John Lydon – the artist formerly known as “Johnny Rotten” – is, at the moment of writing, 65 years old. When he sang/screamed/cauterwaled for the Sex Pistols, he was about 19 years old. A friend of mine on Facebook, back in the day when I still found myself chained to that glorified information-collection centre, is in the same age-bracket as John Lydon. He grew up with the Sex Pistols. So did I, as a matter of fact. And I am younger by about three decades. But that is besides the point.

John Lydon is (in)famously quoted as saying that “Conservatism is the new Punk Rock”. Along with some grumbles that he had never thought he’d live to see the day when the left was such snivelling little censorious whatever-he-said. These are interesting observations from someone who is, love him, hate him or be completely indifferent to him, something of a punk rock legend.

Round and about the time when Good Ole Mr. Rotten said this absolutely horrible thing of his, this Facebook-aquintance of mine was all up in arms. This was a man, he said, that had been lying all his

life. Just goes to show you that nothing of what he had previously done, said, sung, shrieked, cauterwaled, whatever was to be taken seriously. He had now proven himself to not being, well, anything of what he claimed to be, and his status as a living legend – and an icon for this aging friend of mine – was null and void. It had passed on. It had expired and gone to see its maker. It had joined the choir invisible. This was an ex-punk-rocker, and no amount of pining for the fjords or beautiful plumage would ever change that. How horrible it was that Mr. Jolly Rotten was also seen wearing a MAGA-shirt and, yet again, pissing everybody off. As he had established a particular habit of doing.

Now – the more observant amongst us had a cup of coffee, a pair of completely legal prescription chill-pills, courtesy of a completely legal medical doctor, and a calm and collected thought about this whole non-troversial statement.

Mr. Woe-begotten Rotten, you see, was in the end of his teens when he sang for the Pistols. He was in his sixties when he said this oh-so-horrible thing. This Facebook-friend of mine was in the same age-bracket. In his teens when he discovered the Pistols. In his sixties when he reacted to Johnny’s terrible utterance.

One of these have learned from his experiences and matured emotionally and intellectually as well as physically.

This is to say: one of these have gotten older and wiser, and one have not. Or, to put it another way: one of these have evolved from his teenaged hijinks, whereas the other had not.

Of course, the funniest thing about this to me, is that Johnny Rotten has spent a career being anti-establishment. He has, at every opportunity, pissed off the establishment. And now he pissed off this aquintance of mine, who was supposedly himself anti-establishment. What the one had realized, and the other had not, was that it is the establishment that has changed. And the one, doing what time tends to do to a person, had matured and evolved alongside it. John Lydon was true to himself. In essence: he was, and he is, anti-establishment.

This Facebook aquintance of mine failed to see this. He was too busy being outraged at what Mr. Rotten was saying to hear what he was, you know, saying. Not for him this, to see what had happened in the decades that had passed since the rise, the havoc, the crash and burn of the Sex Pistols, and this horrid ullulation from the cracked lips of Lydon.

This aging aquaintance of mine is, if it is of any interest, Canadian. I suppose there is little-to-no surprise at this fact. He is as woke as they come, and is married to one twice as woke. This idea-pathogen of wokeness sure do spread as eagerly as a hooker on a sailor’s pay-day, and even faster than whatever strange and peculiar strains of various STD’s he and she both carry. It also comes with this horrible tendency to get worse as time progresses, if left untreated and unchecked by the maturing of ones mind; ones heart and soul.

Nevermind the frolics, here’s the flex virtues!

And all that with a side-order of grandiose verbiage, designed to grant him internet-points and woke brownie-points for the social credit system (TradeMarked). How tremendously beautiful it all was to see and behold; everyone and their mums came rushing in, nodding heads eagerly, in agreement that the rotten one had forgotten his values and his fans and whatever and what-not. All the while staying true to his values. And still managing the subtle art of pissing off the establishment.

