Point of No Return
Point of No Return was a Brazilian vegan straight edge band that proved highly influential for the development of political straight edge hardcore in Brazil, Latin America, and beyond. The band was active from 1996 to 2006. Their album Liberdade Imposta, Liberdade Conquistada/Imposed Freedom, Conquered Freedom (2002) was released with an essay sketching the history of straight edge and articulating a political approach to sobriety. The essay, “Bending to Stay Straight,” is reprinted here. It is followed by an interview with Frederico Freitas, one of the band’s two vocalists. Frederico still lives in São Paulo where he works on motion graphics and pursues a graduate degree in Latin American History.
Discography:
• Voices, 1997, Liberation Records
• What Was Done, 1999 Catalyst Records
• Centelha, 2000 Liberation Records (US release: Sparks, 2001 Catalyst Records)
• Liberdade Imposta, Liberdade Conquistada, 2002, Liberation Records (European release: Imposed Freedom, Conquered Freedom, Scorched Earth Policy, 2002)
It’s weird, but since that conversation the question would turn into a sort of obsession to her. It’s true that the matter had been raised, there in that particular place, in a casual way, amidst a muddle of tables, friends, juices, and all the fun that such circumstances involve. But already in that moment it was evident that the discussion had affected her in a peculiar manner, far deeper than it had affected the others. While all of her friends were speaking, signaling, yelling and laughing, there she stood—grave, incapable of a single movement, obsessively staring at some fixed point and at the same time she stared at nothing—an exterior inertia intensely contrasting with the deluge of ideas and reflections that permeated her thoughts on the occasion. In the others’ eyes it might even be that the conversation was nothing but incidental. But to her, that discussion had amounted to a number of concerns that had disturbed her for a long time.
No doubt she had taken that matter quite seriously. It had now been a considerable number of years since she had begun to confine herself behind a flag that would always present, identifying and defining her before anyone even knew her. As if she were claiming something like, “Can you see that? ‘Cos that’s the way I am and will be.” Or, considering the enormity of the mark on her hands, she seemed to be much more emphatic indeed: “Did you get it? That’s my essence! And I’m proud of it!”—an ostentation which now, honestly speaking, sounded (why not to admit it?) quite pointless to her.
Not because those labels would somehow distress her—she had never shared such naïve anguish, so proudly re-asserted by those self-proclaimed “original people” or “masters of their own fate,” apparently unaware of the obvious yet paradoxical truth that, by denying their participation in any group, they were already affiliating with at least one: the “groupless” group. Nor because she would prefer to run away from discussions and avoid conflicts—to evade life’s polemics had not been part of her temperament at all since her earliest adolescent years—a period in which, along with some friends, she started becoming conscious that the world was filled with injustice, and that her role should be to take a resolute stance against this situation. In fact, that ostentation sounded excessive to her because after many years, with all the countless good times and a few (albeit remarkable) deceptions, her experience would end up revealing that pride did not, as she had expected, emerge from the group’s ideas but from the group itself: the collectivity that constantly reaffirms its values to its members in jokes, conversations and arguments; in the fanzines that kids read, in the songs to which they sing along, in the eternal tattooed messages through which they more and more attest their loyalty to one another.
It is true that every flock has its evading sheep and she was familiar with these exceptions. To a few people, joining the crew did not imply the adoption of a new stance determined by the group, but only the consolidation of a way of life, which to them was already old and habitual. Even then—she was convinced of it—the evasion of rule in this case could only be partial, since, once protected by the mask of collectivity, the group would always become, on one hand, a major constraint over each individual’s role in the play and, on the other hand, a major incentive for the pride everyone felt when enacting it.
That is how she also came to realize that when the group thus vanishes, so does pride—if not immediately and without conflict, then slowly and progressively, over time. She had been a living witness to this truth and, if she had not given up that flag yet, she understood that it was only because that these things worked out more or less like weddings do: people consent to a particular role for such a long time that, after so many years, they would rather remain crawling, on and on, less for satisfaction than for mere convenience. After all she went through, she could now acknowledge that her inspiration was not the same as it had been in earlier years, when she seemed to have found the ultimate answer to all dilemmas of her Earthly existence.
Thus, the crisis.
But time moves on, and backwards, and people along with it. One day, she was confident that she would overcome that near-anomic condition—that common yet perplexing feeling of displacement, of not belonging, which despite being so confusing constitutes such an essential stage of our lives, for that is exactly when people grow more critically toward themselves. One day she would overcome that near-anomic condition to assert that she had finally recovered a solid ground to fix herself with renewed motivation and conviction. At that time, however, overcoming that state was still pretty distant—it was nothing but an aspiration, or, perhaps, a positive obsession.
What was in fact the basis that sustained her? Was this basis the same to her and to other people? Was it the same in her country and in other places? Was it the same in that time as in other times? Those were the questions, which, after that unpretentious conversation among friends, would refuse to leave the mind of this young woman.
