Creativity Quote by Santiago Durango

There is a deliberately flat shrug in Santiago Durango's recollection: a chain of simple clauses that treats harm like a completed transaction. "We played", "we had", "we led off", "they were offended", "that was that" reads like minutes from a meeting, not a memory of a moral choice. That deadpan isn’t just style; it’s a posture. By compressing cause and effect into a neat sequence, he frames offense as an inevitable byproduct of art rather than a predictable outcome of targeting a community.

The phrase "people of the Jewish persuasion" does extra work. It’s euphemistic and faintly antique, a distancing maneuver that turns Jews into an abstract category - a "persuasion" - as if the issue were taste or opinion, not identity and history. The language sanitizes the moment while keeping the speaker insulated from naming the uglier thing: antisemitism. Even "offensive" is passive. The song is "offensive", people "were offended" - nobody "insulted" anyone, nobody "chose" to provoke.

Context matters here: the punk and post-punk ecosystem often prized transgression as authenticity, a way to needle mainstream sensibilities and test boundaries. Leading off with the song suggests intention, not accident; it’s an opening statement, a dare. Durango’s retelling, though, performs a kind of emotional budget-cutting: controversy without accountability. The subtext is that offense is self-contained, already resolved, when the cultural reality is the opposite - it lingers, it signals who a room is for, and it teaches audiences what cruelty can be passed off as edge.