[Gunnair]

Quote:

Rex Murphy:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea …

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England

– Richard 11, Act 2 Scene 1

It is not likely, after the jackals of every class and colour loosed themselves upon the streets of England’s major cities this week, that anyone will be reading the Bard’s immortal tribute to his country. If they did, they might be weeping from the thought that all it so majestically celebrates is dust and reverie. The England of pageant, chivalry, order, reserve and stoicism — the noble England — is no more. That England lives only in the vaults of decaying memory. That England is the Cleese parrot.
The parade of violence, mayhem, callousness, petty greed and ignorant arrogance that has torn through the “other Eden” and roiled the “happy breed of men” is really quite beyond any ready or rational comparison. Some demi-Paradise — where people leap out of buildings deliberately set on fire by the yobs and chavs (Brit terms for thugs and gangsters), where the oppressed wander in and out of street shops to liberate their merchandize, terrify the staff and smash everything they cannot steal.

Some precious stone, some seat of Mars. Seat of Posh Spice and Piers Morgan. What the world has watched is an England gutted of its most characteristic, time-wrought virtues. The new England is hollowed out; its spirit of community, which Shakespeare’s lines celebrate so eloquently, and which Winston Churchill, three centuries later evoked, both in his person and his speeches, is no more.

The sense of self-sacrifice and deep concern for the neighbour that was so much of the spirit of those who lived through the Blitz; the virtues and practices of those times — times of real danger and real want — were viciously parodied by the rioters, who cared nothing for others, sought to hurt not help, burnt out their own communities and gave a finger to every other citizen in their country.

They would walk all over their neighbour in hob-nailed boots and gladly kick him in the head on the way by, if it meant picking up a “free” cellphone, or any other tacky gimcrack of our time. Consider the now famous Malaysian student who, lying on the ground bleeding, after having been attacked, was picked up by five or six guys (ostensibly to help him — it’s on YouTube ) who then rifle his backpack and steal his wallet and leave him still bleeding and unattended. The good Samaritan doesn’t show up wearing a hoodie.

These vicious riots were a parody in another sense, too: a savage parody when you consider real misery, the absolute darkness of hunger and fear facing people in Somalia right now. And a parody, too, of some of those demonstrations in Egypt, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere — where brutal governments set tanks upon their citizens, and gun down those who are only asking for something as simple as a vote, or as innocent as democracy. Let us hear less and less of the “dispossessed” and “disenfranchised” of first-world countries. As I gather from footage of the riots, being “dispossessed” seems to be a condition curable by waltzing off with some store’s Plasma TV and a couple of iPhones.

Some exceptions there were: the Turkish shopkeepers lining up to protect themselves and their work — a great display. The Muslim father in Birmingham, who lost his son to the hooligans, himself imploring for respect and order — he was a monument of virtue and great-heartedness. (“I lost my son. Step forward if you want to lose your sons. Otherwise, calm down and go home.”)

But these are ordinary citizens. Not one politician stands out.

One message I take from this week: England has no leaders. And in that, she is much like the rest of the western democracies. David Cameron wears a good suit, and speaks ever so carefully. It’s not enough. There is nothing about him (or Nick Clegg or George Brown or Harriet Harman or Ed Bland — that last name is talismanic) to suggest he or they have anything to say in this time that will not be a fudge and an evasion. They are no better on the riots than they are on the financial crisis. They are all temporizers as are the majority of politicians of the Western world.

This goes double for the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who came back from a continental holiday three days late to his burning city and then whizzed clumsily about to various locations like some puppet getting tangled up in its own strings.

There is no one in England fit to lace Churchill’s boots. But even to bring up that hallowed name is far too much. His name summons to mind another order of being, alien to the England of our time.

National Post

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[martin14]

Well written.

I'll give Cameron a chance, although he will have uphill battle.

The nanny state is deeply entrenched.

[xerxes]

Good editorial as always from Rex.

I found Russel Brand of all people to have an interesting take as well:

Quote:

Big Brother isn't watching you

I no longer live in London. I've been transplanted to Los Angeles by a combination of love and money; such good fortune and opportunity, in both cases, you might think disqualify me from commenting on matters in my homeland. Even the results of Britain's Got Ice-Factor may lay prettily glistening beyond my remit now that I am self-banished.