It is curious but as soon as she got home the first thing that would occur to her was to check out a dictionary. Initially she had not been considering whether such an idea would be good or not, useful or not—she was just curious to know what it was that the dictionary would have to say about the term employed to define her identity. That would be the second step in her investigation: to explore all possibilities of significance of that word—that which conveyed who she was. In a way it might be said that it was a question for herself that was taking place right there in the middle of that immense mass of letters. Would she really be able to find herself in it?
“To begin with, the ‘s’...”
She wanted to know whether the dictionary would confirm what the inquisitiveone had remarked in that conversation. It was he who had started the whole polemic—though she could not actually remember why—by claiming that straightedge, in many North American bands, was a quite puritan attitude, and that even the very name, straightedge, could be considered to hold some conservative connotations.
“Then comes the ‘t’...”
The distracted-one suddenly realized that there was a sort of debate taking place and argued that this conservatism was, in fact, very real—not a trivial point at all. One just needed to observe how kids would come up and categorically claim, “I’ll be the same ‘til the day I die,” or even hypocritically declare, “Watching you fall only makes me stronger,” referring in this case to those who, at some point in their lives, decide to embrace life’s contingency and change the way they are.
“Now, the ‘r’...”
With a subtle smile in her face, she now recalled the way the short-tempered-one, already in the early moments of discussion, would manifest a clear irritation, arguing how unfair it was to claim that those people there, in that conversation, discriminated against those who broke the edge. Well, maybe not, she wondered. But that did not mean that the group would deal with changes in a positive way, most of the time.
“Next letter is ‘a’...”
Hey! She could remember now. The polemic was actually raised when the skeptical-one stood up and proposed, with his unyieldingly sarcastic tone, that they should come up with another movement to follow, since what straightedge meant to most of the North American and European kids had nothing to do with what it meant to those in that place.
“After the ‘a’ comes the ‘i’...”
The sympathetic-one laughed as she recalled a stupid term that had in fact already been proposed as a potential new label to replace the old one—the one that some North American youngster had once come up with in a song of his punk band, without his knowing that, from those unpretentious verses on, a whole movement was going to emerge.
“With ‘g,’ it is near the end...”
As she recalled that conversation, she just started regretting that the optimistic-one was not there on that particular day. If he had been, he would surely have enjoyed the skeptical-one’s proposition, claiming loud and clear to everyone what he always used to say: that the reality of most kids in his neighborhood was far from those experienced by high school teens from Boston.
“Now, the ‘t’: is it before or after the ‘h’...”
Straight was the word she was looking for: a sequence of sounds somewhat strange to the Portuguese phonologic system—the reason why all of them held their own proper way of pronouncing it. She was not looking for the whole expression, straightedge, because she knew it would not appear in a dictionary. ‘Straight’ was enough and after a while she finally reached her point. The aim was to see what the Cambridge International Dictionary of English —chosen accidentally, with no particular reason, except that it was a good English dictionary at hand—would have to say about that term. Or, in other words, she wanted to see what the Cambridge International Dictionary of English would have to say about who she was and who she had been in the last ten years.
“Here it is...”
straight/streit/
Thus, the definition.
What is it that even a brief analysis of this information might reveal? In concrete terms, she reckoned, straight was used to describe the mark of the shortest path that could possibly exist between two distinct points in space: a perfectly straight line. When the word referred to the surface of a figure, it would describe the least possible area within three or more points in space: a perfectly flat surface. Despite the fact that the spatial concept related to this word seemed somehow suggestive, she knew that it was its social connotation that would prove most revealing. What did that word come to mean when it was appropriated by a native English speaker to designate some kind of people or to define a certain standard in one’s attitudes and behavior? While she examined the definitions provided by the dictionary one by one, the young woman started developing her own conclusions, many quite discouraging: to be straight would mean 1) never changing one’s philosophy—the always straight path; 2) not having any flaws in one’s basis of thinking—the totally flat surface; 3) to be organized; 4) not to be of much complexity; 5) to be honest; 6) to be serious; 7) to take a clear stand; 8) to be traditional; 9) to be a heterosexual; 10) to abstain from drugs and alcohol.
But what is amazing is that many of those meanings, some of them truly repulsive, seemed to reflect, sometimes directly, all of her anxieties raised up in that discussion—the puritanism, conservatism, and fear of change. Her impression was that, if she was to interpret the Cambridge International Dictionary of English literally, it would be better for her to quit hardcore as quickly as possible and just go join the Moral Majority. But the young woman was not stupid and she knew how to make this problem relevant. Thank god (or devil, or, most probably, an ideological divergence) there was no need for her to accept such definitions as being in any way representative of her own way of being, as well as of those friends with whom she was affiliated, even if these definitions actually portrayed the way many kids around the world, under the same label, saw themselves.
Indeed ideological as any discourse, the dictionary should be nothing but a preliminary and cautious step in her question—a beginning, but never an end. After all, would it be reasonable for her to limit such an important reflection on (and for) her life to what a group of lexicologists say in a dictionary—people who do not even know the hardcore scene and the specific meanings of the term that it held? That is why this first moment in the investigation sounded to her like a provoking, and even comic, preamble within a rather serious critical process whose satisfactory answer she still hoped to achieve.
