an essay: why aren't we rioting?

Why Aren’t We Rioting?

London is burning. As are Manchester, Birmingham, and exurbs of London. It may very well go the course of Brighton, Durham, Leicester, Surrey, and Leeds on the next go; I should not be at all surprised if riot activity took hold in every larger city in the UK. This comes on the heels of protests and riots in Tunisia and Egypt, amidst continued strife and disarray in Libya and Syria. These August riots are happening within months of student protests voicing anger at a Tory coalition in the UK that reduced programs, cut funding, and demanded outrageous tuition increases from students while the Crown squandered a good bit more than a halfpenny to pay for a Royal Wedding, only months after an angered Wisconsin electorate took to Madison and occupied the capitol, demanding that Scott Walker not sign into law a piece of legislation completely damning labor unions, undermining benefits, and blaming low-level government employees for budgetary losses. This same week (week beginning 8 August 2011) – and getting virtually no coverage from any mainstream media outlet – over 40,000 unionized employees of Verizon Wireless are striking, on picket lines, demanding that the company not reduce entitlements and salary, demanding that working conditions do not degrade. In this case, at least, this is a cosmic and perturbing reversal of what union organization attempted in the 1920s and 1930s: namely, to improve conditions and salaries, to receive benefits and a less-destructive workload.

So, why aren’t we rioting? Ultra-right factions and corporations – without any shame or otherwise any sort of occlusion or obfuscation – are blatantly blaming middle-class workers for the debt ceiling fiasco, for the massive American deficit, for the massive state and federal budget shortfalls. The governments, according to the oligarchies and their lobbyists-cum-politicians (or, vice versa), are spending too much money paying teachers, road workers, and the like, even in states like Alabama and Mississippi where teacher pay is among the absolute worst in the nation. The governments, they say, are spending too much money on dangerous entitlements like Head Start and Planned Parenthood. Medicare and Medicaid – while indeed needing administrative overhauls – become the whipping posts for radical Rightness, and social spending is in jeopardy of disappearing or being so severely limited as to becoming laughable, all while the top few per cent of Americans wield an exorbitantly high amount of wealth, all while these same said wealthy individuals are being taxed the least (in terms of effective tax rates) they have ever been since the 1950s. Corporations routinely find loopholes in the tax code to evade paying very much, if at all; and those who do pay, typically the largest corporations, find ways to get large rebates. Warren Buffet’s secretary pays a higher effective tax rate than Warren Buffet, and even Buffet has remarked that this is terrible policy. There is a cadre of wealthy individuals who are gathering steam to ask Congress to allow the Bush-era cuts to expire earlier than 2012 since, and rightly so, they point out that wealthy individuals and corporations are more likely to hold on to their money rather than venture into investment territory (and here I mean “creating jobs,” as the GOP bromide seems to go), and in fact when the government holds more capital they are more likely to push it back into the hands of individuals in terms of middle-class tax breaks, low-income-earner entitlements, grants and endowments, research spending, and the like. We do not have to go further back than 1996 when the US Government held a budget surplus, and until late 2000, unemployment continued to decline. We are witnessing now, in 2011, an erosion of wealth and security among average citizens unlike any we have seen since the Great Depression; we are striking and organizing not to plead for better conditions, but to demand and largely beg that they do not become worse. We are watching a GOP with hands in the pockets of powerful individuals and companies fight to cut entitlement spending, keep defense spending preserved (if anyone believes that the “Super Congress” that includes Boehner and McConnell won’t say a trigger has been tripped to scrap the 2 August debt ceiling bill, I have beach-front property in Kansas to sell them), rewrite tax codes to continue to ease up on the wealthy; we are watching a nearly-complicit Democratic party sit on their hands aside from occasional (carnival) barking and shame-heaving on an invisible, invented manifestation of popular anger through the Tea Party, a tiny contingent of old, white, rich (or so they believe, but not in comparison to Soros, Buffet, or the Kochs) people afraid of losing what they have through a black president that is largely a media-darling and empty, chimerical front for misplaced, inarticulate “popular” anger. There’s also the wonderfully radical-like-it’s-1967 Bernie Sanders who continues to spout something verging on common sense, but is ignored because he calls himself a “socialist” – about as socialist as Arkansas’s Governor Clinton was.

On some basic level, we know all this. We know about the haves and the have-nots (but no one would identify, out of fear of stigma, as being a have-not). We know about the largesse of the wealthy in this country (but we typically observe the wealthy as people who “deserve” their wealth); we know about the financial obligations politicians have (but no one likes taxes). We know about the inability of the popularly-elected government to heed the call of the least of the society’s citizens. There is an undercurrent, a pulsation, especially from working individuals in the lower socioeconomic tiers (myself included), of anger, of displeasure, of a total lack of compassion for those at the top who lose millions in the volatility of the stock market yet cannot or will not give out a 20 or 30 cent per hour raise. There is a growing, mild, popular revulsion toward lawmakers who do not try very hard to hide their wealth or their proclivities to help those who are wealthy.

So, why aren’t we rioting?

The signs should be fairly prevalent as to why we should be.