I, of course, did not care to partake in the internet non-debates, as I had learned my lesson from being internet-ically yelled at by a feminist for daring to declare my wife as beautiful (yup – that was all I did), as well as for being so bold as to state that one is not a child-abuser deserving of losing ones livelihood and being socially shamed, shunned and ostracised for telling a dirty joke in a private Facebook group. There is no reasoning with the church of the latter-day hysterics, and so I just didn’t and I still don’t bother.

Be all this as it may; the point is not to idolize John Lydon, nor to state that his words are gospel. Still: he does have a solid point or two in that horribly vile utterance of his.

For it is not the conservatives amongst us yelling for government intervention in all areas of our lives; nor is it the conservatives yelling for censorship of speech and of expression.

Punk rock was, in its inception (insofar as it ever was political back in the beginnings of it – which was not the Pistols whatever people may claim) anti-establishment, not necessarily left-wing, not into partisan politics. It was chaos; an immense chaotic force of creation and of creativity. Creativity is killed when faced with censorship. Compliance is not creativity. True creativity is a chaotic and dangerous force. Not the Sex Pistols in themselves: they were a manufactured band. But the essence of punk rock, for all its claims of havoc and destruction, spawned an incredible explosion of creation and creativity; a flame that burned as bright as youth always does, and then died as quickly as youth becomes maturity. Which is at the heart of this ramble: maturity.

Maturity does not equate to boredom and to stagnation, nor do adulthood or even old age. Daily routines – order in ones life – are effective tools for life, not burdens that plow through your innards like that one black guy that always appear in a porno. This is something that seemingly does not compute to those that appear to fear maturity and personal growth or personal betterment as were it some plague from the worst passages of the Holy fucking Bible. Everyone and everything must change, but they themselves.

If one were to say, for example, that becoming mature as one ages is conservatism in the sense that maturity conserves society as-is, or, well – as-was, one would perhaps fear maturity as conservatism, were one so inclined as to view the flame of perpetual youth (as progressives are, quite clearly, immature) as diametrically opposed to conservatism.

Take the nuclear family, as one example.

I, having been a father now for almost a year, am of course interested in this topic. It is very difficult not to think of family and of raising children as we have only recently established a family and are in the process of raising a child. Our son is always on my mind and in my actions. Raising a child demands maturity. The child must, at one point, grow into its own maturity. And this can best be done by the adults in the room being mature adults.

The nuclear family was that one thing that really had to be abolished for the liberation of the vagina-people, as the feminist serpent-cult screamed and roared and yelled and bellowed in the sixties and the seventies.

Lo and behold: they have succeeded. The establishment is no longer the nuclear family, and wanting to maintain the nuclear family is a conservative value. An anti-establishment value. To some, a white supremacist value; a right-wing extremist value; a misogynistic patriarchal value.

The father was the one that had to be removed from the family, in order to abolish the patriarchy. Though not spoken by the establishment in those precise words. this is what the establishment is saying. This is what the establishment has laid the foundations for. This is what the establishment is doing. Single-mother households are normal, and single mothers celebrated. The fathers are all deadbeats (but their paychecks are not). And so forth and so on.

You all know this, I suppose, as this is naught but preaching to the choir, seeing as immaturity and the establishment both demand that no opposing views, no views to the contrary, be allowed any leeway into their wide-open minds; so open as to have the open chasm of their open minds fold in on itself and close itself up completely. Those that claim the most to be open-minded tend to be the most closed-minded. “I am open-minded”, they will say, and then they will shriek until those that disagree with them are subtly removed from, well, whatever.

Being anti-establishment in this day and age, in the wild woke west, must demand a level of emotional and intellectual maturity in order to counter-act the shrewdness of the immature and of the established.

We are listening to sixteen year olds pining for the fjords – that is to say – for climate-change out of anxiety and fear, not expertise… but we are not listening to sixteen year olds who long to establish a traditional family in the future, out of biological drive or personal wish-fulfilment, or both. All the while stating that we must listen to the young, for they are the next rulers, the next leaders, the next establishment. With the caveat that they believe that which is correct, that which is the double-plus-plus-good true-speak.

