important details of having a society; coordinating and developing infrastructure, planning for the future, negotiating trade and commerce, generally using the community resources as a means to keep everybody happy and allow everyone to be productive without killing each other. Government officials, however, tend to reinterpret themselves as the ruling class and capitalize on society for personal wealth and influence, then pass that down to their children with the warning to never let the plebes rise above their function as pure labor capital. 

Now, markets fluctuate and industries boom and bust all over the place. That's reality. But, people tend to think that the profits and taxes and stuff that accrued in the boom times should be waiting there to ease the pain of the tough times. Governments don't work like that. Lord Governor Muckmouth isn't going to sell one of the seven estates he owns just because there's a grain shortage over in Theresville, and he certainly isn't going to pay one of his rivals to truck their excess grain over here either. So instead, he blames all those "greedy foriegners" that came over during the boom and lets desperation kill enough people to make the problem go away on its own. That's what Thatcher did in the 80s in every major city that wasn't feeding the purse at a satisfactory rate, foment racial antagonism then send in the troops to squash everyone back into complacency. One of Trump's babysitters was clearly reading the same bedtime story to him every night, he didn't even try to be creative the last two years. 

Why do people take drugs, kill each other, and themselves? Because they are miserable, they have no hope that anything will get better, and no one will help resolve the source of that misery, only scold them for being ungrateful and entitled. So they medicate their problems in completely unhelpful ways and end up going crazy. 

Why do corporations kill communities? Because all the wealth and vitality gets siphoned out of the community to the point that its inhabitants don't have the resources or relationships necessary to help each other anymore. They're too busy competing instead of cooperating. 

Anywho, back to Thatcher. "Swamped" is obviously the most famous word she used from our perspective, but the situation is even more complicated than a single sound bite. Her win caused the National Front to focus its attention on working class cities to regain its support, but she also specifically brought back the racist imperial rhetoric of her predecessors, weakened local governments as much as possible, decimated industrial centers that showed weakening profits, supported Apartheid and actually called Nelson Mandela a terrorist. If you thought Roger Waters hated Margaret Thatcher's England, let me introduce you to my friends The Specials. They hated her so much they created a whole new genre of music just to talk about it. 

Which brings us to the ultra confusing opposition between Economic Liberalism and Socialism (with which Mandela was certainly affiliated, but not to the point of tearing down existing policies, merely extending them into the realm of African Nationalism). Yes, those things are opposite. Social liberal/conservative is the opposite of economic liberal/conservative. Again, i'm not making any of this up. If you want to change a thing you're liberal, if you don't want to change a thing you're conservative. The problem is that those positions switch places each time we have a fight about it, so you end up with the absurdist nonsense of ultra Right Wing politicians extolling "freedom," State Socialists not realizing that's mostly still Right Wing politics, Capitalists pushing Marxist policy, Marxists who aren't actually Marxist because no one has read Marx in at least 70 years (wait, you mean Lenin was only 13 and Mao was -10 when Marx died having not finished writing all those books he meant to write?), the majority of people not having any understanding that public corporations are a type of socialist institution created to feed capitalism in its most abstractly useless form (the capitalization of investment itself), and Political Anarchists like me being terrified of all the social anarchists driving around with truck nuts on their pickups. 

That's a lot of heavy duty stuff for some rock and roll with a horn section, and i didn't even go anywhere near Terry's being kidnapped by pedophiles when he was 12.