In Europe, during the vast majority of the 20^th Century, cuts – drastic, austere ones – in social spending, cuts to educational programs, and a failure to rein in large business and wealth-individual revenue has indeed led to greater amounts of rioting, assassinations, and general chaos. [1] Protests are actually fewer and typically rarer during times of austerity, but those organizations that occur are far more powerful, far more structured, and far more fruitful. One need not look any further than Egypt this past Spring: a well-educated populace aged 35 or younger, with a 30% or greater unemployment rate, once convened, overthrew its authoritarian regime (yet the aftermath begat is still turbulent and chaotic, with residual protests and organizational entropy in the “what next” category). Here in the United States, we are facing massive cuts through the debt ceiling “deal,” and many states have slashed (or eliminated) funding for health and human services, education, and infrastructure in order to “save money” and close budget gaps. [2] In North Carolina, for instance, scores of educational and mental health service programs have been ended, with many struggling to seek outside donations; notwithstanding, thousands of teachers, teachers’ aides, health and mental health professionals, and administrators will receive or have received pink slips. In turn, service industries from restaurants to movie theaters to (ironically) state-run recreational facilities will bear the brunt of this sudden loss of lucre from those inclined to spend it, lessening revenue generation from companies and small businesses, lessening the effective tax intake for the state, county, and/or municipality, damning the system to repeat in a gentle, then sudden, downward spiral. Using this guiding principle, state governments will continue to trim spending (provided the same congresses remain in power) and state-sanctioned positions will continue to be lost until a null-point is reached: either a barebones workforce will remain in place, or revolt will come. Joblessness has to increase ever greatly.

Joblessness and loss of income is not exactly new, however. As of June 2011, there exists a 4.5 to 1 ration of job-seeker to vacant position; that is, for 3.5 workers out of the above 4.5, there are simply no jobs, no positions, no occupations. While this is down considerably from the June 2009 high of 7 to 1, this is still incredibly high, considering that during the “slump” period of 2006, there was a ratio of almost 1.6 to 1. [3] Growth will slow considerably under the debt ceiling deal – such as it was, with LEIs struggling to reach pre-recession levels, job creation a paltry 40 to 50 per cent of “necessary” (according to the CBO and DOL) at maximum, and a wildly volatile stock market – which will lead to slower job creation, if not a reversal and shedding of available jobs. [4] It is especially important to note that there has been at least a 4 to 1 ratio of seeker to vacancy since December 2008. I should know: I have been one of those people on and off (or otherwise counted in the U-6 index of underemployed/underutilized individuals) since May 2010.

The pinnacle of this melting iceberg comes in the harks and screams of economists – one after the other, it seems – who decry austerity, decry a refusal to raise taxes on wealth-holders, decry a refusal to revamp tax codes to hold onto more money, who decry attacks on government intervention. Political leaders are not listening to them; average citizens and people rallying to have smaller, less-invasive government are either ignoring or dismissing the ideas. Daron Acemoglu, an economics professor at MIT, advocates a number of steps to use innovation across fields as a means to invoke steady economic growth in the United States; whether there is a growth ceiling is uncertain, but Acemoglu (and he is one of many; I use his examples as they are clear and broad-reaching) challenges the need, real or perceived, for austerity, challenges the reduction in political and social spending, challenges the culture of wealth that draws talent away from science, humanities, and arts into a Wall Street world, challenges the glut of new technologies and advocates forcing private enterprise to compete for innovation financially as it arises from universities and other governmentally-sponsored entities. [5] He is not alone in these calls: Geithner, Goolsby, Krugman, Reich, et al, have echoed or promulgated these sentiments and directives, and neither private corporate industry nor Government itself has heeded these calls.

We should be on the streets banging pots and pans, crippling our employers, stopping the flow of goods and services, stopping the flow of cash into corporate and Governmental hands until saner solutions are taken – saner than quitting programs that teach 4-year-olds to read, saner than ending the flagship academic program for gifted students, saner than dismantling a decades-old, wildly-successful teacher-training fund. The world as it is seems on a course to get far worse before it gets better; all evidence of the praxis of austerity measures points to creating societies with high unemployment and abysmal wages. Yet, we’re not taking to the streets. We’re not tearing the world asunder. We’re not standing back and watching the world burn because we set fire to it: we’re watching gasoline being poured all over everything.

So, why aren’t we rioting? Why aren’t we invoking Paris in 1968? How come K Street doesn’t look like Brixton right now?

Zygmunt Bauman posits that the London riots are neither “bread riots” nor of “hunger,” but of what he calls “defective and disqualified consumers.” [6] Bauman outlines – distantly – the common conceptualization of the haves and have-nots, and touches on the unspoken dimension in late capitalist societies: shopping is the panacea, and acquisition of material leads to the illusory fullness of life. Bauman likens human dignity as a thing bound up with the ability to spend money and collect possessions. This is a classic trope, and Bauman does not fully flesh out fuller abjection of being unable to live in the consumerist dignity. Unspoken in Bauman’s piece is the loss of agency in participating in the bread-and-circus realm of conspicuous consumption, detailed only slightly by a description of barriers keeping the have-nots out of the temples of capitalism, and I contend that while these may not necessarily be bread riots, per se, the looting and destruction of the semiotic markers of modernity (plasma TVs, DVD players, items which themselves construct ephemeral and unreal images, themselves a self-contained system of signs to egg on the desire for consumption) becomes an elevated and detached symbol for sustenance: those who live without the ability to fully participate in the sign systems and human-dignity-as-spending symbolically destroy the symbolic order, the mediation mechanism that consistently reminds (and challenges) this generation that they do not have “everything” and in fact have less than nothing. A TV is not, of course, edible: but it does represent the ideal fullness, the hunger for more, the thirst for power and agency.

