The news has been bizarrely full of footage of President Elect Barack Obama’s two girls Sasha and Malia starting school at The Sidwell Friends School. For some reason, the presidential daughters enrolling at Sidwell is striking some people as surprising. I don’t know why, given that both Chelsea Clinton and Al Gore Jr. went there. Tricia and Julie Nixon went there. Heck, the school was founded in 1883. Nancy Reagan went there. Teddy Roosevelt sent his offspring there in the early 1900’s. It is one of a very short list of DC schools which would be considered by any area parents who care about education and have some dough.

I can’t tell if the news coverage of Sasha and Malia’s matriculation is the news people being racist dicks because so many Washingtonian politicos will explain they send their kids to private school because the DC public schools are notoriously crime-ridden and don’t offer the education they should and (wait for the lowered voice here) predominantly black. Sidwell Friends has always been known for a progressive approach with a motto of “Eluceat Omnibus Lux” which means roughly “Let the light shine out from and by all.” A good attitude to teach children.

My first thought, however, on seeing the news, was that Sasha and Malia were going to grow up to be socially-conscious punks. Of course I knew some DC punks, when I lived there, who would imply they were raised by wolves and who attended Sidwell Friends. But I wasn’t sure why the whole punk association immediately leapt to mind. Because the works of Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye inform so much of everything in DC punk, even decades after either was likely to be seen in a punk club, I immediately went to look up where they went to high school. I then kicked myself for forgetting. Henry Rollins went to The Bullis School, which is arguably a comparably good preparatory school, but with a more military bent than the Quaker Sidwell Friends. More notably Dischord Records‘ Ian MacKaye and various members of seminal straight edge band Minor Threat went to the public school Wilson High School. The controversial anti-racism song “Guilty of Being White” was based on some of the young punks experiences being picked on going to a school where they were part of a 25% to 30% minority.

The Sidwell Friends and punk mental association on my part was because Ian MacKaye’s parents both went to Sidwell Friends. William R. MacKaye and Mary Anne MacKaye met there and wrote a book about the school called Mr. Sidwell’s School: A Centennial History 1883-1983 which was published by The Sidwell Friends School.

Living in Los Angeles, I was stunned last year, when someone working for me asked what a Republican is and had never heard of the two party system, much less voted. The DC punk scene is political and at least somewhat informed, even though the reason for jumping on the tables is often just the fun of making a scene in public. Dana Hull, writing for Salon, reminisces about die-ins, where scene-makers would protest anything from apartheid to the threat of nuclear war by loudly acting out being killed. I’m not saying that every DC punk votes in every election or only dresses like a freak to protest meat or alcohol abuse or the patriarchy or the oppression of something or other. But the idea was there that one might want to think about what one stands for and share that with the world.

For me, coming out of the DC punk scene, albeit a long time after the start of Fugazi and Black Flag, I mean it when I talk about my ideals. I’m appalled that there are people who claim to be making punk smut, yet spit on the notion that what they create should mean anything or even be mildly original. And, yes, I know Black Flag technically is sorta from Los Angeles, but Henry Rollins is the best-known member and the band was very much informed by the DC punk mentality. Much as Blue Blood might be Los Angeles-based, but a lot of my heart is still DC.

One of my big initial goals with Blue Blood in print was to show that a woman could, not only own her sexuality, but flaunt it, and still be intelligent and well-spoken and interested in and informed about the world around her. Fast forward sixteen years from Blue Blood’s start in 1992 and I realize that some scantily-clad women are vibrant and alive and smart, some are vibrant and alive but unlikely to be rocket scientists, and some are just easy on the eyes.

By the way, the Henry Rollins store is having a clearance sale this week. Other notables who have attended Sidwell Friends include Xena’s Alexandra Tydings of punk bands Annabelle Kickbox and She’s Seen You Naked and Bill Nye the Science Guy. Root Boy Slim of Root Boy Slim and The Sex Change Band fame was expelled from The Sidwell Friends School.

