I was very sad to hear the news that Jack Layton had passed away today. Much will be written about him in the next few days, by people who knew him much better than I did, and by people much better at paying tribute. So, I’ll offer only this: the goal of politics should always be (yet rarely is) to make things better. One may disagree with the means a leader prescribes for achieving that goal, and these prescriptions might even be wrong. But if the leader pursues this goal with integrity and honesty, he can’t help but do a great deal of good.

Jack Layton wanted things to be better. He was an honest and passionate advocate for the better world he sought. This is a rare quality in politics, and we are poorer for having lost him.

I’ll be away from the blog until August 22nd. Keep an eye on the place while I’m gone.

Over at Macleans OnCampus, Robyn Urback shrugs off the political and social causes and implications of the UK riots. Fair enough; you can make a reasoned argument in that direction, even though I disagree. But she does one very unfortunate thing while making her case, which is fairly emblematic of the problems I’ve noticed with media coverage of the unrest.

In arguing that the riots had nothing to do with poverty or inequality, she makes the following statement:

And many of the rioters, in fact, are not disadvantaged youth, but 30-something teachers, youth workers, and graphic designers. To ponder socio-economic excuses for these crimes is to give those who have succumbed to mob mentality a political agenda to fall back on.

The first problem here is to pluralize ‘teachers’, ‘youth workers’ and ‘graphic designers’. If you follow Urback’s own links, it is clear that only one teacher, one youth worker, and one graphic designer have been arrested. Contrary to what Urback suggests, wild packs of young professionals are not roaming the streets of London, and the vast majority of the rioters remain young, under- or unemployed, and poor.

Urback also makes the mistake of suggesting that the outlier is in fact representative of the whole. The teacher, designer, youth worker, future soldier and grad student (these latter two being identified in other media reports as counter-intuitive examples of riot participants) represent about 0.5 per cent of the total arrests (the latest arrest reports indicate that “more than 900″ people have been detained, so I’m pegging the number at about 950). In quantitative analysis, this is what we refer to as “statistically insignificant”. There may well be more young professionals arrested, but we don’t actually know if this is true or how many there are. It is therefore wrong to suggest that the rioters include a large number of comfy middle class folks, and to further conclude that this means the riots have nothing to do with inequality.

Urback is by no means the only reporter to confuse weather (a discrete phenomenon) with climate (a generalized trend) in the riot story. Her example is nevertheless important in understanding how this distorts debate. The pictures and video of the riots discomfit many observers, and this kind of outlier-as-reality is a convenient way to insulate analysis from deeper questions of cause and context. Portraying the violence as a kind of random, inexplicable outbreak of mindless criminality is comforting to many, because it prevents the necessary consideration of why the riots are happening, and how they might be complicit in the overarching social and economic circumstances that fueled the unrest. This is an understandable response, as no one likes being uncomfortable. However, I would suggest it is not an appropriate response for members of the media, those who are tasked with interpreting these events for the rest of us.

In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language“, George Orwell explains how the political use of language is more often employed to obscure meaning than to illuminate it. In his words,

The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed.

To wit: words have meanings. These meanings may be complex, but they are specific. When words don’t refer to specific things, we lose the ability to speak about those things. Anyone who is careless with the meaning of words is careless with reality, and should be viewed with suspicion.

This brings us to Giorgio Mammoliti. The Toronto Councillor for York West has always been a political clown, a kind of gross caricature of whatever ideology he currently thinks will serve his own self interest. Years ago, he was an NDP MPP and leader of the Canadian Union of Public Employees. He is now a stooge for Rob Ford’s slobocracy, the guy they send out when they want to say something offensive but would rather the quote not be attached to the mayor. We should not expect much from this type of opportunist, but he keeps finding ways to disappoint our already low expectations

Giorgio, apparently tired of hearing from the ‘communists’ who presented at the marathon 22-hour City Council meeting on the proposed service cuts, has created a Facebook page called “Save the City…Support the Ford Administration” (I’ve linked to it, but I warn you that its utility is marginal). I have no problem with this in itself. Mammoliti can do whatever he wants on Facebook. But I do take issue with what he has been saying about the page. From The Globe:

“I don’t want to hear from communists,” he said. “I won’t be calling them communists on the site, but I will be using the word ‘whatever’ to reply to them. If you see that word you can be pretty sure they’re a communist and I’ll be cutting them off of the site.”

He maintains a broad definition of the term “communist” as “anyone who is able to work, doesn’t want to work and wants everything for free,” he said.

From the Star:

“I’m really sick and tired of hearing from the communists in this city,” he said in an interview. “I don’t want anything to do with them. I don’t want to listen to them. I don’t want to listen to their griping and their whining. I want to listen to people who are clearly working for a living, and wanting their tax dollars to be used in a particular way. I’m clearly trying to wean out the typical communist thinker who will be doing nothing but whining.”