We have national media; news-anchors of supposedly good reputation, ridiculing a trad-wife for daring to do what trad-wives do, even enjoying it and boasting about it on Facebook. A private citizen, mocked by professional media-people.

Everyone of the wokeists, the progressives, the banshees and the clingers-on and hangers-on is supposedly looking at the big picture, even when staring at the lesser items on the agenda with myopic lenses and short circuiting short-wave radio transmitters in their heads. Whining like spoilt children over non-issues and wild fantasies: eating meat is sexist, women not wanting to take a shit whilst at work is due to the patriarchy, and so forth and so on. A demand for complete and utter control of this and of that of speech and of expression and of the private lives of private citizens; a stability from big daddy government mandated and controlled by the wielders of state-violence if compliance is not met. Oh yes, pound me harder, Daddy! A chaotic society must become stability; stability must become chaos. Freedom is slavery. And we have always been at war with, well, whatever and whom-so-ever is the chosen enemy of the hour.

The big picture is forgotten in the heat of the moment, as dictates and mandates fly through the air, whizzing by our ears like bullets on the battlefield: the now and future generations; the families of such.

I am not one to burden myself overmuch with labels; with -ists and -isms and things of that nature. I never dubbed myself a conservative. I have dubbed myself Grand Patriarch. But that is as it should be, I suppose: someone in this family has to be the Grand Patriarch, and that honour of course falls between two things: my legs and my giant pendulous balls; now swollen to twice their normal size to indicate fatherhood and protection of a small and fragile creature whose existence is as miraculous as the existence of any other child. But a wee bit more miraculous, seeing as he is our child. And that is also as it should be.

Rejection of -ists and -isms notwithstanding; I do have an immense belief in the importance of the family unit. In stability and in routines, in order that things shall work and the day and the environments be safe for all within the family – but especially the developing child. This then expands ever outwards, maintaining the safety and the stability of society. Because it is the children we are supposed to be protecting, is it not? They are, after all, way too immature to protect themselves, to care for themselves. They need their parents – their mature counterparts – to protect and to care for them. And their parents need each other to help, care for and protect one another during such a trying time as raising a child, keeping a child safe.

The progressives, in their immaturity, desire protection from the government. Over-arching and far-reaching protection.

The conservatives, in their maturity then, desire to protect their family and to be free to do so. Something that is becoming increasingly difficult.

There is a longing for a certain individual freedom that seem to emanate from those opposed to the wokeists and the progressives and that ilk; a return to a more basic form of individualism where each care for themselves and their own, and where this in turn is for the good of the immediate society around them. A simpler time and a simpler life. The small picture becoming the big picture by leaps and bounds; one child raised into maturity by mature parents in a mature family becomes the next mature parent, and so forth and so on. In this day-and-age, this is anti-establishment sentiments. This is what is ridiculed. This is what is mocked.

But stability does not equate to stagnation. Constant progress merely for the sake of progress, however, equates to nothing but chaos… at least to the eyes of this sleepless patriarch. This is not that good, that maintained and controlled creative chaos. This is society devolving into chaos and nothing but. One can not enjoy anything if one is constantly moving towards the next. Some times, one must stop and smell the god-damned dull and boring stability. Change always happens. But it must be allowed to happen at its own pace.

Were the whole family to be celebrated once again, stability and maturity would return in great force and with much splendour, I believe. And these societies of ours, that are now becoming steam and dust and bio-hazard tumbleweeds, would become whole and mended and functional again. Celebrate the family. Celebrate the father and his place in the family, not only the mother. Celebrate routines and stability as being more, far more, than a path towards stagnation.

I will leave you with this (if you’ve gotten through this slightly messy ramble of mine): Embrace Punk Rock: Establish a Functional family!