Emo has been around long enough that it should have died a natural death by now. But it won’t go away. It hangs around, moping just out of view, like a skinny wuss with a journal in his messenger bag and tears in his eyes. You tell him to fuck off and he skulks away, but you see him following you again the next day. Emo needs that rejection to keep its heart pure, you see. Ugh, so creepy? Can you believe you ever thought there was something special about emo?

It’s over, emo. We’re done with you. It’s been 20 years. Why can’t you just move on?

Most emo kids are dorky enough to know the enshrined canon and history of emo, which starts in DC in ‘85 or so with Embrace and Rites of Spring. This period in history might as well be the Siege of Stalingrad to most of the grumpy larvae who cry along with Dashboard Confessional, and it’s not really accurate anyway. The first band from DC that I ever heard labeled “emo” or “emocore” was Beefeater, whose absence from the canon is mystifying, since their stance was militant vegetarian and their bass player sported the original emo beard. (Note: I grew up in DC and I saw Minor Threat live, okay, so if you’re under 35 and not a Mackaye, do not come at me with a bunch of noise you read on the web somewhere.)

As a further point, just to illustrate the roach-like endurance of emo themes, please note that emo goes back not 20 years but 200. The original emo heart-throb was Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, author of The Sorrows of Young Werther. Werther was the original emo kid, with his journals, passionate friendships, condescension to mere mortals, pathological narcissism, and of course, his tragic love of an unattainable woman. The book started a craze among the youth of the day, who imitated Werther’s style of dress, godawful poesy, and suicide. Sorrows is still taught as a classic of 18th century romantic lit, and although Goethe went on to write reams of poetry, essays, criticism, and scientific work, in his lifetime he never managed to shake off little Werther. Emo kids are like fucking barnacles.

I’m not going to drone on about which bands are true emo and which bands are plain-vanilla indie and which bands are commercial twaddle and which bands are sniveling shit. I’m not in a position to judge these things, because if something can even be plausibly mislabeled as emo, I probably loathe it. This is because emo is unendurable if you’re not an emo kid.

And what is an emo kid? Besides a pussy’s pussy?

Not that there’s anything intrinsically pussy about singing about the women you’ve wronged or who’ve wronged you. Without ruinous affairs, bluesmen would have had nothing but poverty and whiskey to sing about, a state of affairs that could have left us with no sources for American popular music other than polka. The telling difference between a bluesman and an emo kid is the number of women involved. Bluesmen come by their world-weariness honestly, by having stormy affairs with lots of cruel, wanton, mistreating, yet kind-hearted women. An emo kid can get three albums of endless whinnying out of one woman, who can’t have known what she was getting into. (The other big difference is that a bluesman’s woman would probably love to tell her side of the story. The chick who broke Mr. Confessionals heart doesn’t have to say a word. I mean, shit, who’d dump him?)

No, an emo kid is not a bluesman, no matter how much whiskey you slip into his or her Sprite. An emo kid is made up of many things: goth self-pity and eyeliner, indie kid dork chic and studied dirtiness, a bit of punk self-righteous obnoxiousness, all drowned in adolescent self-absorption.

Because above all, an emo kid is a kid. And the hardest thing to give up about childhood isn’t the freedom, the innocence, or the security (or the illusions thereof). It’s the whining. French auteur Francois Truffaut once said his films focused on children because he was not interested at all in the emotions of adults. This is another way of saying that no one wants to hear grown people whining. No one expects dignity from children, who have an excuse for not knowing that life isn’t fair. But the older you get, the more grating it is to hear you wailing about how much it all hurts. If you get big enough to be punchable, you’d better learn a little stoicism and ironic detachment before they get beaten into you.

Horribly, we must admit that all of us have been emo kids at one point. We’ve all been misunderstood. We’ve all had our hearts torn out and dropped on our Chuck Taylors. We’ve all had our personal notes read before the class. And somewhere in the recesses of our mind, we’ve all written sick-making poetry about it. But we eventually realized that we weren’t alone, and that everyone had felt like this once. And we realized that we were the only ones still whining and sulking. And we shut the fuck up and got on with our lives.

Links of historic interest. Get educated!:

Minor Threat
Rites of Spring
Beefeater
Embrace
The Sorrows of Young Werther