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Minneapolis last night. Not all demonstrations are the same, and not all become riots.
What is happening in America this week has been simmering toward an open boil for years, and is not only about race, or police brutality, or inequality, or poverty, or unemployment, or the pandemic or despair. It is about all those things.
Nor is it 1968 all over again. I was there in 1968, and this is not the same. The sickness we had in our guts that year, the rage that combusted big chunks of our cities, arose in part from having lost three of our most revered leaders in a few years. Imagine if that had happened to Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Octasio-Cortez. Thank God that element is not here today.
There are other differences. The confrontations between demonstrators and police in 1968 were almost invariably between an all-black crowd and an all-white police line. Today the demonstrators often include large numbers of white people. (We’ve integrated our riots! Shouldn’t we get some credit for that?) Back then the police usually stood shoulder to shoulder with helmets, shields and batons. Today they may arrive in armored Humvees, brandishing automatic weapons.
Not all demonstrations become riots, or include looting. It often depends on how they are dealt with by authorities. Mobs have characteristics that cannot be easily read unless you are on the ground with them. I know that because as a journalist I have been there fairly often.
During a three-day “riot” in Hamilton, Bermuda years ago, the mob occupied Government House and its expansive, walled grounds. The police were being quite passive, and that evening things quieted down, with the mob bedded down inside the walls and the police watching them from a distance. The mood of the crowd was easy going and friendly, and I wanted to capture that. So I went to one of the wrought-iron gates, stuck my camera through a space and lit up my Sun Gun. There was immediate bedlam, as people who had been lying about leaped to their feet, shook their fists at the camera and roared demands. When I turned the Sun Gun off, they went back to their repose. A lesson I cannot forget.
I have been tear-gassed, arrested for being in a riot while bearded (discrimination has many forms, you know), briefly kidnapped by rioters, and on one occasion, threatened by the riot police I was among because I had described them on the air as “nervously” preparing to advance. “WE ARE NOT NERVOUS,” they screamed at me, clashing their batons on their shields. Who knew they were listening to the radio?
Even with experience, you can’t get much of a feel for the nature of a mob you see on TV, because of the Sun Gun effect I just described, and because a crowd might spend a whole day relaxed and in a good mood, but if that evening somebody torches a car or a building, that’s all the coverage you’re going to see of that event.
Except that, with cable-TV networks covering things wall-to-wall, you get to see a little more. Watching from my perspective, what I have seen as much as anything in recent days, are police riots. The trigger for all this — not the cause, the trigger — was a casual, on-camera murder committed by a police officer. In the past few days we have seen police fire paint-gun rounds at people standing on their own porches (Minneapolis): fire rubber bullets and tear gas canisters at demonstrators who were kneeling to show their peaceful intentions (Dallas); and drive their cruisers straight into a crowd (Brooklyn). Not to mention arresting a black CNN correspondent while he was on the air and while a white CNN correspondent a few feet away was left alone.
What the events of 1968 and today have in common is this: they were, and are, expressions of rage by people who have been pushed too far down for too long and are not going to take it anymore. Moralize all you want about breaking traffic laws and stealing TVs, when large numbers of people get this angry about this many things, attention must be paid. Something real had better get done.
And I don’t mean read the riot act.
Well Max-424, you were right when you confirmed my suspicion that perhaps it’s time for me to stop reading John Michael Greer’s blog. Not only is the comment section increasingly sounding like a QAnon message-board when it comes to the pandemic, but also Greer posited this week in the comments to his open post that the unrest is “canned riots” being orchestrated by the Democratic Party and George Soros to lose the election for Greer’s new hero President Trump. I left a comment telling him he has lost his mind and I’m done with him. Let’s see if he puts it through. (I posted as “Mr. Nobody” over there.)
They’re all coming out of the closet now. James Howard Kuntsler’s latest offering was nothing more than “Burn those Evil Witches My Beloved President!”
Paul Craig Robert is most interesting case among these -three name- types, I think. For instance, he “knows to a certainty” that 9/11 was inside job. Consider for a moment, a long moment, how such knowledge should warp your political viewpoint for all time.
