London Riots- Too Big to Fail

this issue is so big, I'll deal with it in dollops. This is the big picture:

supposed key themes:

police brutality
racism
yobbism
political opportunism (don't they just ruin everything?)
community breakdown
copying the bankers

Many people have been quick to link the riots to the breakdown of society
caused by the government letting the bankers run rampant. So, apparently,
the hooded youff of Britain was sitting in the park thinking "i hate how them
bankers is always stealing stuff. Let's do some uv dat, innit!"

That might sell newspapers, but I'm not buying it, or them.
Having been here for the better part of a decade, I've got a few ideas
and some media texts to back them up.

the real issues:
Police brutality
racism
instinct and opportunism
jealousy
Conservative politics
sublimated stress

The guy below, from the Gang of Four, get close to some key ideas.

checkitout:
Dave allen. North.com

Tea Party, London Riots, Austerity, Punk Rock

When I was recently interviewed by the author Rick Moody I found myself digging back through my memories of the UK and my time during the punk rock years of 1976 through roughly 1981. It wasn’t a nostalgic exercise; the oft used colloquialism “it’s grim up North” was more of an astute observation than a simple quip. Things that came to mind during the interview exercise were the coal miners standoff against a para-military police force, the right wing government of Prime Minister Thatcher privatizing our public companies to enrich her friends in the City of London, (our Wall St,) and the overall upheaval, the convulsing of society that came with that.

So here we are again in 2011.

The last time Britain saw widespread rioting, in the 1980s, street violence came after a long and failed political struggle against the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, which suppressed trade unions and decimated social services.

– Richard Sennet and Saskia Sassen.

History repeats itself, especially when memories are short. Here’s a paragraph from me in the aforementioned interview with Rick Moody:

It’s worth point­ing out that Gang of Four began when the Labour party was still in power under the hap­less leader James Callaghan, with Mar­garet Thatcher tak­ing the reins in 1979, eight months after the release of Enter­tain­ment! So it’s not as if we were in oppo­si­tion to the Con­ser­v­a­tive party at the time, and we cer­tainly didn’t write songs that had a polit­i­cal party agenda. We were openly sup­port­ive of the strik­ing coal min­ers, we sup­ported the Rock Against Racism move­ment, we were openly Fem­i­nist (“It’s Her Fac­tory”) and so on, but really is that any dif­fer­ent than sim­ply being coined “lib­eral” or being a left-leaning Demo­c­rat in the USA today?

Just after we released our debut album, The Clash released London Calling – The album’s subject matter was social displacement, unemployment, racial conflict and politics with a small p.

This time in London there is no Punk rock revolution swirling around the rioters providing a musical soundtrack to their nihilism. Here’s Richard Sennet and Saskia Sassen again:

In attempting to carry out reform, the government appears incompetent; it has lost legitimacy. This has prompted some people living on Kingsland Road to become vigilantes. “We have to do things for ourselves,” a 16-year-old in Hackney told The Guardian, convinced that the authorities did not care about, or know how to protect, communities like his.

A street of shuttered shops, locked playgrounds and closed clinics, a street patrolled by citizens armed with knives and bats, is not a place to build a life.

Americans ought to ponder this aspect of Britain’s trauma. After all, London is one of the world’s wealthiest cities, but large sections of it are impoverished. New York is not so different.

The American right today is obsessed with cutting government spending. In many ways, Mr. Cameron’s austerity program is the Tea Party’s dream come true. But Britain is now grappling with the consequences of those cuts, which have led to the neglect and exclusion of many vulnerable, disaffected young people who are acting out violently and irresponsibly — driven by rage rather than an explicit political agenda.

And they point out that if the radical right and the Tea Party insist on attempting to fix economic problems and social ills by reducing the size of government the consequences of those decisions and actions will be enormous for the USA:

Britain’s current crisis should cause us to reflect on the fact that a smaller government can actually increase communal fear and diminish our quality of life. Is that a fate America wishes upon itself?

Are we all ok with that?