‘We’re all being oppressed by the upper middle class.”
– Bad Religion, “Politics,” How Could Hell Be Any Worse LP, 1982
As anyone who has ever stood on one for any length of time will tell you, skateboarding is as much a culture, a state of mind and a mode of being as a sport. Indeed, one of the more appealing things about skateboarding for yours truly has always been the primacy of competing against yourself to learn new tricks and improve. Skateboarding is well the reverse of competitive preppie nutsack culture of high school cliques and the respectable, competitive, agro middle class society from whence they were shat.
The culture is meaningful enough for people that tattoos of cultural icons are well common:
The Independent skateboard truck company is part the DNA of skateboarding, pretty much. For a lot of people who don’t fit into the narrow, middle-class mould, it’s a meaningful symbol of an inclusive culture for kids who often have nowhere else to go. And that culture means enough as an anchor that preppies hiding from themselves inside nutsack cliques take for granted, by virtue of being the sheltered middle class, that many skaters get Indepedent-themed tattoos.
What’s weird is when someone up and says, why are you telling skateboarding culture to be Nazis. Like someone who clearly has no fucking clue about skateboarding, like some middle-class, social-climbing, codependent clique slave on a mission to reconstruct themselves as a moral actor after aborting ethical core to fuck people over clawing their way to the top of the shitheap. The ones who used to yell SKEG from moving vehicles at school.
What was the problem, something like this? Was the problem the use of particular symbols, or the fact that one of the mottos Independent uses regularly in its paraphenalia is this:
What’s the problem, the use of a round cross, or the fact that it’s telling the kids to keep it real for the good fight, as oppose to selling out to middle class selfish individualism and becoming a bootlicker for the man? To avoid the temptation to get on the social competitiveness bandwagons of vacant nutsacks hiding from themselves inside sterile, codependent cliques–a devil’s bargain to the extent they never mention the part about debt slavery, and the alienating, stiltifying predictabilty of a life servicing debt, and the futility of spending your life throwing an endless torrent of consumer durables into the big empty hole inside.
To avoid the temptation to try to roll positively sacred social and class hierarchy personal boundary not so much turds in equality, diversity and inclusion glitter. To avoid the temptation to talk in symbolism and police symbolism to do what, force compliance with punitive passive aggression when we can’t win respect?
It almost seems like a bit of a culture war.
Skateboarding has fucking problems like every other thing that involves people. Gator. The reason Jay Adams went to jail. Deck collectors who are little better than the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons who froth over both of them with nary one fucking moment’s reflection on where lines are drawn, we’re not up for your woke mind control but. The percentage of skates who are just shit people (yours truly obvious exception but).
There are bad actors in every community, no brainer. What part of that fact justifies an inquisition in any community. Not a one. It’s almost as though inqusitions happen because preppies are acting in bad faith because they sold out to the upward mobility bandwagon, and are thirsty for opportunities to reassert themselves as something other than self-seeking, approval-thirsty, codependent, collectively-narcissistic big knobs. It would be awkward and weird if they were only making things worse for themselves on that count I guess.
I like the new logo. I’ll be surprised if as many skaters tattoo themselves with it though.
https://shredzshop.com/blogs/news/independent-trucks-logo-change
In fact, the Independent logo was a thing of shame for at least one person. Sigh.
This is meaningful social reform losers, get a clue.
Maybe skateboarding culture has some free rent in the heads of “trading action for access” preppie nutsacks. Maybe its culture was is jsut projecting the hostility and aggression of preppie cliques onto whatever handy target presents itself at any given moment. The logo of a company that manufactures the metal bit that goes between the urethane and the wood on a skateboard is the thin end of the wedge of thought-policing and authoritarianism, or it isn’t. Upper middle class culture war on peasants who weren’t born to rule is best practice rising above the collective paranoia that sets us apart, or it isn’t.
Is skateboarding in danger of becoming a hive of Nazis? There are always a few squirred away imbibing Hitler jizz like Bear Grylls takes his own wizz.
https://bluntmag.com.au/music/melbourne-musician-ally-spazzy-outted-as-neo-nazi/
Who knows though, really.
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