If, in the truth that she knew, word meanings did not lie within words, but outside them, in the rather unstable and arbitrary common sense, a more interesting and decisive investigation would be a reflection on some of the most influential meanings that, until then, had been attributed to the term straightedge (SXE) by different groups of people in different times and places. Therefore it would be such consideration that would become her concern from then on.
It is interesting, but a fact from which this woman could not hide, that although the power of the group seemed to be a fundamental point as far as SXE was concerned, the motives for each person to become straight were frequently diverse; sometimes, even antagonistic. She had already grasped the truth that, once within the group, people would end up assuming its values in one way or another—some to a higher and others to a lower degree; some more critically, others more blindly. However, what seemed to draw her attention at that second and more reasonable moment of reflection, was that the SXE, according to its place and time, would always assume distinct forms and values. Elaborating a little bit more on the inquisitive-one’s comments in the earlier conversation, SXE and puritanism might even have had hands defining the perspective of many hardcore kids today, but the fact was that the puritan image did not fit perfectly, or even grossly, into each and every scene, including those in North America.
One had but to consider the great differences that could be seen among the various perspectives on SXE that had arisen in the history of the North American hardcore scene. This seemed to be an interesting point from which to start her reflection, since the USA held the position as the greatest imperialist power, the reason why it came to be the place from which the main SXE models would arise—those that influenced the worldwide hardcore scene in the most impressive way. At that point she would start recalling, with an amazing clarity, a weekend she had spent debating exactly this topic with her best friend; a discussion in which three main perspectives had caught each one’s attention because of the large impact that these perspectives had on the Brazilian SXE scene. (Image 5.1)
Image 5.1: Ratos de Porão (Brazil), São Paulo, 2009 Mateus Mondini
The first important perspective held a strong me-alone-against-the-world idea. Represented by bands like 7 Seconds, Minor Threat and many other bands primarily from Washington DC, SXE in this trend was quite individualistic—a value which, she had already observed in other occasions, seemed to heavily pervade most of North Americans’ views and stances, structuring from progressive to conservative lines of thought. Hardcore itself was also a continuation of a healthful and positive individualism that grounded the basis of the punk attitude, but SXE from that generation would take all this to an extreme: they were the opposition to the opposition, the utmost expression of this individualism.
“I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I don’t fuck. At least I can fuckin’ think,” said its maxim—that she held at the tip of her tongue. The principle was for everyone to do whatever they wanted with their lives; to be out of step with society; to give no account for one’s actions; or as the great metaphor would synthesize, to be the black sheep. Sustaining such a stance, there lay a firm belief—the product of this same kind of individualism, that each person is the absolute master of his or her own fate—perhaps neglecting that in order for a dissident black sheep to escape, the participation of other cooperative sheep distracting the shepherd’s attention was absolutely crucial.
In this model she saw, despite the individualistic façade that had never pleased her, one of the most interesting conceptions of SXE in the North American hardcore scene: an intelligent way of keeping the punk attitude of protest without buying the whole thing and embracing that nihilistic self-destructive lifestyle that—except in the very inception of those restructuring times which marked the beginning of the punk movement—made no sense at all for a youth eager to fight for social change.
As she thought about the portrait that she was sketching little by little, the traces that composed it, and the relationships they established among each other, it became more and more transparent to her. She now turned her focus to a second model, which certainly differed in many respects from the first one. Represented by bands like Youth of Today and other bands hailing mainly from New York, this tendency was much less into individualism than into a spirit-of-youth-against-the-world idea.
This was not surprising, since for this trend to appear, two sources seemed to be a decisive influence: firstly, bands such as Agnostic Front and the Cro-Mags from the old New York hardcore scene, all of them markedly defined by a sort of street-gang culture—characteristic of the place where they came from—that was firmly reflected in their lyrics. Secondly, and more obviously, bands such as DYS and SSD from the old Boston hardcore scene, where the power of thirty or forty strong guys seemed to render enough security for the crew to survive in a society in which they could not fit. The ‘88 SXE hardcore, as it would be known later, was the heir to these two scenes and thus it seemed inevitable that it would end up placing value on the role of the group.
“Me, you, youth crew,” said its maxim—to which she used to sing along so passionately. The principle was to deny one’s heart to a hostile and decaying world, to then devote it to the group of friends; to take a clear stance, “us versus them;” or as the great metaphor would synthesize, to be one more member of the wolfpack. Sustaining such a stance, there lay the NY sentiment of pride of the family, added to the Bostonian sensation of power of the crew—perhaps ignoring the stupid waste of force and cohesion manifested in a wolfpack which is united to fight against another and not to struggle against its real predators.