To be honest when I lived in England I didn't really care too much for the fabricated theatrics of reality TV. Except when I worked for Big Brother, then it was my job to slosh about in the amplified trivia of the housemates/inmates. Sometimes it was actually quite bloody interesting. Particularly the year that Nadia won. She was the Portuguese transsexual. Remember? No? Well, that's the nature of the medium; as it whizzes past the eyes it seems very relevant but the malady of reality TV stars is that their shelf life expires, like dog years, by the power of seven. To me it seems as if Nadia's triumph took place during the silver jubilee, we had a street party.

Early in that series there was an incident of excitement and high tension. The testosteronal, alpha figures of the house – a Scot called Jason and a Londoner called Victor – incited by the teasing conditions and a camp lad called Marco (wow, it's all coming back) kicked off in the house, smashed some crockery and a few doors. Police were called, tapes were edited and the carnival rolled on. When I was warned to be discreet on-air about the extent of the violence, I quoted a British first-world-war general who, reflecting on the inability of his returning troops to adapt to civilian life, said: "You cannot rouse the animal in man then expect it to be put aside at a moment's notice."

"Yeah, that's exactly the kind of thing we want you to say the opposite of," said the channel's representative.

This week's riots are sad and frightening and, if I have by virtue of my temporary displacement forgone the right to speak about the behaviour of my countrymen, then this is gonna be irksome. I mean even David Cameron came back from his holiday. Eventually. The Tuscan truffles lost their succulence when the breaking glass became too loud to ignore. Then dopey ol' Boris came cycling back into the London clutter with his spun gold hair and his spun shit logic as it became apparent that the holiday was over.

In fact, it isn't my absence from the territory of London that bothers me; it's my absence from the economic class that is being affected that itches in my gut because, as I looked at the online incident maps, the boroughs that were suffering all, for me, had some resonance. I've lived in Dalston, Hackney, Elephant, Camden and Bethnal Green. I grew up round Dagenham and Romford and, whilst I could never claim to be from the demographic most obviously affected, I feel guilty that I'm not there now.

I feel proud to be English, proud to be a Londoner (all right, an Essex boy), never more so than since being in exile, and I naturally began to wonder what would make young people destroy their communities.

I have spoken to mates in London and Manchester and they sound genuinely frightened and hopeless, and the details of their stories place this outbreak beyond the realms of any political idealism or rationalisation. But I can't, from my ivory tower in the Hollywood Hills, compete with the understandable yet futile rhetoric, describing the rioters as mindless. Nor do I want to dwell on the sadness of our beautiful cities being tarnished and people's shops and livelihoods, sometimes generations old, being immolated. The tragic and inevitable deaths ought to be left for eulogies and grieving. Tariq Jahan has spoken so eloquently from his position of painful proximity, with such compassion, that nearly all else is redundant.

The only question I can legitimately ask is: why is this happening? Mark Duggan's death has been badly handled but no one is contesting that is a reason for these conflagrations beyond the initial flash of activity in Tottenham. I've heard Theresa May and the Old Etonians whose hols have been curtailed (many would say they're the real victims) saying the behaviour is "unjustifiable" and "unacceptable". Wow! Thanks guys! What a wonderful use of the planet's fast-depleting oxygen resources. Now that's been dealt with can we move on to more taxing matters such as whether or not Jack The Ripper was a ladies' man. And what the hell do bears get up to in those woods?

However "unacceptable" and "unjustifiable" it might be, it has happened so we better accept it and, whilst we can't justify it, we should kick around a few neurons and work out why so many people feel utterly disconnected from the cities they live in.

Unless on the news tomorrow it's revealed that there's been a freaky "criminal creating" chemical leak in London and Manchester and Liverpool and Birmingham that's causing young people to spontaneously and simultaneously violate their environments – in which case we can park the ol' brainboxes, stop worrying and get on with the football season, but I suspect there hasn't – we have, as human beings, got a few things to consider together.

I should here admit that I have been arrested for criminal damage for my part in anti-capitalist protest earlier in this decade. I often attended protests and then, in my early 20s, and on drugs, I enjoyed it when the protests lost direction and became chaotic, hostile even. I was intrigued by the anarchist "Black bloc", hooded and masked, as, in retrospect, was their agenda, but was more viscerally affected by the football "casuals" who'd turn up because the veneer of the protest's idealistic objective gave them the perfect opportunity to wreck stuff and have a row with the Old Bill.