What’s fascinating here is Giorgio’s frequent and brazen misuse of the term “communist”. Communism refers to a specific political and economic program which, among other things, calls for worker control of the means of production, collectivization of industry and agriculture, and the reconfiguration of the state as an instrument for economic planning. In practice, the term can also apply to states which refer to themselves as ‘communist’, such as China, Cuba, and North Korea. It does not apply to union members. Some of these individuals may be communists, but the connection is not a necessary one. Nor does ‘communist’ refer to people who are defending public services that enjoy broad support. It is also inappropriate for Mammoliti to apply this term to all of his critics simply for being critical, unless extensive public polling reveals that the majority of them do, in fact, hold communist views. I am unaware of any such research, but would be happy to review it should Mammoliti’s office make it available.

So why does Mammoliti call his critics communist? While I don’t doubt that he is largely ignorant of broad swaths of history and political theory, and may not actually know what ‘communist’ means, I think something else is going on here. He obviously intends it as a slur, a way of lumping together a diverse collection of individuals of a variety of different political viewpoints, united only by their opposition to his politics. His abuse of the term is a way of labeling and sidelining otherwise legitimate criticism, of presenting absolutely credible and mainstream views as somehow radical and extreme. Opposing cuts to services such as libraries and pools is a reasonable position for liberals, conservatives, and  social democrats alike, but by labelling this opinion “communist” he is attempting to remove this argument from the range of acceptable policy options.  It perverts the dialogue around public services and city finances, and is a form of exclusion unacceptable to anyone who cares about meaningful debate. Mammoliti’s abuse of language reveals a fondness for thug tactics and a distaste for democracy rather unbecoming of a democratically elected politician.

Orwell closes his essay by stating  that”political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” By cynically exploiting the meaning of words, Mammoliti does little to dispel the widespread belief that the sum total of all his public comments amount to anything more than exactly this – pure wind.

Photo by alienbeatpoet.

In 1982, the Dead Kennedys released the song “Riot“. If there is such a thing as a ‘public rage’ sub-genre, this track represents its creative peak (other notable entries: The Clash’s “Guns of Brixton” and Sublime’s “April 29, 1992 (Miami)“). Among Riot’s more timeless observations is the basic irony of the unrest we’re seeing in the UK right now: you can’t ever really get at the people you’re angry with, so you just end up burning down your own neighbourhood.

The self-defeating nature of riots is apparent to most observers, from San Francisco punk bands to politicians to the hapless residents of London’s besieged communities. When the smoke clears, nothing has changed, and you’ve probably provoked a police rampage for your trouble. Riots also cause a visceral and negative public reaction that obscures the animating grievances behind the violence. This is particularly true in North America; the civilian population of Canada and the United States has no living memory of war, and are taken aback by visible evidence of the barbaric flip side of human civilization. The resulting public backlash is unfortunate, as it prevents some important questions from being asked.

I’m not going to try and justify the riots or the actions of the rooters. Violence is indefensible in most cases, and never more so than when the victims are innocent. The herd behavior that characterizes urban riots is also distasteful, as is the greed displayed by the looters. But I reject the suggestionthat the riots are just meaningless, random violence. There are reasons the riots happened, even if the rooters aren’t conscious of, or even interested in, them.

All the things that prefigure a riot – lack of social trust, status anxiety, willingness to do violence – are all strongly correlated to income inequality. Nations or communities with high disparity between the very rich and the very poor are more violent, and inequality in the UK has increased significantly over the past 30 years.  An unemployed, racially marginalized young male in Tottenham is likely unaware of the dynamics of income inequality, but his daily lived experience of his own poverty relative to the great wealth on display is humiliating. This humiliation becomes rage all too easily.

So, he riots with his mates. He burns the businesses and homes of him neighbours, steals the things he could not afford, and maybe ends up with a criminal record. This archetypical rioter hurts only himself and his fellow travellers, and never comes close to revenge on the real culprits, or even a real understanding of who they are: those who recklessly exploited the economy, bankrupted the state, and now force the middle and working classes to pay for their mistakes through austerity budgets, higher taxes and fewer services.

Nobody seems all that interested in asking questions about these hidden circumstances. Those who are to blame for creating a tinderbox of anger in these neighbourhoods are only too happy to help deflect further inquiry away, so we don’t catch a glimpse of the legitimate complaints behind a monstrous display of violence. And sadly, through it all, London burns.

UPDATE: This article makes a great case for why The Specials’ “Ghost Town” is not only a fine piece of public crisis music, but also one particularly relevant to the UK riots.