Was the punk rock of my youth secretly conservative?

I was listening to a Classic Punk playlist on Spotify the other day and heard the song “Safe European Home” by the Clash.

I always assumed this song was making fun of uptight British and European vacationers who preferred not to venture too far from the safety of their milquetoast white societies.

The Dead Kennedys saw that liberal college students were too brainwashed to understand how lucky they were.

That’s how it was back in the 1980s. Europe, England, and America were so safe and law-abiding that young people had to seek out exotic locations to have real travel adventures.

I thought “Safe European Home” was about boring, bourgeois people who would never consider visiting Africa, or the Caribbean, or Central America, mostly because they might be exposed to