Sonic BOOM…
Friday, August 12th, 2011Fact is, let’s be historical about it. No one achieved anything against a massified power structure without breaking things. In a society that is like this: (this is a fantastic blog entry, great facts and details, not to mention a brilliant moral argument) http://nathanieltapley.com/2011/08/10/an-open-letter-to-david-camerons-parents/comment-page-7/#comment-1258
…well in a society like this, ‘breaking things’ when it’s done by the powerful, comes with arguments about ‘he’s suffered enough’ or ‘he didn’t mean it, honest, he only stole that money because he’s um, been just awfully tired, um, maybe’… while the arguments against poor or colored people destroying/stealing stuff tends to be: SCUM!
Well there’s a third way to go about this. We all stick together and realize our so-called elites, who haven’t a thing to them that qualifies them for ‘elite’ status except birth in a certain neighborhood (I mean even fat old Hank the 8th with his 6 wives fought wars in his youthful years and was a scholar of Latin and composed some literary stuff… Ask Cameron to fight a war and he’ll piss himself most likely…) – yes, we realize these guys have to be destabilized, harassed constantly and then finally kicked off their high horse with a bootheel that hurts. By the people. And yes, before your reflex action of ‘yes, but haven’t all revolutions failed?’ kicks in, no. They have not. Every notion of personal dignity, self-respect that we take today for granted (including the indignation at this kind of ransacking which would have been routine if you were a peasant in 14th century Europe), is a result of previous – often failed – idealistic action. There are no perfect systems. History is an accretion of progresses made and barbarisms conquered. Just because abuse leaves its mark, that doesn’t mean you have to sit and take it forever.
The point I want to make here is that this rioting, like it or not, will provide a kind of sonic boom, a sound barrier, that may well define all future popular action against a phenomenally sick and putrid system of government and corporate cronyism. Yes indeed. If you look at history, there is always a movement that sets the trend, that sets limits within which all future movements then unfold and deploy their energies.
It took many such riots at public executions, flayings and so on from the king and his folks, for instance, for the French revolution to gain its momentum. The reason the Bastille was a symbol of the monarchy was that there had been a fairly decent history of popping peasant/urban-poor bones, ripping out shoulders and generally letting penniless folks rot in shit-caked prison cells which had increasingly pissed le peuple off. Today there is no peuple. Civil society just doesn’t carry the poetic punch of le peuple. And that’s where anger comes in. Anger is not only contagious, it follows rules. It flows like a river, but it has banks, eddies, and a general current and direction. Like any psychological process, it spontaneously creates rules and boundaries for itself. Usually in public movements, it is the extremists who set those boundaries, with outrageous, (almost) incomprehensible anger. Then that anger, weirdly enough, becomes generalized, it is assimilated within the population and even those who didn’t at first understand, begin to. And the fact of showing anger becomes acceptable. Accepted. Necessary. Inevitable.
These riots are a show of anger. Destruction is part of showing anger, ransacking is a part of displaying power. Ransacks were a part of war conduct for a long time. Arguably, even the dropping of nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to mention the Dresden bombing, were ransacks, since they occurred after it was clear the enemy was defeated.
Pride and its rituals are a part of power and its inevitable enactments. As Foucault points out, the highly public dismemberment of the prisoner in the old days was exactly one such display of power. The police that we are taught to fear are its modern version, their uniforms reminding us of the faceless immensity of the State that watches us and will punish us if (and when) we screw up. It is precisely this facelessness that rioters aim for. That they destroy regardless of whose business they’re wrecking is not baffling, it is fundamental to the enactment. It is a display of their power. It is the destruction of a massified visible structure that is usually beyond their control, a display of power over surroundings they do not usually have access to, except as passive consumers.
And of course, this is what pisses the good folk off the most. Displays of power are accessible only to the wealthy and privileged in our phenomenally indoctrinated societies. Ashton Kutcher can earn 700,000 dollars an episode for a dumb tv show he makes, but when any subset of the poor or working class asks for a raise in minimum wage or benefits, the arguments pour in about how industry isn’t about charity, how you should earn your daily wage by the sweat of your brow and so on. Right.
The fact that this argument is accepted by most of us shows how stuck we are in preposterous so-called principles no sane man who isn’t drunk, afraid or dreaming would accept.
We are stuck. We’re stuck in so many ways it’s impossible to delineate. But we are very soon going to have unstick ourselves. We’re going to have to learn to return to a simpler understanding of what life is, a more basic sense of our common humanity. And that’s where this sound barrier is going to prove vital.
Every rebellion, whether personal or public, requires one first insane, traumatic move. Then comes a time when reflection can set in. Criminality? Sure. But it is important to understand this criminality is fully a part of the act of rioting. It is even its essence. Just as corporate and government criminality are a part of their display of power. The article I’ve linked to above gives a clue as to why. It sets up a backdrop for the kind of context we live in. The facts detailed in it show the constant display of power that we put up with: powerful people telling us, WE do this but WE can. BECAUSE we’re powerful.
Well, it was only a matter of time before the boomerang came keening back. With a vengeance that has stunned a lot of people and caused the kind of dismay that says: oh man, I guess we’re going to have to do something like this to get everyone’s attention fairly soon. Do we really want to?
Yes you are, people. If you don’t want your pensions cut while Ashton continues to make his millions, if you don’t want your children’s educations to become unaffordable while your bankers live like mafia thugs, well you’d better listen to that sonic BOOM that’s just sounded, and realize, we’re in a whole new world. And there’s nothing that’s brave or new about it.
It’s a stink-filled sack of lies, corruption and domination. And the fight to overcome it must be accepted.
In ugliness lies beauty, in chaos sits life, in the hideous display of anger sits the grandeur of the inscrutable novelty of the present moment.
Cheers!