Just yesterday I was walking down the street with an undergrad who volunteers with me at Free Cycles here in Missoula. He noticed the Rancid patch on my back pack and asked me, laughing, if I was a punk rocker. He seemed surprised to find that I was, and subsequently told me he liked Black Flame. I asked if he meant Black Flag and he looked very embarrassed.

He recovered from this faux pas by offering me some unknown and unwelcome news of the punk scene. There was a growing Republican force in the Punk Rock, he began to tell me, led by groups like GOPunk and ConservativePunk.com.

Immediately, ridiculous nightmarish visions of youths in sweater vests methodically strumming out a lifeless Sex Pistols cover pushed me into a mild state of panic. I pressed him for information. "They like the same punk rock we like," he told me (though I wasn't sure he liked the same punk rock I liked), "they just don't believe in the same ideologies." I told him that there was very little difference between the music and the ideologies, though what the ideologies actually were didn't come up. And I told him that conservatism in punk rock was ridiculous, though I wasn't able to figure out why. I tried to picture a conservative punk rock concert; the first thing I noticed in this imaginary atrocity was that there was no one in the crowd. Whether or not this is the case at actual republican punk shows, I can only assume.

When I arrived home after finishing that feverish conversation, my girlfriend had e-mailed me an article from the New York Times about the republican punk phenomenon, and I was told nothing more than I had already heard. A tiny minority of punks were doing something so outlandish (being pro-Bush) that they were picked up by the Associated Press. None of it made sense, and I wasn't sure why I hated it so much. I decided to try and figure out why I was so upset.

First must come a declaration: I love punk rock. I go to punk rock shows, I like the mosh pits, I like the energy, and I like the ideology, which is weak and loose at best. It has something to do with respect and loyalty, or..well -- it might not. It definitely has something to do with fun, but there must be some more concrete principle in the ideologies of punk rock. In any case the ambiguities are many.

The indistinct ideology of punk allows for a great amount of leeway concerning the politics of individual punks. The Dead Kennedy's and more recently the Suicide Machines are both powerful anti-American voices in the punk world while Johnny Ramone has always been a stalwart Republican. There are Christian punks, Nazi punks, feminist, nihilist and gay punks. But they all have something in common, something more than just loyalty and fun. Yes. It must be the thing that defines punk rock -- rebellion.

In a world where flicking off the lead singer of a band is a compliment, there is no place for people who are pleased by an established authority.

That is why there are no Democrat or Republican punks. You can register and vote Democrat or Republican, yeah, in fact voting is very punk rock. It's a simple mechanism for social change, however ineffective it might be. But you can't actually believe in the ideologies of a bullshit political party, or of a bullshit President, or even of this bullshit society for that matter. Punks don't believe a word the government tells them, so they can't believe in American wars or march in patriotic parades or tout Medicare bills and education reform.

Groups like GOPunk and Conservative Punk do not frustrate me because of their Conservative ideologies, though I will admit to being shocked. I am frustrated because these pseudo-punks believe they are anti-establishment. They got confused and began to rebel against the leftist and often anarchist core of punk rock by becoming pro-establishment, and they think that makes them more punk than ever.

Any real punk with a mind for politics will tell you the systems of this country need to be brought down and rebuilt from scratch, and the best of them will tell you that the same is necessary for the punk rock movement.

There are no punk rockers who do not respect the music of Operation Ivy. Op Ivy sold more albums per dollar of publicity than any band ever (they spent nothing on publicity and their one full length album, released in 1990, finally went gold in 2003 (the same day as the 2 Fast 2 Furious soundtrack, sadly)) and they did it with skillfully played and often political songs.

No punk should deride Op Ivy; it's one of the very limited number of blasphemies in the punk world. They set the tone for most of the second wave of punk rock and few question that tone.

In 1989, when I was 9, and Reagan was president they wrote the following lines and sung them in tiny rooms without stages (and once in a laundromat).

Punk is about change, it's about rebellion, it's about power, it's about sweat, it's about fun. It will never be about supporting an established system or authority. Any punk who says different is just a jerk in a funny jacket.