For the young woman, although sympathetic to that emphasis on the construction of a non-individualistic resistance, the criticism she held for this trend would be one of the gravest: that was, with rare exception, the generation that produced the most futile bands of the SXE history. Through a powerful, energetic music—though excessively tough in her eyes—sterile lyrics, without any critical stance, were articulated. The identity of the group and the aggressiveness that it encompassed lost the relevant significance of opposing a world of absurd values, and turned into mere empty symbols to be perpetually evoked and glorified at the shows—rituals of mental masturbation that came to nothing. Pride, for pride’s sake, and that’s it. Today, with a more critical perspective, that is how she saw the ‘88 generation: in the music, greatly powerful, in the ideas, sadly mediocre.
The third and last model had been special—she’d had the opportunity to watch its development at each new step. This was the model which had prevailed in the North American SXE scene since the beginning of the 90’s, and whose main representative was Earth Crisis from Syracuse. There she could see the fostering of a fairly new concept in SXE, which would give rise to an important trend in the movement: VeganStraightEdge (VSXE). The refusal to inebriate oneself, now added to a vegetarian ideology, ceased to be an individual stance (as in the first model), or a group stance (as in the second model), to then become a political cause for which the militant SXE would feel compelled to fight. At the same time, the trend seemed strongly grounded in a Christian extremist ideology that, as reflected in the lyrics, was used to symbolize the struggle for justice through a vegan-straight-edge-crusade-against-the-evil idea.
“Perpetrators of this madness, your right to live is gone. Your burning bodies shall light the path to a glorious new dawn,” said its maxim—in one of the songs that most impressed her. The principle was to become a VSXE warrior; to be the owner and defender of justice; to give oneself to martyrdom; to retaliate all evil perpetrated by those demons who destroy our planet; or as the great metaphor would synthesize, to bring the firestorm to purify. Following this view, many bands who later adopted this trend made a mix of several types of fundamentalism, including, and principally, Islamic. The metaphor, in this case, shifted its form, but not its meaning: the Christian sacred war (the crusade) was gone, only to make room for the Muslim sacred war (the jihad)—perhaps ignoring the fact that the firestorm would inevitably provoke an uncontrollable blaze, burning both the rotten and the healthy trees without discrimination, destroying that which was originally supposed to be preserved.
On the one hand, a specific aspect of this generation grasped the young woman’s sympathy as no other trend had been able to do: the power and determination that the SXE would attain when it was seen as a cause for militant politics—the kind of politics which actually transcended the parameters of hardcore. On the other hand, there was another aspect in this trend which, unlike that which had occurred with the other models, contributed to keep her almost totally away from it: the sad contradiction between methods and aims, reflected in the discourse of bands that preached the end of tyranny through fundamentally tyrannical words.
All these SXE models had an undeniable relevance, but the young woman knew that in her country the sources of influence went far beyond them—beyond Uncle Sam’s land. Europe, also, because of the same imperialist forces that would uphold the USA as a cultural paradigm to the world, would produce some very influential SXE models—though notably distinct from the North American ones. Among these models, one in particular grasped her—one that had reached its highest intensity in the beginning of the 90’s, represented by bands like Nations on Fire from Belgium, and Manliftingbanner from Holland. Whereas in the USA, the heirs of the vegan jihad were moving towards more and more conservative as well as extremist stances, people with a leftist-struggle-against-capitalism idea would revitalize the SXE at the other side of the Atlantic—following the trail already blazed by bands such as Lärm in the 80s—with a critical and progressive, intelligent and incisive critique.
“When man is free, when there is no more need. I will rest my soul in peace,” said its maxim—with which this woman would identify more than any other. The principle was to place social, political and economic matters as top priorities; to propose alternatives of social organization for an unacceptable capitalist system; or as the great metaphor would synthesize, to be positive, political, powerful. Sustaining such concepts, there lay two main lines of leftist thought: communism and anarchism—perhaps defying, through an unbreakable faith, their own historical time, marked by the recent Soviet collapse and the then drowsy international anarchist movement.
Undoubtedly, the European SXE model seemed to her a much more interesting approach than any of the North American ones. Not only because it moved completely away from the right-wing perspective of the purifier firestorm, but also because it denied the political emptiness of the ‘88 wolfpack and extended the leftist notion of the black sheep, transcending its well-intentioned reformist individualism in order to definitely adopt a radical political and economic critical perspective. Besides, it was in this European model that could be finally seen an explicit concern in extending the idea of the brotherhood to that of the sisterhood, something which had often passed unnoticed through the North American trends.
There was only one problem in this perspective that she could not help but to point out: probably in an unconscious attempt to distance itself from the fundamentalists that liked to impose the drug-free lifestyle upon others by force—something that was in conflict with its progressive stance of respect for individual liberties—the bands in this generation relegated SXE to the personal realm, dissociating the problem of drug consumption from its deep political and economic implications on which drug refusal, and thus traffic refusal, should be based. The model seemed limited, therefore, precisely because it failed to incorporate the very SXE attitude within this larger political perspective of a radical left.
Thus, the history.
