Ironically, these pages are intended as a loving corrective to a familiar arrogance: the hubris that would-be activists/radicals/revolutionaries (choose your term) tend to have about topics like "the system," "the people," and so on.

The shortcomings of so much "radical" activity became painfully obvious to me in the process of writing Dance of Days, a narrative history of the D.C. punk underground. Never mind anyone else's arrogance; I saw all too clearly my own blindness.

So often I/we seemed to think that simply screaming about the world's injustices, seeking a transcendent moment, or cutting ourselves off from mainstream society would somehow magically change the system. This can be an appealingly romantic notion, but it is not likely to succeed. "