CSotD: mais certains sont plus que d’autres indesirable
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Madam & Eve comments on the London riots. I like the crappy "universal" style that turns what should be a loveable mascot into the sort of international icon you'd find on signage telling you which restrooms are for men and which are for women, or asking you not to litter.
There must be something in the Olympic charter that stipulates that only the athletes are permitted to attempt excellence, and Rico has nicely captured the spirit of graphic mediocrity that we've all come to expect of the IOC.
Meanwhile, part of hosting the Olympics, or the World Cup, is a combination of repairing the eyesores in your infrastructure and hiding your living eyesores, and, yes, London picked a lousy time to roll out a whole new set of thugs.
And I don't think I'm just being an old man in not really wanting to hear explanations. Every riot is, by nature, destructive, and every destructive riot has an element of looting and thuggery around the edges. But, in the olden days, the rioting was a spontaneous over-reaction that got out of control.
That was then; this is now.
Fifteen years after the Mai/Juin riots of 1968, there was an anniversary wrap up, and they asked former student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit what had caused Paris to explode? He explained that they wanted to march arm-in-arm down the streets drinking wine and kissing pretty girls and the police tried to stop them.
On the one hand, it's a bit of a wiseass answer, on the other, it's a brilliant piece of analysis, because there really would have been far less trouble in that era if the powers-that-be had simply relaxed and let people drink wine (or smoke grass) and kiss and have a few chants.
And stopped sending them off to war, but that wasn't happening to French kids. Algeria had been over for several years and they'd been out of Vietnam longer than that.
They were blowing off steam and there is a celebratory element to rioting. But that sort of riot, whether it is rioting for social change or rioting to celebrate a sports victory, is a case of something getting out of hand. Today, these events seem to begin at "out of hand" and degenerate from there, and they've taken on an element of anarchy that stems, I think, from those who see and imitate without knowing why.
As a result, the base level is now such that you need to add "ostensibly" to the reasons: "Ostensibly rioting for social change," "ostensibly celebrating a sports victory."
To go back to Danny the Red's explanation, it's one thing for two strangers to spontaneously kiss on the street, quite another for some jerk looking on to decide he can just start grabbing girls and slobbering all over them.
Those spontaneous students grew up and settled down years ago. The jerks remain. and it's not that the riots have no purpose. It's that they have no sense of joy, and no sense of it being a fling, a party we all know we're going to regret in the morning but that will produce some art and laughter until then.
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