The Riots We Deserve?

I was expecting disturbances this summer- what with the cuts and the bankers and all that shit- but I was expecting them to be more overtly political. I was expecting marches, with banners and slogans- and some anarchistic carryings-on at the fringes- as we had earlier this year. I wasn't expecting the kind of Mardi Gras of looting and arson we've just experienced.

Nobody was. I don't think there's ever been anything quite like it before. I guess we have modern social media to blame/thank for the way it spread like a rash from city to city.

The politicians- Theresa May going "criminals, criminal, criminality", Boris Johnson hefting his unused broom on the streets of Camden  like a majorette, Ed Milliband wonking on about bad parenting in Salford- seemed more than usually impotent and out of touch. None of them has been anywhere near a mean street in their lives- except to chat up the voters, of course. They haven't a clue. 

David Cameron told us some parts of our society were "sick"- to which one wanted to reply, "Yeah, the city, the banks, the police, the politicians, the red tops", but that would have been cheap- though no cheaper than the point it was answering.

A society gets the riots it deserves. A society that cares about abstract notions like Justice and Liberty gets political riots, it gets people making political demands (maybe while parading heads on pikes.) A society that cares for nothing but wealth and celebrity gets masked looters and the torching of Miss Selfridges.

Abandoned Words

I visited this site in the hope of getting my teeth into something chewy, but to be honest most of these abandoned words are ones only a pedant could love- things with Greek and Latin roots, conceived in the study and of little use out of it. Few of them will ever have had much of a life.  Still, the site itself is fun. I like the way the poor little things clamour for our attention. 

The Country Of The Blind And Other Stories: H.G. Wells

"The Country of the Blind" is Wells's best short story- a beautifully balanced fable about the individual and society.  The rest  are a liquorice all-sorts of Wellsian themes: there are comic sketches, horror stories, a ghost story, SF stories, social satires- and one very odd little story, "The Valley of the Spiders", which could almost have been written by Borges. The second-best story is "The Door in the Wall", which- simple and relatively undeveloped as it is- goes to the heart of what it was that made Wells tick. Had Wells visited that enchanted garden himself? Probably not, but he knew it was there- and that knowledge drove everything he did in art as in life.