London Calling Again & Again

By Mickey Friedman
August 13, 2011

In the early summer of 2010, Bruce Springsteen came to London town and offered up a stirring version of The Clash’s “London’s Calling” to a Hyde Park filled to the brim with adoring fans.

 

And then, in a burst of brilliance, the folks behind the campaign to lure the world to London for the 2012 Olympics thought to use “London Calling” to promote their summer of sport by the river. Why not? In a world where everything is for sale, why not use everything to sell?

Joe Strummer of The Clash is sadly no longer with us to appreciate the irony piled upon irony, his brilliant searing indictment of a world out of control transformed to advert, their sheer gall mixed with utter stupidity.

Apocryphal, in “London Calling” Strummer and Mick Jones were simultaneously describing their past, London present, and conjuring the future.  Three Mile Island, the climate crisis, police brutality, rampant phoniness, food shortages, you’ve got it.

Do you remember the lyrics?

London calling to the faraway towns
Now war is declared, and battle come down
London calling to the underworld
Come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls
London calling, now don’t look to us
Phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust
London calling, see we ain’t got no swing
‘Cept for the ring of that truncheon thing

Chorus
The ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in
Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin
Engines stop running, but I have no fear
‘Cause London is drowning, and I live by the river

Maybe it’s too easy to say the Gods of Irony have sent another message? Could it be they don’t really exist? Could it be it’s just us feeble human beings once more revealing how little we’ve learned? I don’t really know.

I do know that once again the battle come down.

How else can you describe the mad anarchy that enveloped the streets of London, then the boys and girls who came out of the cupboards throughout England.

I don’t know whether the police murder of Mark Duggan was the beginning, or just the spark so noticeable as to be counted as such?  First the police implied that Duggan, in a taxi stopped by police, fired first at an officer.  Then they revealed the officer who was shot was shot by a policeman’s bullet.

After the riots broke out, they admitted they were wrong to imply Duggan fired first.

 

There’s a raging debate about the riots and the rioters.  One of the most compelling stories was about the immigrant children, many-colored but certainly not white, raised on the dole without family discipline.  There they were, though their faces were hidden by bandanas or hoods or balaclavas looting and pillaging wide screen TVs and smartphones and sunglasses, setting fire to cars and buses,

Prime Minister Cameron just happened to be on vacation – a vacation he profoundly deserved because of all the exhausting flack he received when it was revealed his chief media advisor, Andy Coulson, was one of those who had hacked into the phone of a murdered teenage girl and the phones of the royal family and the phones of hundreds of celebrities as a editor for the News of the World.  Sir Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper.

But Cameron flew back just in time to blame the police for not responding quick enough and then to tell the people of Britain that the problem wasn’t poverty or cuts in government spending or even cuts in the police budget.  The problem was parents.  And the lack of morality.  “A deep moral failure,” he called it.

Cameron continued on: “In too many cases, the parents of these children – if they are still around – don’t care where their children are or who they are with, let alone what they are doing,” he said.

“The potential consequences of neglect and immorality on this scale have been clear for too long, without enough action being taken.”

But once again, the irony seemed lost on him.  He was talking about the rioters, right, and not about his advisers, not about Rupert Murdoch and his sons? Not about his own parents?

Irony lost, it seemed on all those who wanted a sweet simple bow to tie on this profoundly disturbing failure of British civility. Wasn’t it Tony Blair, the last Prime Minister, who lied Britain into the Iraq War? So where exactly and to whom are the British to look for lessons in morality?

One of my favorite photos is one of a policeman breaking into a home to retrieve some suspected loot from a break-in.

Now the perplexing and unpredictable truths seem to be tumbling out. Soon the jails were filled and the courts were filled. The rioters were 12 year olds and plasterers and university students and fathers and mothers and even an aspiring ballerina and dental nurse. Though most seemed in their late teens and early twenties, the age range included men in their thirties and forties. My favorite looter attends the oh so posh Exeter where she studies Italian. Her parents run a marketing company and play tennis on their own private tennis court in Kent.

And there were, in fact, some black looters who missed out on Exeter.

The problem is, that while it is so very easy to mock all this, there is nothing funny about a riot. Having been in the midst of one or two, it’s terrifying. Add some deep-seated anger, some insanity, and pissed off police and you’ve got a small sample of hell. And innocent people are usually the casualties.

Sadly, Prime Minister Cameron and the promoters of next year’s Olympics are the last people to know what needs to be done.

I was about to say that hopefully, here at home, President Michele Bachmann will have a plan for us to prevent “Manhattan Calling,” but then I remembered she probably thinks “planning” is a socialist plot.

I’ll leave the last word to Joe Strummer: “We felt that we were struggling, about to slip down a slope or something, grasping with our fingernails. And there was no one there to help us.”