On Alternet, Bruce Levine posted eight additional reasons (though debatable) why Americans – especially youths – seem impassive to resistance and action. [7] They are, in no particular order: student loan debt; medicating people into quiescence; Kozol/Foucault in re: docile bodies and compliance; NCLB/ESEA II and Race to the Top; the class-based stigma of education level; normalization of surveillance; television (which seems like an easy, if not outdated, target); Religion/Consumerism. Much of the article is fairly one-dimensional and discursive, especially the attempts to condense decades of theory into one paragraph about Kozol’s “inert concern” and Foucault’s docile bodies, and the inclusion of student loan debt seems to preclude all other sorts of debt a young person may have – and on its own, it is not a fortifiable rationale for failing to act in visual, verbal political means. Nonetheless, Levine lucidly puts forward the middle-class, bourgeois (if not invisible) bias against “uneducated” people: they feel disenfranchised because they do not have the wherewithal and book-smarts to lead revolutions or be outspoken critics. While there be truth here, plenty of “educated” folks do not go out and instigate radical change, either, whether because of liberal guilt (“I cannot speak for those less fortunate or privileged than I,” “I don’t know what to do with my privilege,” etc) or because of other factors. Levine also makes an odd pairing of ESEA-II/NCLB/Race to the Top AND every other (largely failed) large-scale social control mechanism in the form of The War on Drugs, the Patriot Act, and others – while I understand the rhetorical flourish in the Machiavellian fear-instillation procedures, the erosion of critical inquiry and independent thought as a means to counteract convention and attain satisfactory answers to “why” and “why not” would have been plenty. Even so, and surveillance culture (cf Michael Parenti’s The Soft Cage) as a touchstone, narco-control and the idea of erasure of civil liberties are plenty enough even in the abstract to cow an individual so terrified of being on the wrong side of the law that, vaguely, should he speak out against Congress or the President, he could be held for up to 72 hours for no reason and potentially seen as an enemy combatant. Ignorance is bliss – bliss if you are a system you desire to be free of fettering from disgruntled citizenry.

Claire Potter, a history professor at Wesleyan, touches upon the ideals of meritocracy within the schooling system and uncovers a little bit of the meritocratic myth while pointedly, if only briefly, reminding us that despite our objections to the contrary the American psyche is fraught with violence. [8] We imagine ourselves as a peaceful people, Potter writes, yet we tacitly support structures that perpetuate forms and systems of violence that, through our silent complicity, we legitimize and even form political doctrine around. We are not a violent people individually, but rather structurally – but since we cannot imagine ourselves as violent or physically acting against the polite will of the State except for dark and terrible fantasy, we cannot be an activist population either, since this connotes a form of violence we are loathe to act out. Potter casts her argument, however, from a place of intellectual power as a career academic and professor, and maintains much of her argument centering on the reduction and mocking of the humanities and arts in higher education. While she is spot on in these analyses, and while she does invoke the necessity of the masses to perhaps momentarily throw off the shackles of Hobbes (‘he that in his actions oberveth the laws of his country’), she gives no further analysis or description as to why we are no longer an activist society in the United States other than a paltry anecdote concerning the commoditization of activism: while throwing money at problems has indeed sated and made lazy those segments of the populace inclined to rustle up political dust, it does not cover the whole of the issue.

I would like to contribute a few more reasons why the American populace seems content – or otherwise apathetic – to remain aloof, despite growing calls of outrage and controlled anger across social media and in conversation. [9] We may not be fiddling as Washington and by proxy the nation burns, but we seem torn between the distraction(s) in-hand and the growing, orange glow of danger just over our shoulder.

1. The Meritocracy Is So Damn Tantalizing

While Potter and Levine discuss the concept of subjugation by the illusion of the Protestant work ethic – toil hard, study hard, and you shall earn your rewards – but what is left out is a subtle ideal of helplessness and subjection to a restrictive system of “positive” reinforcement, and a fear of failure that becomes engrained in our young people – and remains, as psychological and pedagogical scars, within older people.

Activism and vocal protest are vehicles that convey some sort of anger, some sort of feeling that typically runs counter to prevailing systems of behavior and conduct. I am one of a large generation of children who came about when grades for conduct were handed out, and as an extension of perceived success, negative marks on my conduct record were tantamount to failing an exam or doing poorly on homework. Purchase embarrassment and shame would follow as I would be haunted by my reputation. This patterning of behavior remains with certain individuals – typically those who are smart but not naturally leaders – and for all the attempts to teach “leadership” skills to children, leadership occasionally takes on the sheen and the role of the rule breaker: loud talking, defiance, acting upon conscience. These are patterned codes of behavior that exceed Levine’s watered-down reading of Kozol and Foucault; these codifications of compliance with authority exceed, even, Foucault’s theory of docile bodies: these ideals punch the docile bodies by removing any agency that may be left in terms of self-expression or the ability to comment on wrongdoing or ethical dilemmas out of fear of chimerical grade-based control. Not only must one be silent and non-disruptive, but one must also be participatory and actively, visibly, do good for someone else; remonstration of anger or displeasure of any sort – the last vestiges of selfhood, even when directed at oneself (I would grunt or growl at myself if I got a question wrong, or was bored in class – which was often – and would typically get conduct points deducted for such behavior) – are not allowed. The self is not just an elastic good to be stretched for compliance in the system: the self is snapped so there is no more resistance. College students balk at participating in social and political causes due to absentee policies and missing work and missing opportunities to make grades to further their educational activities; high school students confront the prospect of the “permanent record” (which is sealed at age 18 or graduation and does not, in fact, either exist or follow them to college) and the same absentee policy and the same lacuna of work. But to run parallel with a criminal element, even for the most rebellious youth, brings a shamefulness if they have been fully coaxed by the system.

