Everything Is Fine

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Brave Woman Harangues Rioters

http://www.twitvid.com/4JTZH

A woman on the streets of Hackney bravely confronts looters.

Our Cities Alight

I thought the world might be ending in 1981, in the depths of the Cold War our cities suddenly caught alight. Brixton, Toxteth, Handsworth, Chapeltown and Moss Side were ablaze both literally, and with anger fuelled by long term social deprivation and resentment at police stop and search powers directed at young black men. It was a troubled year, Bobby Sands starved himself to death and more riots took place on the streets of Belfast, US President Ronald Reagun was wounded in an assassination attempt and a man fired shots, which later proved to be blanks, at the Queen.

I remember keeping a scrapbook at the time, I was slightly obsessed with the rioting, I cut out out reports and pictures from the papers and built up a dossier of violence and disorder, photographs of disaffected youths throwing missiles, of wounded policemen being sheltered by comrades, of shops and workplaces and homes burning.  I could not understand then why people were destroying the amenities in their own neighbourhoods, if this was the only protest they felt they could make, why did they torch their own community centres.

The riots that have exploded across London, and which are spreading through our larger cities, have taken a different hue. The original riot seems to have been triggered by the police shooting of a man, reports are now contradicting the first story that Mark Duggan fired first and wounded a police officer, it is now being said that all the shots were fired by the Police.  Tensions boiled over and Tottenham suffered more for it.

Some activists in Tottenham are claiming that last month there was an entirely peaceful march to Tottenham police station, which it is claimed around 2,000 people took part in and was almost completely ignored by the media. Protesters/rioters in Tottenham interviewed by NBC pointed out that if 20 black kids smash up a branch of William Hill and burn a sports car, they can bring the world's media to their doorstep.

The more extensive riots that have taken place though have no political or activist connection with the first events in Tottenham. Television reports carry footage of largely young people bent on a bit of window breaking and looting, organised, it is claimed, on the Blackberry Messenger closed system. This is vandalism and theft on a large scale and nothing more. It may well be that the people involved in these events are at the poorest end of the social spectrum, but these riots are not anti-police or against authority, it's just a bunch of kids out to cause mayhem and steal some trainers.

Last night Sky News were warming their hands over the footage of a huge blaze consuming a furniture store in Croyden, and taking with it the jobs and livelihoods of the families that worked there.  As buildings burn in Tottenham and Croyden, ordinary working class families have lost everything, their jobs, homes and all their possessions bar the clothes they are wearing. Sky repeated that footage late into last night, I must have seen the same group of three kids run past the burning building 15 times.

Whatever your situation in life, you still have choices, and if you are poor and excluded then looting a couple of pairs of Adidas trainers from JD Sports isn't really going to improve your social situation.  We live in a technological age where you can choose to use your mobile device to organise a mob of your wrong thinking friends to firebomb Currys, or you can use it to inform and educate yourself.

"I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent." - Mohandas Gandhi

The Right To Complain

"Im old, I'm poor, I'm out of work, and I'm in debt, and therefore I have a right to complain." William Cuffay, Chartist radical, 1788-1870.

The Slave Ship

Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhoon coming on by J M Turner, 1840

Venus and Cupid, the Rokeby Venus

Venus and Cupid by Diego Valazquez. The painting is variously known as The Toilet of Venus, Venus at her Mirror and The Rokeby Venus after Rokeby Park in Yorkshire where the painting was first hung after being brought to England. The Spanish Inquisition were active during the period in which Velazquez painted, few Spanish nudes were painted and few have survived.

In 1914 the painting was damaged with a cleaver by the Canadian Suffragette Mary Richardson, she said about the act “I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history. Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas. Mrs Pankhurst seeks to procure justice for womanhood, and for this she is being slowly murdered by a Government of Iscariot politicians. If there is an outcry against my deed, let every one remember that such an outcry is an hypocrisy so long as they allow the destruction of Mrs Pankhurst and other beautiful living women, and that until the public cease to countenance human destruction the stones cast against me for the destruction of this picture are each an evidence against them of artistic as well as moral and political humbug and hypocrisy."

Richardson went on to join Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Facists and rose to become head of the women’s section of the movement.



Beauty Warning

Taken from 'The Real Art of Protest' on Facebook.

Liberty Leading The People 28 July 1830

by Eugene Delacroix.

Words Are Weapons

Spain's Youth Protests Ahead Of Elections

Youths defiant at 'Spanish revolution' camp in Madrid

Call for protest ban in Spain for elections

Youth unemployment in Spain is currently 43%.  This situation is still part of the seemingly endless repercussions from the global banking crisis, and yet while hundreds of thousands of jobs are being lost across Europe month on month and essential public services are being cut, the people running the banking institutions that got us all into this mess are back claiming huge salaries and obscene bonus payments.

"Dulce et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen (poetry reading)

Strange Fruit

Image via Wikipedia

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

- Abel Meeropol

The photograph shows the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith on August 7th 1930 in Marion, Indiana, Meeropol is reported to have written the poem after seeing this photograph. Although the photograph has shown up on the Zementa content widget, there appears to be some controversy over its copyright status as Wikipedia offers this explanation for fair use "Fair use rationale for Strange Fruit: This exact image inspired the poem Strange Fruit and is used in the article to illustrate this inspiration. The image is irreplaceable for this purpose."

Art As Revolution

Image via Wikipedia"The first stirrings of dissatisfaction and the first intimations of a better future are always found in works of art" - John Dewey.

Dewey, John, John Dewey : the Later Works 1925-1953, Vol.10:1934.

The picture is Shlosberg dva angela, I cannot tell you any more about it because all the information seems to be in Cyrillic script.

Lorraine on the bus - About 26 March

I like this lady, she's brave, polite and pleasingly forceful, using her time to make her political point and trying to ensure that her fellow commuters are not complacent in the face of the problems she sees.

Television

Being British

And actually, that's fine by me because I'm very open to things from outside my cultural, national or religious borders.

It's Just Marriage

Words Are Weapons

Photo from 'The Real Art Of Protest' on Facebook

Argument

THE POEM (Written during the lent term of 1905)

At Ashburne there is a Society

Which has rapidly gained notoriety,
It's name I can state with propriety, -

Argument

We meet after Punch on a Saturday

With tea and sweet cakes we're a party gay,

Instead of elicit chatting as Students may,

Argument

We talk of meetings Political

And all of us soon are so critical

Our speeches become analytical

Argument

The Signs of our age are Synthetical,

Do you call Walt Whitman poetical?

My theory is not hypothetical

Argument

 

We talk of the Status of human kind

Of Suffrage, and greatness of human mind

Equality, love, but we always find

Argument

If we began all our talks at the break of day

They'd continue till after the Sun's last ray

As we get into bed, the last word we say

Argument!

Image by Leo Reynolds via Flickr

A.J.T. (Alice Jane Taylor) - Turner took the married name of Alison Uttley and wrote the children's stories Little Grey Rabbit and Sam Pig.

The Charge Of The Light Brigade

Image via WikipediaHalf a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!' he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
Some one had blundered:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

Flashed all their sabres bare,
Flashed as they tuned in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wondered:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right through the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reeled from the sabre-stroke
Shattered and sundered.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came through the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

When can their glory fade?
o the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!

- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The painting is Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, by George Frederic Watts (died 1904), given to the National Portrait Gallery, London in 1895.