"1981: The Brixton Riots" and "England's Riots: Trainers"

[achali]

RELATED
Robots of Brixton / "The 1981 South London riots but through the eyes of robots some 70 years later" [short] http://weblog.liberatormagazine.com/2011...lm_26.html

SOURCE
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/ba...riots.html

1981: THE BRIXTON RIOTS

Since Saturday evening, the news from London has been both alarming and increasingly difficult to parse. It began with a police shooting, but over the past three evenings it’s morphed into something enormous and varied. Britain’s beleaguered media is struggling to explain the riots, while the government and the police struggle to contain them. Writing from London yesterday, Lauren Collins drew immediate parallels between the weekend’s violence and the Brixton riots of thirty years ago. A few months after Brixton’s Bloody Saturday, in the spring of 1981, our London correspondent, Mollie Panter-Downes, summed up the aftermath:

The riots were a sort of harsh educational crash course for bewildered citizens who had believed that it could not happen here or had trusted to the long patience of the English character to accept the bad times somehow. Now they know better. Shop fronts boarded up here and there in Kings Road, Chelsea, and the staid streets of South Kensington show a new, pessimistic uncertainty that turbulence will stay in the blighted city areas. All the explanations of what happened and why are different, and possibly all are partly true. Plenty of Londoners, particularly those who live in neighborhoods with a large colored population, undoubtedly thought at first—and even seemed to enjoy saying with grim “I told you so” satisfaction—that Enoch Powell’s famous prophecy of racial fury that would one day bloody the waters of the Thames was being proved right at last. The nasty pictures of white looters—respectable-looking middle-aged citizens descending like a cloud of methodical locusts to finish off the destruction begun by the hooligan young of any color—maybe confused his supporters somewhat.

Panter-Downes alluded to the nation’s despondency in the early years of Thatcher’s reign, but Jane Kramer comprehensively explored it in her May, 1981, report from London. Kramer wrote with apprehension about what Thatcher’s austerity measures promised to bring. (“There is something touching about Margaret Thatcher and her enthusiasms. She seems to believe in Milton Friedman the way an English schoolgirl believes in Hobbits.”) She painted a picture of a Britain in quiet crisis, where the riots in South London were the physical manifestation of the country’s broader problems:

There is a sense of loss here. It has come over the city as a kind of quickening sadness, like one of those early spring evenings that suddenly light the blackened stones of Parliament and the Embankment with streaks of gold. Everybody has an explanation for it. People talk about “the decline”—which is the fashionable London phrase lately—as if the country’s distress were a moment in some historical aesthetic, something to survive and savor. Or they talk plainly about the price of groceries and children’s coats, and in the end sound just as evasive and rhetorical, because there is much more to this distress than high prices in a ravaged and ravaging economy. It is as if Londoners were grieving for themselves, for the decency they have always held, as an article of faith, to be a particularly English quality, for the civility, the fairness of mind and spirit, that they believe is finally what sets them apart from millions of smarmy and disreputable Europeans waiting just across the Channel to corrupt them. They seem to be suffering from a loss of faith in the British character. They have counted on character, the way a conquistador might have counted on God, to see them through their wars and their empires and their homelier domestic crises, and many of them assumed that Great Britain’s latest crisis—two and a half million unemployed, race riots in Brixton, Ulster close to civil war, Labour turned viciously against itself, a Prime Minister devoted to what is probably best described as up-against-the-wall economics—was going to be another one of those tonic afflictions that used to marshal the reserves of British character to come to the rescue when the common good was on the line.




SOURCE
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/ne...iners.html

England's Riots: Trainers"

We sit watching pictures of rioting on our television. It’s as if the walls of the house are permeable, however quiet it is outside. Walls, it turns out, are permeable—plate-glass windows are kicked in and battered in, metal shutters are torn from their housing and staved in. We watch the extraordinary surplus strength of young men carried away, twisting in the air and kicking out at the glass with both feet, smashing through; watch the tornado energy, the ferocious focus, with which they set about hacking into the closed shops. Pretty ugly, pretty scary. You wouldn’t want to be there. Although, bizarrely, people do seem to be there, watching—not just the rioters and the police and the small businessmen whose fight it is, but passers-by, untouched and yet involved (and that’s us, too, watching on television). Some just watch, some slip in after the wild ones have broken through, slip out again with loot: flat-screen TVs, trainers, bikes. These riots aren’t a mass surge, taking everyone along; they aren’t even a demonstration (except at their very beginnings in Tottenham). In the CCTV and mobile-phone footage they often look more like a wild night out: the bursts of running, an uncoordinated spatter of shouting, a heedless, exhilarating fall into a chaos where nothing matters, only this absorbing moment whose containing walls are giving way under the assault of fists and feet. And then the wild night crosses a threshold to where the footage flares with orange fire, is smudged in dirty smoke. People get hurt.

The romantic uniform of balaclavas, hoodies, and scarves wrapped around faces is derived from politics among other things, but this isn’t politics straightforwardly; there’s not much for liberal pieties to fasten on. The guerrilla dress is more like a style statement, a form of dandyism; sometimes the rioters who speak to camera sound—even when they’re giving it most heart—as if they’re acting the part of outraged righteousness, as if they’ve picked it up from elsewhere, ready-made. But then that’s what the young do—try out outrage, try out righteousness, try on different styles—and mostly they’re performing for one another. Boys and young men outdo one another in a dizzy spiral of audacity, according to the complex dynamics of a peer culture we don’t see, can’t read. Two girls sharing a stolen bottle of wine do teen-age deadpan for the benefit of the BBC, drawling their complicity, giggling together: the whole point is that we’re shut out. “It was fun. We wanted to show, the police can’t do nothing.” The tone’s familiarly galling; they’re expert in what triggers to touch, to bring down adult offendedness and impotent expostulation. The texts the rioters send invite our outrage, in their very flatness. “What ever ends your from put your ballys on link up and cause havoc, just rob everything. Police can’t stop it.” (“Ballys” are balaclavas.) “Meet up, smash up shops and get some free stuff.”

Those trainers: fetish objects of desire, markers of the hidden chain of corrupting exchanges that begins in the sweatshops of Vietnam, Indonesia, China. There won’t be much experience among the young looters of the burden of the labor that goes into making the trainers—sneakers—they help themselves to, or the laptops, because there’s not much factory work left in this country. Their role in the global cycle that delivers the multinationals’ profits is simply to consume; the advertisers’ promise of frictionless fulfillment obscures dirty realities and sham satisfactions at both ends of the chain. Some of those identikit high-street stores turn out to be quite hollow when their walls come down. All you get is a box of shoes. And even the very indifferent young watch enough television to have picked up the themes of a crumbling economic system and a political authority in disarray. No doubt they have intuited—at whatever level of conscious awareness—shams behind the walls of the adult power that’s supposed to be so substantial and responsible.