Moreover, for those students – and, later, workers – caught up in the mythology of hard-work-equals-success, the real possibility of failure from democratic organization is a deterrent. Not all social movements have generated the results they desired: the first abolitionists had to wait until the Emancipation Proclamation to revel in their ideological victory some two generations later – and, perhaps, wait still until 1963 and 1965 for the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act to pass. Suffragists had to wait almost a full four generations before the 19^th Amendment was ratified, and sticklers of history will note that – at least with North Carolina signing off on it as a technicality in 1971 – not everyone was on board. These political, social movements, while garnering capital and acolytes along the way, initially failed, and indeed repeatedly failed. The movement for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment – if indeed it is a movement not moribund – is entering its fifth decade. Failure in some form or fashion is inevitable with a social movement, be it a failure to communicate the message through a rally or protest or a failure to pass legislation. As with any failure, there is room for improvement and recovery and resetting – cliché, perhaps, but one must learn from the failure in order to prepare for the next round. Schoolchildren and employees, especially those in the Helping professions and in service industries, are pummeled into believing that failure is not, is never, an option. This surrounds us in professional sports (didn’t catch the ball? Out!), in politics (human foible surfaces? Out!), on TV (didn’t get the right answer on Final Jeopardy? Out!), and virtually everywhere. Granted, I don’t want my brain surgeon to fail when he’s operating on me – but I want him to fail repeatedly in med school. We enter into a consciousness of total fatalism as it pertains to failure: to make even one mistake is to be worthless, to shed all propriety of worth of the duty or message. Failure is unpalatable. Failure is not wanted. But not every march on the State Capitol results in the governor abandoning an unjust bill: and we, as a populace, have been very well conditioned to avoid failure, of any sort, at any cost – even, paradoxically, if it means the failure of the democratic system we are charged with keeping in line.

2. Prolonged Adolescence in Gen-Y and Millennial Groups

A societal shift has occurred, and continues to metamorphose: as young people progress through college and through their 20s, they stave off making larger, customary, traditional life decisions that their parents and grandparents made by the time they were 30: career choice, marriage, children, property ownership, and the like. The urgency to “grow up” has been scaled back, for myriad reasons, and discussion of this shift is outside the scope of this discussion. Needless to say this slowing of adulthood’s pace has created a form of dissonance of duty, a generated momentary incompatibility between lives lived in late adolescence and early adulthood. This delay in coming of age creates a dualism of minor entitlement and minor (or major) dependency upon temporary structures: children complete high school and are told it is a high honor – but the reward cannot merely be intrinsic. Completion of college and graduate school are not intrinsic end-goals as there must be something beyond. Economic woes aside, young people are having a more and more difficult time holding on to the necessity of their studies and securing and solidifying their desires in adulthood. This could be a momentary questioning of the meritocracy the person has come of age into; this could be that plus a larger crisis of identity, an epistemological break as the transition continues. Persons wish to remain somewhat free of real responsibilities as long as possible yet yearn for the independence apparently granted by participating in the larger social system they have inherited. This is not just a class-based phenomenon, and as a rule may not always apply to persons aged 21 to 26: what it does is momentarily cripple the person into temporary solipsism as they look to parents, friend, family members, and other support systems as a means to clarify identity – there is no time, in the short lens, to be concerned with (longer-range) societal problems.

3. The Criminal Justice Complex and the Dialectic of Patriotism

These concepts of loss of contact with civic duty and responsibility and a fealty to the meritocratic method of living feed into two seemingly distinct yet intertwined facets of speech in the United States: the criminal justice complex, and a dialectic of patriotism – albeit a skewed one. The push and drive of paradoxically succeeding through grades and hard work while being a complicit and compliant docile body is by design a prevention from landing in jail: we hear the argument, perpetually made by white writers for “urban” television characters in a thoroughgoing paternalistic manner, to pull oneself out of the muck by the bootstraps, to stay in school and stay out of trouble, to get an education and get out of the “hood.” This ideation of scaring a person straight to prevent criminal activity – to become a supplicant to the controlling environment of a school in order to quell rebelliousness and curiosity – is in turn fed by, and reinforced by, a criminalization of any behavior not sanctioned by the Institution. This abstraction of criminalization becomes engrained and fetishized in order to, as Foucault serenely puts it, defend society. Against what?

George W Bush famously uttered the words, as it pertained to finding those responsible for 9/11, “you’re either with us, or against us.” At no other time in recent memory has such a diaphanous dichotomy – false entirely – been spouted. Zinn and Chomsky write plenty about this, but suffice it to say that the ideal of being against is something no normalized human wants to do within society; but in this very dichotomy, the essence of democracy is incalculably lost. The opposition, the dissent, disappears because it is now, essentially, criminalized. One must stand for country and follow blindly or open-eyed into war; to say otherwise is to be outcast, ostracized, to be in a manner of speaking stateless, and this generates a devastating dialectical tension. One is for or with us, whoever this phantom us is (not abbreviating the United States!); or, one is against or not for us, not with us. We are left with an agonizing choice of what the outcome could be – and disregarding elementary Hegelian structures for the moment, it becomes a choice between a perceptual criminalness and a perceptual goodness: who dares go on the defensive to explain why they are against the agency of society as a whole? Who dares maintain that a democracy cannot be folded into one methodology or praxis of thought? Who dares countermand the call of Patriotic Duty, whatever form that may take, without running the risk of being a citizen without a country? Stateless citizens are not tolerated, and persons not abiding our State are not allowed: undocumented workers and Palestinians can attest to such things, as can colonial subjects in adopted imperial fatherlands. These are criminals, or treated as criminals, or personae non gratae. They are imprisoned. They are sidetracked from achieving meritocratic goals. They follow – and are followed by – reputation and memory. Should we vocalize dissent, we are imprisoned in an architectural, spatial incarceration of metaphor; we lose social capital; we lose cultural capital through exclusion; we become alienated until we make obeisance to the social order, establish a new social order, or lash out against the dominant power. Lashing out perpetuates the cycle and denudes us of even more of the societal protections that complicity with the dominant order affords us. This is no different from a convicted felon being afforded no exculpation or assistance from the society to which he or she has paid a debt, and in desperation or because of the necessity to live within the social order must resort back to what initially created a felon out of that person.

