Seconded
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-----Original Message-----
From: British & Irish poets [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Tim Allen
Sent: 21 August 2011 14:54
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: the King Blues
On 20 Aug 2011, at 17:47, David Bircumshaw wrote:
> As for the riots, they weren't political, but the reaction to them
> has been.
Of course they were political, deeply political - unless your
conception of political is completely different to mine. The situation
of the bad run-down estates constantly harassed and controlled by the
thuggish gangs of youths - places where most of us wouldn't dare to
walk alone or park the car, and from where the police keep their
distance - is a political situation. It is the result of politics and
its solution, like all these things, is going to be political. A
person does not have to have an individual political consciousness to
act in a political way. The urban underclass isn't there by accident,
it has been created by economic and political decisions made by others
and the systems they support. Just because it has been abandoned,
except as a convenient cypher, by what we know of as ' political
parties', does not mean that it's socio/cultural behavior is therefore
unpolitical - which is the point I was making in my post.
The causes of the riots are multiple and complex, a point which most
commentators with any sense have agreed upon, unless they have tried
to simplify it for the sake of THEIR politics - the 'reaction' etc.
Those complexities are at work both in the groups and in the
individuals - why does one person join in while another gets out of
there as fast as possible? Why does one person use the opportunity to
grab some trainers while another uses the opportunity to kick someone
in the face? (Two very different things - wouldn't you agree?). Why
does one person set fire to a shop without thinking of or caring about
the people trapped in the flats above, while another would never dream
of doing such a thing, whatever was going on? In other words the
behavior of people in these situations varies (something
unacknowledged by the authorities who tar all with the same brush) but
the situation itself is made possible by a wider malaise that affects
all of them (and us), one way or another.
The sudden realisation of having a momentary 'power' - the power to
choose to burn down a shop and threaten the police - must be a pretty
strong thing to resist among certain people, and that feeling of
having a power en masse, however temporary, definitely pushed this
thing along. This is the power of expression through conflagration -
probably deeply satisfying while it lasts. It is also probably
followed by guilt and confusion, at least among many - "Was that me?
Did I do that?"
Tim A.
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