Warp it all to high hell.
But even with this knowledge Robert’s has kept the faith, time and again waxing nostalgic for the old status quo, believing it was still out there despite this knowledge (what?), and so he always kept that door slightly ajar, left just enough space for the White Knight Trump to come bursting thru; to save our America from itself, to return the country to its former glory.
The reachable right, that’s what PCR represented to me, but Roberts is gone. I can’t read him any more. He’s just another white man like Kuntsler and Greer who hates … warning: code words coming … the other, and nothing, literally nothing else on this earth, in times like these, matters in the slightest compared to that.
Yep, and Dmitry Orlov just plain old needs to be put on some kind of medication. Chris Martenson seems to be the only one of the old “Boomer-doomer” voices who hasn’t gone full fash, even though he has always come off as something like an Eisenhower-era Republican. Even if he seriously disappointed me and joined the Psych-Ward Brigade, I would probably still grudgingly respect him as a source of information.
Yup, Orlov is a proud Russian patriot now (or is it, again?), and openly worships his version of the White Night, Vlady Putin.
Oh well, good for you Dimtry, I guess it’s, see ya later!
It there a pattern here? Is Jimmy Dore right, that all racist reactionaries, no matter where they hail from, require a Daddy figure, otherwise they can’t get out of bed in the morning?
Martenson interviewed Matt Taibbi recently. What I found fascinating, is that Taibbi seemed uncomfortable throughout, because Martenson was ripping out these crazy radical ideas that were way to the left of where Taibbi was willing to go.
Green Party platform stuff, basically (or center-center, if you’re in Germany).
I could be wrong, but I believe Martenson may be one of those rare individuals capable of making “intellectual adjustments” after they’ve reached a certain age. Worth a watch, if you have time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=13&v=AR2agQZPaZ4&feature=emb_logo
Well, perhaps because it’s a very unpopular opinion, I do give Pooty-Wooty-Fresh-And-Fruity some credit for arresting Russia’s very steep and pronounced demographic and economic decline that was taking place under the misleadership of Boris Yeltsin, with the eager assistance of Bill Clinton’s US corporate state. That said, there’s a lot about Putin’s reign that makes me glad I don’t live in Russia.
I stopped reading Greer’s comment section shortly after he switched to the new site, and sometime last year I gave up on the site altogether. I used to be a regular reader (and occasional commenter) on the old ADR site, but – like JHK and Orlov before him – his politics became increasingly offensive and his general discussion weirder.
Not enough time left to waste on that stuff.
We should appreciate the Boomer men who didn’t turn into raving reactionaries in their later years, because their numbers are precious few.
And because I don’t want to just post a comment to slag on somebody else on the Internet, I will add that I appreciate Umair Haque’s take on what’s happening in these troubled times.
I think he’s saying that America’s prosperity ended once debt began to outpace income. What a surprise!
Well, perhaps not the same, but remarkably similar in many respects: thousands of young protesters clashing with cops – cops with little or no experience with this level of crowd control – and a fair amount of mayhem on both sides. Not since the civil rights and Viet Nam protests of the 60s’ and 70s’ have Americans experienced this type of uproar, at least not on this scale. And the crowds, then as now (with the exception of the MLK, Watts riots and the like) seemed rather well integrated…sorry, but is was my experience.
There is, on the other hand, one major difference. Back then we protested because we believed we could bring about change, that there was a future worth fighting for, and not just in the ‘rice paddies and jungles’ of Southeast Asia, but right here in the US of A – at the time, a most American of presumptions! And often we were successful, at least in part.
The Millennials, however, harbor no such hippiesque, pie-in-the-sky sentiments. Brought up with Barney, Pinky and the Brain, and planes flying into buildings on TV, sudden impoverishment at home caused by the 2007-08 financial melt-down, and maturing into a society presided over by a sociopathic carnival clown, their collective consciousness is one of resigned nihilism. Awakened from their smartphone subcultural half-slumber by recent events, they protest out of raw instinctual rage, but expect little substantive change. They’ve known the score for quite some time now.