4. Induction of Anger or Outrage over the Wrong Things

There has been a stronger inclination (especially post-9/11) for social movements – planned and ad hoc, sensible and senseless – to generate around what I call Phantom Actors.

A phantom actor is not a straw man and not symbolic for a larger issue, but a cause or ideal that a segment of society perceives as running counter to the shared, if liquid and heterogeneous, goals of society that needs to be targeted, illuminated, and eliminated, in order to preserve a society and protect it from invented, arbitrary wrongs. In short, it is an invented enemy and a quick and easy target for the manifestation of displeasure that detracts from other, larger, more pressing societal issues. The phantom actor is also occasionally a sporadic recipient of an ephemeral chaos, such as in the case of the riots in Vancouver when the city’s hockey team failed to bring home the Stanley Cup on home ice. While begun by only a few citizens, the bystander effect and mob rule settled in, and in a uniquely postmodern, information-age way, digital video and photos were taken of smiling Vancouverites smashing windows or standing next to smashed windows, all in the name of voicing some voiceless and imagined rage about an event that while it touches some small part of the psyche is inevitably doomed to illusion as it does not significantly affect or dramatically alter any lives (except for those who were playing for Lord Stanely’s Cup), or, verily, significantly or radically alter the course of history. The phantom actor here is, of course, failure: the hockey team personifies this failure; debility and inability to confront the personification results in a confrontation between objects in space, and with the geographic space the representation or synecdoche of the phantom actor, storefronts, cars, rubbish bins, and the like suffer the consequences of this abjection of Buber.

A better example of this phantom actor scenario comes into play with a string of relatively recent “protests” – led by Anonymous – against Scientology. Granted, Scientology is a pernicious cult that abides by a P T Barnum bromide and a proverb attributed to Thomas Tusser, but no less so than any other organization that creates wild metrics of belief in order to imprison weak-willed and deep-pocketed individuals: Scientology happens to have a very thin veneer that is easily exploitable by rational persons. The key here is “easily exploitable,” and as such, easy to subvert and call into question. That is to say: it is an easy target and a cheap shot. In 2007 and 2008, there were numerous, small protests coordinated largely by college students to stand up against Scientology, and some students have admitted to organizing and demonstrating just for fun. In 2007 and 2008, the first signs of the Great Recession were underway: why not protest TARP or various Wall Street bailouts? Why not assemble and protest in front of offices of sub-prime lenders? 2007 and 2008 also featured relatively bloody upticks in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Where was the sanguine and righteous indignation that Bin Laden had not been found, that no WMD were ever found, yet American military personnel continued to die? Scientology, then, became a phantom actor – and the protests became a solution to a problem so societally small and negligible in terms of domestic and foreign policy, a call to action when other, much more long-range and pressing issues demanded political and societal outrage.

The best recent example would be the outcry in New York over the proposed Park 51 Islamic Center. Despite repetition from the Muslim community stating that there would be no “mosque,” and only a cultural center akin to the JCC on the Upper East Side, the proposal of this so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” drew the ire of many New Yorkers (some undoubtedly trucked in by FOX News), never mind the presence of Islamic centers and mosques scattered throughout lower Manhattan. The issue is already a Zeitgeist, with very few lingering protestors, despite Park 51’s plans to carry through the renovation of the space. This incidence of the phantom actor is a bit thorny, but still transparent. The proposed center became the straw man for anti-Islamic sentiment still harbored by a minority of New Yorkers yet traumatized by 9/11, but at the same time, Congress was wrestling with – and nearly killed off – a piece of legislation to pay money out to families of firefighters and emergency workers permanently disabled due to physical and psychological effects of working at Ground Zero on the day of the catastrophe and in the weeks and months afterward. Park 51 became the phantom actor for misplaced zeal and unresolved heartbreak from New Yorkers still searching for a scapegoat, still afraid of Islam: instead of picketing the Houses of Congress or Bloomberg’s office (or skyscrapers), citizens flocked to that which had the least bearing upon social and political outcomes for themselves and their fellow New Yorkers. The choice became: protest the White House to find Bin Laden; protest Congress for handwringing over the First Responders Bill; or protest a progressive cleric, his financial backers, and a proposed community center that happened to be Muslim.

5. Normalization of Decrying Earlier Populations who Took Part in Activism

The term “’60s Radical” has come – at least to my ears from those younger than I am – to symbolize the whole gamut of political activists and activism groups during the 1960s, and no longer just evoking the SLA or the militant wing of the Black Panthers or Abbie Hoffman’s Yippies or Edward Abbey’s later radical environmentalists. Similarly, we need not turn any further than South Park to see a popular revulsion against Hippies or people otherwise labeled “countercultural” with symbolic, paradigmatic markers and associations with 1960s culture writ large. “Hippie” has become a dirty word: it has re-entered the cultural lexicon as a pejorative epithet applied to modern-day children of entitlement and privilege; at its best, it is used to describe holdovers, anachronisms or residues subscribing to the evasive archetype of what a hippie may have been. “Anti-war” has come to be associated with draft-card-burning, sideburn sporting (and in 30 years, neoliberals with hedge funds) college students who “hate” their country. This language and empty duality of patriot/traitor has certainly existed longer than since the Vietnam era, but as such a defining moment in the history of recent dissent, the labeling of “draft-dodgers” and war protestors as unpatriotic – most clearly seen in the Nixonian rhetoric of the “Silent Majority” – became a method to subjugate dissent and normalize a code of behavior supportive of the aims of American foreign policy. This has historically become conflated with the dialectic of patriotism (above) as well as finding interpersonal resolution in an apparatus of Othering, but in an Othering of history: in the 1960s we find these diverse social movements, and since then no apparent analog because we are unable to imagine a new analog. The movements themselves have been ridiculed – by scholars and ordinary citizens – as idiosyncrasies, as an independent, unrepeatable moment, and, in the case of the Vietnam conflict, doomed to failure and fruitless as the shadow of the Other was cast upon those who balked at the War-Authority. The 1960s movements cannot happen again not just because we cannot imagine a new analog, but because they have been mythologized and shaped as monochromatic pushes to end injustices – injustices that in some form or another still exist – and as a sum-total shadow-self of polite, normal American society: indeed, the rebellious Other of ourselves we refuse to acknowledge.