That was never my cup of tea though. For one thing, policemen are generally pretty good fighters and second, it registered that the accent they shouted at me with was closer to my own than that of some of those singing about the red flag making the wall of plastic shields between us seem thinner.

I found those protests exciting, yes, because I was young and a bit of a twerp but also, I suppose, because there was a void in me. A lack of direction, a sense that I was not invested in the dominant culture, that government existed not to look after the interests of the people it was elected to represent but the big businesses that they were in bed with.

I felt that, and I had a mum who loved me, a dad who told me that nothing was beyond my reach, an education, a grant from Essex council (to train as an actor of all things!!!) and several charities that gave me money for maintenance. I shudder to think how disenfranchised I would have felt if I had been deprived of that long list of privileges.

That state of deprivation though is, of course, the condition that many of those rioting endure as their unbending reality. No education, a weakened family unit, no money and no way of getting any. JD Sports is probably easier to desecrate if you can't afford what's in there and the few poorly paid jobs there are taken. Amidst the bleakness of this social landscape, squinting all the while in the glare of a culture that radiates ultraviolet consumerism and infrared celebrity. That daily, hourly, incessantly enforces the egregious, deceitful message that you are what you wear, what you drive, what you watch and what you watch it on, in livid, neon pixels. The only light in their lives comes from these luminous corporate messages. No wonder they have their fucking hoods up.

I remember Cameron saying "hug a hoodie" but I haven't seen him doing it. Why would he? Hoodies don't vote, they've realised it's pointless, that whoever gets elected will just be a different shade of the "we don't give a toss about you" party.

Politicians don't represent the interests of people who don't vote. They barely care about the people who do vote. They look after the corporations who get them elected. Cameron only spoke out against News International when it became evident to us, US, the people, not to him (like Rose West, "He must've known") that the newspapers Murdoch controlled were happy to desecrate the dead in the pursuit of another exploitative, distracting story.

Why am I surprised that these young people behave destructively, "mindlessly", motivated only by self-interest? How should we describe the actions of the city bankers who brought our economy to its knees in 2010? Altruistic? Mindful? Kind? But then again, they do wear suits, so they deserve to be bailed out, perhaps that's why not one of them has been imprisoned. And they got away with a lot more than a few fucking pairs of trainers.

These young people have no sense of community because they haven't been given one. They have no stake in society because Cameron's mentor Margaret Thatcher told us there's no such thing.

If we don't want our young people to tear apart our communities then don't let people in power tear apart the values that hold our communities together.

As you have by now surely noticed, I don't know enough about politics to ponder a solution and my hands are sticky with blood money from representing corporate interests through film, television and commercials, venerating, through my endorsements and celebrity, products and a lifestyle that contributes to the alienation of an increasingly dissatisfied underclass. But I know, as we all intuitively know, the solution is all around us and it isn't political, it is spiritual. Gandhi said: "Be the change you want to see in the world."

In this simple sentiment we can find hope, as we can in the efforts of those cleaning up the debris and ash in bonhomous, broom-wielding posses. If we want to live in a society where people feel included, we must include them, where they feel represented, we must represent them and where they feel love and compassion for their communities then we, the members of that community, must find love and compassion for them.

As we sweep away the mistakes made in the selfish, nocturnal darkness we must ensure that, amidst the broken glass and sadness, we don't sweep away the youth lost amongst the shards in the shadows cast by the new dawn.

[Wada]

Thankyou Xerxes.

[andyt]

Wow, once you get past the verbiage, he nailed it.

Quote:

Politicians don't represent the interests of people who don't vote. They barely care about the people who do vote. They look after the corporations who get them elected. Cameron only spoke out against News International when it became evident to us, US, the people, not to him (like Rose West, "He must've known") that the newspapers Murdoch controlled were happy to desecrate the dead in the pursuit of another exploitative, distracting story.

Why am I surprised that these young people behave destructively, "mindlessly", motivated only by self-interest? How should we describe the actions of the city bankers who brought our economy to its knees in 2010? Altruistic? Mindful? Kind? But then again, they do wear suits, so they deserve to be bailed out, perhaps that's why not one of them has been imprisoned. And they got away with a lot more than a few fucking pairs of trainers.

These young people have no sense of community because they haven't been given one. They have no stake in society because Cameron's mentor Margaret Thatcher told us there's no such thing.

It was a lot easier in the 60's. Status was knowing a dealer with good dope, and some worn out jeans your girlfriend sewed some cool patches on. Didn't last long tho.