Moving toward the end of this second interesting step in her process of reflection on SXE, there was a hesitation that simply refused to abandon her mind: the way she was thinking of those different social movements could barely reflect the way they actually existed. In truth, all that description was nothing but a scheme—something which she had already criticized in other people’s discourse as well. History, she thought, did not develop in a linear process, within which different movements simply follow one another—least of all through a discontinuous process within which one movement always rises up from another’s demise. On the contrary, experience shows that social movements develop in a mutually dependent and simultaneous manner, in such a way that in each movement it is always possible to identify—through affirmation, negation, or yet ironic references—those signs that constitute the others.
Another aspect to be considered was that the very content attributed to those four categories seemed not to completely reproduce reality: in truth, all that description was nothing but a stereotype. Presumably, for those who have actually experienced some of those trends, her analysis would certainly appear as an unfortunate reduction: a simplification of forms and meanings that, in the everyday life, are mixed and confused in a much more complex and indeterminate way. Besides, for those who had not directly taken part in those trends, but who had experienced other ones which were (to them) equally, if not more, important, the choice of these specific trends could only represent a distortion: an arbitrary selection whose inevitable result would be the depiction of a grotesque caricature of what (to them) SXE was actually about.
But even in the face of all these considerations, something was telling her that the enterprise was still valid. Maybe because her aim had never been to elaborate a detailed or true reconstruction of SXE history, for in her eyes true reconstructions were not something possible to attain. All she wanted to do was to rethink the main lines of thought that, with their values and aesthetics, had remarkably influenced the scene in which she had been initiated and grown. So if her analysis was nothing but a scheme, it was because that analysis was a vulgar exercise, not a scientific research. And if it was nothing but a caricature, it was because her emphasis in some specific aspects of SXE history—and it just could not be otherwise—resulted from her own subjective perspective: the way she—a young, white, middle class woman, involved in hardcore since the 90s, in a third world metropolis—had grasped North American and European SXE hardcore.
Finally, she knew that this small historical reflection, as her search through the dictionary, was not her final goal, but a means through which that journey into herself continued to advance. Indeed, it was precisely this process of investigation that had opened the way for her to then start looking for her own definition of the term straightedge—the possibility of finding out a ground where she could find her feet. At least, the political purpose of these final steps seemed to be pretty clear in her mind: there was a need to achieve an actual re-definition—a definition which could point out the particularities or the new meanings which her group’s view on SXE carried on. It was only by attaining such singularity that her definition would be able to subvert the (almost) crystallized flux of cultural colonialism: not only from the center to the margins, but also from the margins to the center.
“Ladies and gentlemen”, she thought aloud, as if addressing an audience full of interested people: “Here comes our local definition.”
It’s funny, but as her investigation went on, the somehow excessive reluctance that had characterized her initial moment of crisis—in which her only certainty was her total uncertainty about everything—would now start showing some signs of weakening, giving way to a growing feeling of relief and safety. The initial point of this change had undoubtedly been the retrospection that she had just carried out: it was only by reflecting on each of those SXE models that she could more clearly realize how much of her own conception was borrowed from them, how much she had actually rejected, and how everything that had been appropriated all now seemed to acquire new meanings.
Her perspective on SXE held, as it was with the black sheep model, the conviction that it was important to not blindly follow the stream. It was such conviction that had motivated those kids in the early 80s to intelligently dislocate some elements with no apparent connection in the tradition and then combine them in a defying and interesting manner: the way the straight-punks would bring polemic to a scene in which, ironically, the deviation from rule was acquiring the rigidity of another rule. This new perspective was in defiance because it combined, in a single idea, concepts apparently antagonistic to each other: the straight and the tortuous; and it was interesting because the new meaning thus derived pointed precisely to a more critical way of looking at both: we’ve got to reclaim freedom, but with responsibility.
While distancing herself from this model, the idea that the young woman just could not buy was the emphasis on individualism. That might have been interesting in the time and place where it had been born, but twenty years later and some thousands of miles to the south, it seemed to her definitely inappropriate. Once and for all, she did not believe in the possibility of a society in which each individual would possess some sort of a purely individual motivation, detached both from the cultural weight into which all human beings are born and grow, and from the material weight that grounds this basis. For this reason attitudes that defended the inviolable right for every person to do whatever he or she wanted as the highest value that there could possibly be, always resulted, in her opinion, in a quite superficial and myopic view of reality.
An almost immediate consequence of this short-sightedness could be seen in the way many remarkably individualistic social movements ended up involved in mere day-to-day politics, with no concern of extending their criticism to a larger economic scale. That is exactly the criticism that one of her favorite writers had addressed to the Civil Rights Movement—of which the writer herself had taken part—during the 60s in the USA. In that time, the struggle against racism and sexism was based on the celebration of diversity and through demands of equal ethnic participation in the media. Deprived of a deep economic critique, those demands for a just representation were quickly accommodated by the market, which then started to incorporate diversity as a key-term in propaganda. The world of consumption opened its doors to the individuals from different minorities, but only those who could afford such expensive integration. The poor black, the poor woman, the poor homosexual, were still equally segregated.