6. People Can’t Afford to Organize or Are Otherwise Too Comfortable

There is a deceptive comfort in being solidly middle-class or bourgeois, and that comfort comes from the ability to have just enough time in one’s day to attend to everything else that does not pertain to an occupation or vocation. This slice of time diminishes by orders of magnitude when spouses and dependents are entered into the equation, and as time being the most precious commodity (in abstractum), it must be spent, one imagines and assumes, upon those things most central to a daily life. Organizing, rallying, picketing, and striking: these inexorably eat into the time-bank and are contraceptive to what is recognized as a “balanced,” middle-class life. Despite the amount of time put forward in the work environment, despite the amount of time dedicated to leisure, there is only “just enough” time in the day, or not enough, for bourgeois citizens to engage in all symbolic markers that solidify and reinforce their class and privilege. To-do-lists are impossibly long, our commitments to pushing our children through the meritocratic system too manifold, for us to be able to schedule or pencil in any time for civil retaliation or discourse of any kind. This is, of course, a fallacy, but one which we, as a comfortable society, refuse to acknowledge and comprehend.

This time phenomenon is also intricately woven with forms of architectural incarceration and geographic passivity in the forms of commuting, the use (or absence) of mass transit, and so on, as well as bound up with a fear of loss of borrowed time through the recrimination of speech by way of laws and by-laws that forbid such things as political activities “on the clock,” joining unions of any sort, and the doling-out of sick-days and vacation-days based on how many days in a row, how many hours in a row, one has sacrificed to the good of the larger system of employment.

Every American worker commutes, and the vast majority of workers commutes at least ten minutes, typically by automobile, from house to work. Quite often, work is not centered in the downtown or city center; work is rather situated on peripheries, on peripheries of peripheries, far separated from seats of governance and government, removed from the symbolic geographies of Power and Control. In order to voice concerns or assemble, one must travel, one must commute, expend additional resources (in addition to time-resources) on gasoline, parking, and so forth. For those who do have access to public transportation, there are very few citizens who hold regular employ who have access to perfectly free public transit, and then there is waiting, riding, disembarking, and so forth. These are paltry measures in cosmic scale, but for persons not equipped with long-term ideals, the inconveniences can be cumbersome and return back to feed upon the resource of time. Public transit in itself becomes a mild form of architectural and systemic incarceration since one is at the mercy of the timetables as well as the whim of financing and will of the workers responsible for the transit. Ironically, in places that do not have public transportation or have very poor public transit infrastructures in place, the absence of choice of transportation becomes its own incarcerating device. There is, of course, also the popular stigma of public transit (generated from real and imagined legacies of the American South and the working poor), a specter isolating the less well-adjusted from using the resource as a means to voice dissent in centralized places.

It goes without saying, of course, that wage-earners with families, or two-income families with manifold responsibilities that may also be wage-earners in the lower “castes” of industry and service can scarcely afford to miss work – routinely, in the case of prolonged social movements – in order to participate in visible outcries for change. Given the number of states with Right to Work legal policies, the populace has been terrorized into fearing the loss of their jobs for any insignificant reason, let alone skipping work in order to be a soldier of conscience. Sick Days and Vacation Days – if an earner does indeed have a position where such things accrue – must be scheduled in advance or proven necessary after the fact by medical, legal, or public safety personnel. The very possession of a job is itself a form of incarceration, replete with hierarchies and social mores that disallow interaction with conscience and demonstration, creating a subtler, more terrifying (because of a worker’s dependency upon it) docile body system. [9A]

So, why are we not rioting?

These conditions have a summed effect, and are greatly interdependent. While each relates back to some mechanism of social control and behavioral authoritarianism, each is its own subtle manifestation originating from a wide-ranging field, from the apparatus of dictated patriotism to the quelling of intellectualism and subversion of introspection and extroversion in schools to the policies and laws by which we live or are expected to comply with.

Certainly, many of these conditions, these criteria – mine and others – exist in England. The differences of educational systems are outside the scope of this essay, but the docile body is still present, if not prevalent, in grade schools in Dorchester and Kent. Surveillance culture practically originated in the UK – the borough of Wandsworth in London has thousands of CCTV cameras, almost one camera per three residents. The meritocratic ideal is still prevalent in England, if tempered by a socialized medicine system (in contrast to the American ideal of being healthy costs money, and more money is a result of hard work), yet stoked by incredibly prestigious institutions and severe competition for government funding across disciplines. There is still an Othering regarding patriotic duty and dissent in England, but nowhere near as normalized and rigid as the invisible system at work in the United States.