My daughter is planning her escape. She forbids me from revealing her destination. But she’ll need to leave soon. News just came over the web that the freeway exits to downtown have been closed by the National Guard…We live downtown.
Personal violence is, as our leader would say, very bad. But with Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon on the prowl, I cannot get upset with some youngster pilfering a $300 TV from the Best Buy.
The rioting, whether planned or spontaneous, is merely a distraction from the real problem — the collapse of the global economy. That, my friends is not an accident. The goal: a significant reduction of more or less useless eaters. The current rioting as a knee jerk reaction to police brutality is only a prelude to what will take place when the mobs have nothing to eat for a few days.
The bankers must be well pleased with the progress to date.
Finally a sane comment. Someone who realizes what’s really going on.
I cannot believe there are still people wasting time spouting views on left or right wing politics. There is no left or right wing,just people who have been brainwashed. There no difference between Obama and Trump. Did anything change significantly under Obama? Financial manipulation for gain is the only game in being played.
Although I recognize that rioting and looting (after peaceful demonstrations and best intentions go sideways) are not constructive responses to social ills, I have a hard time deploring the inevitable madness of crowds, which according to the author takes a variety of forms. Considering that meaningful petition to government for accountability and redress of corruption, racism, looting of the U.S. Treasury, etc. have been pretty effectively stuffed down (and necessary reforms never happen), there has to be an escape valve for all the pent-up frustrations. No doubt there are apolitical opportunists grabbing whatever they can lay hands on as store windows are smashed and inventories made, um, available. Those are actually pretty small potatoes compared to the institutionalized money and power grabs we’re now witnessing by the “elites” (gawd I hate that term). The same is true when comparing police cars and city blocks burned versus the lives of people — tens of millions — destroyed through unemployment, austerity, incarceration, and exploitation. That list of ills could go on and on. In a way, the inaction of governments at all levels to truly protect the public and serve the common good has led directly to public outrage and acting out. Why did it take so long?
Regarding losing faith in authors such as Greer and Orlov, their tone-deafness and self-aggrandizement more than a decade ago kept me from giving them my attention despite the value of their writing. Too easy to look elsewhere for better models, such as Dore and Hedges.
I’d add Richard Heinberg to that list of reliable sources.
I always thought the Orlov, Kunstler and Greer were slightly unhinged. I much prefer our host here at The Daily Impact, Dave Pollard, Undenial, X Ray Mike and James at Mega Cancer.
Thanks for your no nonsense, commonsense commentary, Good Sir!
Online analyst Gail Tverberg just posted an article offering the suggestion that “Increased Violence Reflects an Energy Problem.”
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2020/06/03/increased-violence-reflects-an-energy-problem/
It’s a sad world we live in.
Yes, especially ever since 2016. And I don’t just mean Trump. The “tone” of everything just went sour that year, and it very unsurprisingly hasn’t been getting any better at all.
Couple of points. First I agree with assessment of the favored authors. Didn’t know about Greer though, thanks for the heads-up. I too like the ADR. Kunstler is on the “Russiagate is a multi-tentacled conspiracy to oust Trump” and beats the drum for due justice to the perpetrators. That may be true, but really? Ya think that is actually going to happen when everyone seems to have dirt on everyone. Steve Miller should rewrite his tune to “Swamp Town”.
A suggested structural change that would go long and deep in the U.S. is to adjust the means of school funding. The current means of school funding is directly representative of the inequality thereby engendering the continued dysfunction. Until this changes, I’m afraid all the police reforms in the world won’t amount to much. Just window dressing.
In Canada and most of the other wealthy nations schools are funded by the Provincial/State government and the Federal government. Provincial fund K-12 and Federal fund post-secondary. The income taxes are apportioned across ALL schools evenly. Therefore the quality of education is universal. If there is a poor school it usually due to the administration as opposed to the zip code.
Same for health care BTW. Just sayin’…
Until that change happens I’m afraid there is not much hope.