This type of individualism was therefore the product of a society, or a class, that benefited from capitalism. People would arm themselves with a sort of humility which allowed them to wash their hands as far as larger and deeper critiques were concerned—a position which might even be interesting to a group of middle class kids living in a developed country, but which was in no way interesting to those who most suffered the consequences of capitalism. The bands from this first model did not see a terrible urgency in criticizing and trying to change society in a more radical way. However, this young woman, living in a country that occupied the position of eighth largest economy in the world, and yet remained the fourth worst in terms of distribution of wealth, certainly felt that urgency. And that is why, in a sense, this model always seemed to be too small for her.
Her perspective on SXE held, as it had with the ‘88 wolfpack, a collectivist ideal. She always believed that humans were essentially social beings, and that the individual depended on the group as much as the group depended on the individual to exist and to survive, both symbolically and materially. The thoughts filling our minds were social; the feelings inhabiting our hearts were social; and even human language, which acted as a catalyst for both, was intrinsically social. Besides, it had always seemed clear to the young woman that, politically, the individual would only become an agent of his or her own history as an active member of a group: after all, it was the organized collectivity which had mobilized the great transformations in society. Therefore if the idea of a group was still frightening in the eyes of some people, then she attributed this to a (reasonable) fear that one’s subordination to the collectivity would somehow imply the negation of the individual potential for action. But that was not a matter of being in a group: the problem was the kind of principles around which one’s group was organized.
It was at this point that her perspective conflicted with this second SXE model: the collectivity to her had a much higher price to be paid: the building of a community, not the cheapening involved in the idea of the crew of the ‘88 wolfpack. To her, joining the group meant to value the collectivity because it congregates different people in support of a common political goal: to resist a society that worked only for a few of its members and to fight for a society that, once and for all, might work either for everyone or for no one! The way to reach this goal was by incorporating it into the very form of the group’s organization: participating means to speak, but also to listen; debating means to confront, but through dialogue; deciding means, thus, to reach consensus. It was in that sense that the group seemed to her not an option, but an absolutely necessary learning exercise.
Another aspect that she had appropriated from this model was its positive outlook on life—something which had certainly arisen before, but which that generation had raised to a higher potency; an optimism reflected in the certainty that things can still be changed for the better. It was the kind of outlook that in a less naïve and a more politicized form could also be seen in the discourse of different social movements. It was important to fight the bitter cynicism of those who only opened their eyes to see problems in everything, who only opened their mouths to say that there was no future at all, and who, making a victim out of themselves as solitary romantics in a sea of stupidity, were more concerned with assuring their place in the line of never-ending-critics than with transforming the scene in something better for everyone.
Working to transform the scene, by the way, was something that the ‘88 generation especially seemed to deny for women like her. Not that there was any kind of deliberate scheme of feminine exclusion from participation (which certainly did not exist) in this model, but the fact was that the form of SXE embraced by this generation was too “masculine”—an excess reflected in hymns and sing-alongs which reminded her of a bunch of tough football fans, in the pictures of muscular boys with no shirts, stretching in formidable martial arts kicks; and in lyrics about fights, pride and loyalty that pointed to the crew of friends as the most important value in life—what, in one way or another, closed any possibility for a deeper identification as well as a willingness to participation for women like her.
She did not mean to say that in her conception of SXE there was no room for aggressiveness. On the contrary, she saw aggressiveness as something which was absolutely necessary to the construction of a struggle which intended nothing more and nothing less than bringing down a whole system of political and economic power firmly established as a perpetuator of social misery and inequity. In fact she thought there must be a definitive end to the idea that women were destined to privilege sensibility, and men, aggressiveness—which, in her eyes, was a great misunderstanding of sexual (biological) differences and gender (cultural) differences. Aggressiveness and sensibility were symbolic values attributed to social roles that were built by each society and though they could not be totally independent of biological factors, they certainly went beyond its determination. The problem with the ‘88 wolfpack was that it simply reinforced, implicitly, the idea that aggressiveness was for “boys,” its aesthetics associated only to (futile) clichés of masculinity.
Her perspective on SXE held, as it was with the purifying firestorm, the incorporation of veganism as an obvious moral extension of the SXE position. Meat, egg and dairy industries constituted an extremely powerful economic enterprise that placed profits above any consideration for the death and suffering of millions and millions of animals, nor for the destruction—as a result of the enormous waste of natural resources and the devastating pollution of air, soil and water on a frightening scale—of the environment which sustains all forms of life in this planet. The vivisection industry was undoubtedly one of the most cruel human actions against non-humans, disguised by the mask of “Knowledge” and legitimated through the authority of scientists that worked with one eye on the microscope and the other on the research funds that allow them to comfortably persist in their bloody career as executioners. The entertainment industry, in turn, was responsible for jeopardizing the beauty and enchantment of such important cultural manifestations as circuses by condemning animals, whose instincts demand freedom and socialization, to lives of confinement and isolation. The act of ceasing to consume the products of all this misery was a simple gesture that represented a very significant self-exclusion from systematic processes of exploitation.