There is also an additional aspect to the riots in England presently: the legacy of colonialism and the dilution of communities of color within the UK. Summed up by a retort to a BBC Anchor, Darcus Howe remarked “have some respect for an old, West-Indian Negro” when asked if he was participating in the London riots and asked whether he had been a rioter before. The anchor: blonde, blue-eyed, and British. The rush to blame persons of color, encapsulated here, and the rush to accuse a criminal element has its legacy in paternalistic treatment of black émigrés to England from Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Jamaica, and other lands once dominated by The Crown: they were placed into occupations and realms reserved prior for “northerners” and lower-class, uneducated persons, creating at once a tension between the immigrants and the lower white classes, and securing a second-class citizenship through un-venial disaffection, despite aristocracy looking upon the tolerance of immigrants as a favor of sorts to escape the “hardships” of life on their native soils. Racism in England extends also to Indian and other Subcontinental immigrants and to the relatively recent influx of Muslims and Arabic-speaking persons into England, all quarantined and largely occupying spaces of service or helping professions, perpetuating colonial legacies.

Beyond race, however, lies the generational divide. While racial matters surely figure into being catalysts of the London (and other UK) riots, we must contend additionally with the fact that over a million youths aged 18-24 in England are unemployed – the largest amount since the mid-80s, and almost as high as the unemployment rate during the Great Depression. [10] Education, thanks to austerity measures, is out of the hands of these young people and beyond realistic financial reach for many socioeconomically disadvantaged youths. The riots transcend gender and ethnicity as well, with young women and persons of all colors participating in smash-and-grabs, vandalism, and creation of chaos without an ideological backing. Scholars and reporters are scrambling to find and create an ideological purpose (as Bauman does above) to these riots, but an overarching ideology – even if it is loosely that as defying the dominant capitalist order – implies caution, planning, idealism of some sort, and a purposeful outcome. What do these youths have to plan for, if we are to assume that they have “failed” at the meritocratic system by not being able to secure higher educational goals or occupations to keep them docile and happy? Why should these youths plan if they are the cast-aways of polite society? Meritocracies and capitalisms have their winners and losers: these youths are plainly the “losers” as they are not those wielding power. They have left only their minds and bodies with which to fight, and systematically denied of the ability to engage their minds, they choose bodies and physically manifesting perturbation. This exceeds Bauman’s idea of a deficient consumer or failed capitalist, and stripping away the avuncular veneer of the aging social theorist, what we have instead is a desperate attempt to not only lash out at the system of symbols and signs at work in the realm of conspicuous consumption and capitalism, but to come within a few inches of possessing those artifacts of the Good Life and seeing the illusion of the means of production and consumption, both forms of means that their society and their inheritance (or absolute and total lack thereof) have walled off to them, forms of means that shout and echo that they are societal failures. They have nothing and are reminded of it consistently: the last resort is to simultaneously take by force and destroy so that the property they have been denied – property they have promised through societal fallacies – cannot be enjoyed by others who have “made it.” Locke’s words of life, liberty, and the pursuit of property cannot be overlooked: these youths very well only may possess life; CCTV and forms of surveillance are omnipresent in the UK, and much post-capitalist, societal liberty is underpinned, underscored, and underwritten by financial capital, merging with the pursuit and propriety of property, creating the symbolic order of meaning of living in general: thus, in the conventional, consumerist sense, these youths are not just merely “defective consumers” – they are, in essence, devoid of worth in total and are damned to perennially remain worthless. There is nothing left to lose, and only everything to gain, the first such generation in decades that has looked upon the world and has come away from it completely wanting.

Additionally, observing the movements in the 1950s and 1960s reveals a vast difference in demographics: while today a relatively small proportion of Americans hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, a far smaller proportion of Americans were “educated” during these earlier decades. The resistance of college students – many of them first-generation students – to willingly go to war in Vietnam might be a direct result of evading a threat against educational and personal sovereignty: the prospect of attending college, finding better work, and securing oneself as solidly middle class came under fire as draft cards were being issued, and this prospective sacrifice overseas was unpalatable and incompatible with personal and broader societal goals of transforming the population into a securely educated one. The movements circulating the Civil Rights struggle were to allow access to educational and occupational opportunities theretofore unknown to and precluded from the purview of the African-American, and the struggle centered around not just the ideological goal of equal treatment of human beings, but of equal access to systems that were off-limits, of acknowledging the institutionalized discrimination that prevented African-Americans from gaining footholds and being able to engage with the meritocratic system whites enjoyed. The thrust of both larger movements symbolized the necessity to gain, not the fear of loss, and generationally, these movements occurred at the initialization of growth in college attendance and educational achievement that this generation is walking into. It is still widely held that to be a proper, middle-class American, one must complete an undergraduate degree; college attendance is now seen as the logical conclusion of K-12 education, as a mandate – and increasingly as a birthright – for Americanness, and is almost viewed as a given. The threat of removal of this mandate does not appear imminent – not yet, for there are still methods in place to pay for college as costs continue to soar. College is not yet “elite” enough, not yet expensive enough, and options to pay for higher education are still too many; there is no push for a generation of younger students or would-be students (or their financiers) to take to the streets, despite increasing student loan debt, despite increasingly-high private loans and second mortgages.

