Tweakgeek, although I can't really tell from your post whether or not you actually like The Clash at all, I don't disagree that true punk rock is basically apolitical and socially irrelevent except as a phenomenon.
Punk is also something that can't be "killed" by one man - it is by definition doomed to die everytime a generation that fashions its own punk movement grows about two years older and moves on. If you're like me, you'd probably rather listen to The Cramps than to The Dead Kennedys, but seeing Lux & Ivy perform 25 years later, trying to extend the same gloriously puerile mindset well into middle age, just seems contrived. I stopped going to Ramones shows after Dee Dee left, but they had already become boring professionals. Among the other artists you mention, those who maintained ongoing music careers, primarily Iggy (but I could add Lou Reed and John Lydon), grew and changed. I'll still go to see The Buzzcocks, The Vibrators or Deniz Tek (Radio Birdman) if they come around and enjoy it, but I don't pretend it's better than The Clash; despite the fact that the latter is practically a "classic rock" band by now, it's the former who are actually ossified, good as they may be.
Your contention that Strummer is somehow "responsible" for Bono is silly. Of course The Clash must have influenced U2; so did Elvis Presley. That's the way art movements work. To me, Strummer was basically a protest folkie at the core, but I don't "blame" Woody Guthrie for his existence. If you don't like Strummer's work and want to say so, then you'd make a more worthy argument by criticizing the man's own efforts rather than someone else's.
The notion that punk was at root a rejection of hippie ideology has always been wrong. It may have originally started as a rejection of hippie style and music (the aesthetic), but idealogically, it was, if anything, a rejection of the co-opting and corrupting of true hippie ideals by the corporate "rock" industry. In the local punk movement that I was a part of during the early 80's DC harDCore scene, Minor Threat's Ian MacAye has cited the ideals portrayed in the movie "Woodstock" as being one of his prime inspirations, even though his band's style and music were anything but hippie-derived. (Yeah, I know that his is not the kind of "punk" you're talking about, but even Iggy admittedly modeled himself on Jim Morrison, who himself bridged the gap between Lou Reed and Jimi Hendrix. Although today the word "hippy" tends to bring to mind SF jam bands like The Dead, during the 60's, The Beatles were actually the world's foremost representatives of flower-power, and all subsequent rockers bow before [and were/are relativistically defined by] them. Besides, what do you think The MC5 were? Or The Seeds? Johnny Ramone has said that his guitar style was his way of expressing the power [given his comparitively limited abilities] that he had originally felt from listening to Hendrix.) Rebellion, questioning of authority, and forming a counterculture community are timeless impulses independent from tie-dye, LSD, and long hair.
Bottom line: Punk couldn't have existed without the hippies - the similarities you note are not coincidental, and both movements were really in reaction to pop superficiality and slick corporate packaging, despite their aesthetic polar opposition. The main practical difference is that punk revels in a manifest nihilism which, up until Nirvana, prevented it from becoming acceptable as the mainstream. Ultimately everything old becomes new again, except that it's probably already dead before most of us get to know about it. Enjoy picking through the remains!