At the same time, distancing herself from this model, what the young woman could not possibly admit was the fundamentalist stance that characterized its basis for vindication of change. A stance that implied, firstly, a simplistic appropriation of religion, in which the only aspects to be adhered were exactly the most sensationalist ones, such as manichaeism, punishment and martyrdom, all synthesized in the idea of the holy war that seeks to literally eliminate the enemy from the Earth. A position that implied an absolutist viewpoint that transformed conventional principles into dogmas by determining that they must be applied anywhere, at anytime, over anyone, under any circumstances. A stance that implied, finally, a purist notion that would draw an arbitrary moral line, nevertheless rendering it of natural or religious status, so that one could clearly identify purity and impurity, saints and sinners, angels and demons, and in the most extreme cases, those who deserved to die or not. Simplism, absolutism, purism: how could she possibly identify with a philosophy sustained by pillars of such nature?
The answer provided by the purifying firestorm also upset her because of another type of individualistic attitude in which the struggle for social change was seen as a struggle of solitary warriors that find out through their vain search for allies (with a totally senseless pride!) that they can only trust themselves. This option for a lonely path might even be justifiable as a strategy within some branches of the animal liberation struggle, but it was certainly the most counterproductive choice in regard to the necessity of building a new society based upon cooperative values. And within this option it was so because there was no need for the militant to make concessions to or negotiate with, whoever it may be. By ignoring the necessity of an organized and decentralized collective resistance, the fundamental practice that it enables becomes thus underestimated: the immensely difficult effort of looking at the world from the other’s eyes. Lacking such effort, one notices that most of the time VSXE warriors’ discourse ended up following the most dangerous path: of pure intolerance.
Her perspective on SXE held, as it had with the positive-political-powerful model, an anti-capitalist agenda committed to the end of class struggle—through abolition of private property, socialization of the means of production and decentralization of decision-making processes. But, differing from this same model, to be SXE in her eyes had nothing to do with a personal decision: being straight was deeply embedded in a way of living that was compatible with the revulsion she felt against capitalism. Everyone knew that drug use, be it legal or not, comprised astronomic amounts of money. Stimuli for consuming it were found everywhere, and the consumption was never presented as something which people might do (eventually and with due caution) in search for new sensorial experiences. People, especially young, were deliberately driven to drug use in order to acquire social and sexual status in the eyes of others. And such consumption was satisfactory for the elite because drugs were an efficient mechanism for State control, convenient for sending the criminal, those who threaten the system, to jail—or cemetery.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, narco-trafficking came to be, along with Islamic fundamentalism, the great new subterfuge for the USA to intervene in the Third World as they wished. In the young woman’s view, it was clear how the US government, using entirely capricious criteria, classified two kinds of drug dealers: First, those who served their interests—as Noriega in Panama of the 80s, the Afghan warriors against the Soviet invasion, the CIA in the Vietnam War, and so forth—were encouraged and even financed by Washington. Second, those who, on the other side, repudiated US politics for whatever reason—as the FARC in Colombia, other third world popular movements and guerrillas—were stigmatized with the charge of drug dealing. Thus the empire would open the perfect moral scenery for interventions that were not intended to stop the traffic, but rather to eliminate opposition.
Enemies of capitalism were everywhere, not just outside US borders, and they needed to be systematically fought within the limits of their country as well. In the USA, for example, a very well known case was the role of the government in the dissolution of the Black Panthers Party for Self Defense, undermined through drug dissemination by government agents in the poor black ghettos of Oakland—a sad history already told and re-told dozens of times. And in Brazil, the country where the young woman lived, perhaps in a more explicit way than anywhere else, one might clearly see that rich dealers would never go to jail while poor dealers went all the time. Rio’s favelas were fed by a mafia of politicians, executives and policemen who provided not only money and access for drugs, but also the armed arsenal that guaranteed the operation of the drug dealing system.
To be drug-free was, as in any massive boycott, more symbolic than practical. But was not this condition a necessary step in the very logic of boycotts? Because what the young woman had observed was that time passed by, and from an initial insignificant state the boycott had started growing, its influence spreading, its implications multiplying, the poles of balance gradually stabilizing, until the practical and the symbolic dimensions acquire equivalent weights. That was the point when both dimensions started feeding each other through a dialectical movement that, in the end, would make the cessation of the boycotted object a simple matter of time. It was in this optimistic perspective that she wanted to reflect: the power of today’s elite partially consists of convincing a great number of people to consume drugs; if this consumption is not met, an important power-sustaining mechanism would be lost.