Unemployment in the United States is currently at 9.1% - doubtless among the highest rates of the past 75 years. The U-6 measurement currently sits at 16.1% [11]. The unemployment rate for African-Americans is 15.9%. [12] There are no actual new jobs being created: in effect, what is happening is that the residues left behind by Empire Building during the last decade are crystallizing and separating and allowing occasional employ to return. The largest sector of growth the past three quarters has been in the service industry, and at that, a majority of openings have been part-time. Thousands of people with master’s degrees and doctorates are wandering aimlessly in search of work, any work, to be done. A thousand or more people showed up to apply for about 300 jobs at an underway Caterpillar heavy manufacturing facility near Winston-Salem, NC, in addition to applications already received. Previously safe positions in governmental agencies are no longer safe. Yet, we have not met a critical mass. There have not been enough jobs lost for a long enough time for people to move beyond the psychological pain of being a meritocratic failure, beyond the misery of having no occupational purpose. There have not been enough comfortable people affected by the recession, and there have not been enough severe austerity measures – not to downplay recent state and federal-level cuts – to propel the populace into ire and to force them to live outside their lifelong conditioning and architectural incarceration. In short, things are not quite bad enough for us to be overturning cars. But this begs the question of when will things be “bad enough”? And will that time coincide with a critical mass of people willing to step outside themselves? Will it be the generations of persons born after 1980, those who appear to be most affected in this country? The meritocracy game is apparently the only game in town – but it too is failing by virtue of eliminating eligible players: illusion begets illusion, and just as there is no longer an end-goal that seems palpable or true in any sort for young people wishing to make all the right moves, the mirage vanishes. What more do those generations have left to lose? What could they possibly gain?

Those who have so quickly called the rioters in England a “criminal element” without regard to what gave rise to the criminal activity are ignoring the greater problems, and are blind to potential future challenges. It is deplorable enough that young, unemployed, chronically-poor persons in England are referred to by politicians and media as “feral children” – but were there not persons who attempted to "reform” Kaspar Hauser and educate him as to the ways of polite meritocratic systems?

What about the thousands of persons who graduated from college or graduate school or high school this past Spring with nowhere to go and absolutely no options? Are they not also Kaspar Hausers dropped back into the churlish sea of Recession and Zero Opportunity, set adrift to either cling desperately to a floating piece of debris, or sink to the bottom?

So, why are we not rioting? Or at least picketing, or demonstrating, or following our constitutional abilities and peaceably assembling as to petition a redress of grievances? My final explanation would come as a combination of the conditions and topics discussed above with the final piece of theory: we have lost sight of, and have lost care of, the conceptualization of societal justice writ large due to continued mild forms of oppression and false views upon the means to secure justice. We see justice as that guiding principle that steers our ship of the republic, yet it is continually denied certain portions of our population through institutional structures; wealth can and has and will purchase imbalanced amount of justice for the wealthy; the model of the Czar and the Serf are not cast into history, but alive and well throughout the American landscape as the working poor and working classes subscribe to the ideal of meritocracy, toiling endlessly, trying to advance in life, to unwittingly help the controllers of wealth advance a little more. Justice does not come in equal doses to those who were born women, black in America, multiracial in America, or homosexual in America as it does to those who were born white. And even then, those not born into wealth are not likely to ever encounter it in their lifetimes, despite how hard they work, despite how conditioned they have been to behave and be good.

Saint Augustine once asked, “what are kingdoms without justice, but great robberies?”

The American people should know very well what sorts of kingdoms those are. The English youth might be on the path to figuring that out.

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1. http://www.voxeu.org/sites/default/files/file/DP8513.pdf
2. The discussion of the “printing press” fallacy that adherents of an inflation-free, dollar-strong system is outside the scope of this essay, but it is worth mentioning that a society that creates money ex nihilo with no gold or silver standard – the same society that can fully expect outside interests to continue buying our debt yet controls the means of production (in absentia) of foreign producers for domestic goods – can afford to indeed create more money and flood the market: while it devalues currency to some extent, it devalues debt as well, and generating social spending will over time equalize this debt and glut of money.

3. http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/7441/
4. http://web.epi-data.org/temp727/EPI-TCF_IssueBrief_311.pdf
5. http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/08/the_real_solution_is_growth.html
6. http://www.social-europe.eu/2011/08/the-london-riots-on-consumerism-coming-home-to-roost/
7. http://www.alternet.org/story/151850/8_reasons_young_americans_don%27t_fight_back_--_how_the_us_crushed_youth_resistance?page=entire
8. http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2011/08/london-calling-a-reflection-on-rioting/
9. This is indeed a paradox, but of small magnitude. I am indeed using the Internet as a means to put forward these ideas, and, as a matter of course, all of my information was gleaned from the Internet. However, and this may belong to any one of my categories outlined above, I have noticed a severe uptick in populist anger emanating from social networks. One can Tweet all day about the unfairness of systems and be a clarion for change, but I have yet to see (in the United States) a widespread usage of social media as a means to successfully organize and action some sort of change. Twitter, especially, seems to be a storm cloud that hits a mountain range of surveillance fear, impotence in organization and demonstration, or a fear of authority: the power is there, but, as it were, nothing is precipitated.
9A. I originally included additional rationales but felt these were well-covered already or fairly obvious. Compassion Fatiague / Lack of Empathy: Mediation of protest viz. social media, etc., creates a false sense of work or accomplishment; we have been inured by popular media and MSM to impassively stare, to be detached from our own gaze; coverage of civil unrest has decreased greatly and precipitously since 9/11, and current media coverage is laughable and ignores root causes. All these together collude to justify without our consent an absence of empathy and a tiredness of action and will. Cooptation and Commoditization of Activism: Join the ACLU or Amnesty International for X dollars a month; we expect gifts for contributing to causes; subcultures have been privatized; activism itself has become a form of commodity, absorbed by something it once attempted to ignore/outrun. Loss of Perceived Power of Organization: New Jersey teachers’ strike vs. NCEA rally; Vietnam mass demonstrations vs. Iraq war demonstrations (college students and 60s holdovers); organizing for political things now is only done in “elite” urban centers (in contrast to how the Civil Rights era took shape in smaller towns); satirization of organization viz. Colbert’s March to Keep Fear Alive, and Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity (sanitization); protest and outcry efficacy and potency has been watered down by misuse of the freedom to organize.
10. http://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/139521599/foreign-policy-britains-young-and-relentless
11. http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate_u6.jsp
12. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm