[Charlotte Innes]

To answer my own question above, I've attached a poem by Charles Martin called "After 911," which appeared in The Hudson Review in 2005. That's a few years after the fact, but maybe it took him time to write it. At any rate, he wrote the impossible--not about a riot, but about a disaster that people felt would be impossible to write about when it happened.

I think he did a great job.

http://www.hudsonreview.com/martinAu05.pdf

[Alex Pepple]

Charlotte, that's a great poem by Martin. I have his latest book, Signs & Wonders, which I which also contains that poem. Quite a wonderful book, and incidentally, I have a review of it forthcoming in Think.

Here are few more poems, which though not directly about riots, might be fitting for this thread--

"Jerusalem" by James Fenton

"Bombs Rock Cairo" by Christian Wiman

Cheers,
...Alex

[Skip Dewahl]

The only title a poem dealing with that rampaging should have is "Entitlement". By the way, were there any reports by chance where someone heard a marauder threatening that if he wasn't doled out his "breh an' buh-uh" money, he'd.....?

[Quincy Lehr]

Skip, are you really that much of an @$$hole, or are you just taking the piss?

[Gregory Dowling]

Charlotte, no, I didn't take the Barnaby Rudge passage from my Kindle. I found an on-line version of the novel and copied it from there.

I think the interview Jayne is referring to is this one . There's a useful transcript of it as well. Here's the part where the girls give their political views:

GIRL: Like, it's the government's fault.

GIRL: I know...

GIRL: I dunno...

GIRL: Conservatives!

GIRL: Yeah, whatever who it is - I dunno.

GIRL: It's not even a riot - it's showing the people we can do what we want.

GIRL: Yeah, that's what it's all about - showing the police we can do what we want, and now we have.

LEANA HOSEA: So do you reckon it will go on tonight?

GIRL: Yeah hopefully, hopefully.

GIRL: Definitely.

GIRL: It's moved all around - hopefully...

GIRL: Yeah, hopefully, I want a few more things!

And then there's this little piece of advanced political thinking:

LEANA HOSEA: But these are like local people. I mean, why is it targeting local people and your own people?

GIRL: Because it's the rich people.

GIRL: It's the rich people, the people that have got businesses and that's why all of this has happened, because of the rich people.

So we're just showing the rich people we can do what we want.

[George Simmers]

Thanks to Gregory for posting the superb paragraphs from Barnaby Rudge.
A twentieth-century novel that shows young British people engaged in wanton destruction is Evelyn Waugh’s ‛Decline and Fall’, in which the sporty toffs of the Bollinger Club create havoc after a boozy celebration.
Waugh’s Bollingers are based on the celebrated Bullingdon Club (founded 1780). According to Tom Driberg, Waugh’s description was a ‛mild account of the night of any Bullingdon Club dinner in Christ Church. Such a profusion of glass I never saw until the height of the Blitz.’ Typically, Bullingdon dinners end with the trashing of the restaurant, and sometimes other mayhem. Since all the members are very wealthy, financial restitution to tradesmen and others is made quickly after the incident.
Past members of the club include David Cameron, Boris Johnson, George Osborne and David Dimbleby, all of whom have been waxing moralistic about the current disturbances. Occasionally over the centuries the Club's exploits have been so spectacular that it has had to go underground for a while, but it has always re-surfaced eventually.
Among the Club’s mottoes is ‛I love the sound of breaking glass’, a sentiment that might find a warm echo in the hearts of many young people in Tottenham and elsewhere.

[Gregory Dowling]

Ah yes, George, Decline and Fall. The opening chapter with the description of the Bollinger club dinner has the wonderful sentence:

"A shriller note could now be heard rising from Sir Alastair's rooms; any who have heard that sound will shrink at the recollection of it; it is the sound of English county families baying for broken glass."

On Cameron's (and Johnson's) Bullingdon days, there's this open letter to Cameron's parents by Nathaniel Tapley.

[Paul Stevens]

Oh yes, the wonderful Bullingdon Club: toffs enthusiastically validating vandalism. And having seen successive British governments join in the serial Middle-Eastern pack-invasions, burnings and lootings in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere, the rioters have wonderful role-models at the very highest levels. As above, so below. But for REAL looting it's hard to go past the big corporations:

...to pluck just one small example out of the ether, Rupert Murdoch's London Sun newspaper and his loathsome but now defunct News of the World made a profit of £89 million in 2010 but, through various corporate pea and thimble tricks, paid just £415,000 in tax.
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/...812-1iqmu.html

[Jayne Osborn]

I think the interview Jayne is referring to is this one . There's a useful transcript of it as well.

Thanks for posting the link, Gregory. It was indeed that interview. These youngsters, if they worked really hard at it, could aspire to becoming morons!

Our nation's future, eh? I think I'll emigrate; have you got any room over there?

[Duncan Gillies MacLaurin]

I always thought Martin Luther King rather good on this subject. And I feel his words and spirit are still very much the words and spirit of our times. Here's an article that highlights this:

http://wagingnonviolence.org/2011/08...cy/#more-11423

You can protest violently or non-violently. Either way you can end up in prison. There's less media coverage of the non-violent kind of protest, but perhaps if the media gave more space to the non-violent kind, there would be less of the violent kind.

I heard Jesse Jackson in St. James Church in London, in 1985 it must have been, as the anti-apartheid wave was at its height. It was very moving. "They have cast a shadow on darkness", he said. Several times.

Duncan