"No more silly rules and no more law and order"

I finally figured out exactly what it is about the Occupy movement that's proven so inspirational to me. It's filling a space in my soul that has been empty since, oh, 1981 or '82--the space formally occupied (appropriately enough) by punk rock.

(By happy coincidence, calaverasgrande just published this on the Occupy Oakland website.)

I'm not an anarchist (never was, never will be), but the language of anarchism was an important and inspirational part of punk, especially when grafted to the raucous, distorted sounds of groups like Sweden's The Leather Nun, whose song 'No Rule' supplied this blog post's title. That song's chorus-- 'no more silly rules, and no more law and order'--strikes me as bearing more than a passing resemblance to the OWS chant, 'we are unstoppable, another world is possible.'



With punk, you never knew what was coming next, but you knew that it would be interesting, challenging, and exciting. As a teenager and a young adult, it offered a path to a place that existed outside the confines of 'regular' society: a place where all things were indeed possible and where anything could be imagined and put into practice.

It's been thirty years, but that path has once again been revealed to me.

NO RULE!