SXE in the perspective that the young woman had built with her group of friends was, in total, the person who would stand for the end of all forms of oppression and discrimination. It was the person who defended the inalienable right for self-determination of peoples that still undergo the humiliation of political intervention and that often find themselves in the difficult position of having to fight tanks with stones, missiles with shotguns. It was the person who fought to overthrow all fences that had privatized property of the few out of that which had once existed for everyone. It was the person committed to recall our collective memory, as a frightening denunciation that the problem was still not overcome, the singular experience of suffering of those who felt the weight of whips in the sadistic game of torture. It was the person who strived for seeing, through critical eyes, the subtle screens, masked by the seduction of entertainment, that bring the necessary ideological charge to assure the perpetuation of the imperialist hegemony. It was the person who felt revolted by the sad irony of a suicidal capitalist society that, as if voluntarily placing its neck in the gallows, first produces the victims of its system through its insatiable greed for wealth, only to be later unforgivably victimized by these very victims. It was the person who regretted the bloody history of our colonial past, in which the price paid for the futile silver mirrors, brought by the white people to be traded, represented an irreparable loss of millions of lives from thousands of nations. It was the person that believed in the structuring of a system of flexible creeds and stances as a fundamental principle for the organization of a collective resistance, the only bridge capable of guiding us to a world of more cooperative and just values. Some positions, reflected the young woman, among hundreds of others...
It therefore seemed clearer to her now that SXE did not belong to North Americans, nor to Europeans, and not even to Brazilians—at least not exclusively. It belonged to everyone and for this reason it belonged to no one. It was also hers to make whatever she wanted of it. Few things distressed her so much as that old mania of always seeing punk, rock, or whatever cultural manifestation coming from the metropolis, as something that the empire invents and the rest of the world merely copies. Why is it that the same analogy was not made, for example, for soccer and carnival in her country? There had been hardcore bands in Brazil since 1978. People there conducted things their own way, a particular way, and they felt inspired by what the metropolis, or wherever, produced in certain aspects, but not all; in certain cases, but not all.
In the perspective of her group of friends, the wish to keep oneself updated on the latest trend in the North American and European hardcore scenes simply made no sense. There was an emergent need to definitely replace the web nature which characterized the traditional cultural relations, inside and outside hardcore, by a net nature: one relationship in which the flux of political and aesthetic ideas would be defined by a different form of dissemination, not plunging from a center to the margins, but circulating from one center to another. In order for this one-way relationship to be finally shifted by a reciprocal relation, it was necessary to use the instrument at hand, that which she was most identified: the international SXE scene.
Faithful as she was, the young woman hoped for the possibility of, in ten years, being able to reflect on the North American and European trends as much as on Latin American, Asian and African trends. And she dreamed of a day when her investigations would be focused on the way different places in the third world would appropriate the SXE models coming from the metropolis, to then re-signify them according to their local particularities, offering new and instigating perspectives about how the SXE international scene can become a cell of real resistance to imperialism.
Thus, the redefinition.
Approaching the end of that long, disturbing, and at the same time fascinating period of doubt, search, analysis and interpretation, the only parts of the young woman that seemed unmodified were her legs—as in the most confusing initial moments of that process, they insisted on defying the smoothing commands of her brain, perpetuating a slight and incessant trembling. But after conflict nothing remains unscathed, and a few minutes were enough for her to realize even that had been changed! Her legs were trembling no longer due to the insecurity of not finding a fixed structure where she could fix her feet, but due to the excitement of realizing that such structure is never fixed; least inexistent; only adjustable. Her legs, she began to understand, seemed, by their own human nature, to prefer the dynamics of dance to the rigidity of absolute inertia. Guided by the rhythm of the music, constrained by the borders of the stage, allocating old steps into new positions, relating her mere two feet in a number of unexpected arrangements, combining movement and stillness, and expanding the very limits of the available stage through the exploration of air space as a basis for new motions, they rendered her body the support it needed not to tumble down—even in the face of the most difficult improvisation, in which every cadence of the song will always reveal itself as the unexpected.
It is lamentable, but after so much reflection she only now realized the great stupidity that she had just committed by not registering, as she used to, any of those thoughts in her diary. She did not even have an exact notion of how long that investigation had absorbed her. Had she taken proper care to take notes, she might perfectly organize those ideas in a single text and try to publish it later. It could be a sort of essay, that is, a text that presented, though in simple terms, a discussion about her conception of straightedge. It might even be, she reckoned, a sort of manifesto: “In our understanding, SXE is like this, not like that!” But ... who knows ... is it possible that there was still time for preparing it?
So interesting an idea appeared to her in that moment, that right away she went looking for pen and paper. She sat in front of a desk; rested head on hands; thought for a few minutes; and, raising eyes toward paper, wrote with a delicate calligraphy: “We have no principles. Our principle is made out of one’s adaptability to different contexts.”
It seemed to be a nice idea: a sort of synthesis of the critique that she would like to propose in her text. But the sentence was not hers; she had taken it from some place, though she could not remember exactly where. Besides, it was too objective, too cold. It was not the kind of sentence with which she wished to finish off her text. She had to find another way of saying the same thing—to find a sharper metaphor. She had to take advantage of that time in which all those ideas were still fresh on her mind.
Closing her eyes, the young woman rested her head on her hands again; reckoned for a few minutes; bit her fingernails as more time passed by; and then, turning her eyes little by little to the paper, wrote—now more convinced that she was almost meeting her expectations:
“The straightedge might even not be god, but they also know that, in certain contexts, they have to write straight with crooked lines.”