Riot Here, Riot Now

I miss the News of the World phone-tapping scandal. Do you remember that? Just the thought of those tabloidese scum profiting from the misery of others gives me a warm and slippery feeling in my tum-tum. On and on it went, promising to never end unless something came along that was even bigger – but that was unlikely. Surely scum of that magnitude couldn’t be usurped, bettered, trumped? But this is England and we do some of the finest scum you’re likely to find anywhere in the world. Mmm, finger-fucking good.

I am, of course, referring to the recent bout of insanity perpetrated by our darling lickle yoots. I know I said that the last post was it for English Bitcherature, but I’ve come out of retirement to bemoan the current climate and tenuously link it to the world I’ve just run away from. Looks like it’s not just me who’s running now. I’ve heard story after story from armchair pundits and those caught up in the violence themselves – including my sister and her family on their way back from the theatre – high culture to no culture in a single train ride – and I feel it’s time I gave my side. You know, the inconsequential angle.

To borrow a cliché used a lot recently, I’m shocked but not surprised. The behaviour we’ve all witnessed, wide-mouthed and limp coffee-cupped, comes from exactly the kind of defiant and belligerent pupils I’ve been banging on about for months now. What’s different about this is that it’s being legitimized left, right and centre (well, mostly left) by the proliferation of analysts and commentators adorning the news of late. This is not to say that I don’t see what they’re saying – for some of these kids, their socio-economic backgrounds are devastating and this mayhem can surely only be an entirely understandable reaction to that. However, for some of them the truth is that this was all a kind of game to play and it’s an uncomfortable reality that, to borrow from Alfred the butler, some people just want to see the world burn.

The reasons for the violence became more and more fragmented as time went on and just seemed to me, as someone who’s spent three years listening to poorly constructed and unrealistic excuses, as little children regurgitating what the media had been saying. This is very similar to teaching and just as frustrating. What children do, because they’re stupid (not their fault, but a fact) is repeat what they hear on TV.

It struck me that these ‘excuses’ didn’t start vomiting forth from their mouths until a good two or three days after the riots began. Coincidence? I used to hear the same old thing day after day from the little tossers who ruined every lesson they were in – ‘I’m distracted’, ‘He’s distracting me’, ‘I’m not engaged’. This from a little bogey with the vocabulary of an ape is more than suspicious and I saw precisely the same thing on the 24-hour coverage. Which I watched with the kind of compulsion usually reserved for a US DVD box set. Except it was real. And just down the road. Sometimes I’d hear a police siren outside my house and then there’d be one on TV. Messed up.

Horrible rat children were using the words of the academics on TV to justify their actions and, in doing so, took away from the really important reason this all began – the shooting of Mark Duggan by the police. Clearly this man was no angel (sorry, but having a loaded weapon in your car makes you a bit dodgy, at the very least) but his death at the hands of the police and the subsequent handling of his family in the aftermath was unjust. The latest travesty of our increasingly tough times. However, the entire incident which tried, in some ways, to make sense of the riots, was passed over by the majority of the mob.

This wasn’t about injustice or institutional racism, it was about a chaotic free reign of the streets, the chance to smash and destroy and a free plasma TV or two. ‘We’re taking our taxes back!’ they drawled at the cameras, faces obscured by the same hankie gran had used on Sunday to wipe the gravy off their chins. ‘When you give us respect, we’ll give you respect!’ they spat, seemingly unaware of the contradiction of requesting respect from the police with a boiling hot DVD recorder under your arm.

Now I’ve driven into a puddle deliberately once or twice and the resulting soggy rage gave me much to smile about as they and their clothes shrunk in the rear view, but the joy these wretched boils squeezed out of their actions was, for me, the most disturbing thing about the whole affair. It was one of the things I always found hardest to deal with as a teacher as well – the overt pleasure pupils would get from seeing someone else upset. Where’s the empathy? Where’s the understanding? Jesus, where’s the humanity?! Well, it’s not here anymore. When I saw how happy it made these kids to burn down an old woman’s home who stood before them in tears, it made me realize one thing – fuck me, I’m glad I’m not a teacher anymore.

And here’s another thing, how come the rioters got all the good weather? It’s been raining ever since. Typical. By the way, are they over? If so, what am I going to do with all this boiling oil? Some questions to tide you over until next we meet.