Student riots have a peculiar moral authority on the left, it seems. Your normal riot is to be commended for obvious reasons — direct action, spontaneous and enthusiastic agitation against injustice, plus distribution of consumer goods to the disenfranchised. (I’ll never forget watching footage of a riot in my neighborhood in D.C.; the protestors smashed a window and looted the salad bar, stepping over the jagged glass with styrofoam containers of food. No lettuce, no peace!) But student protests are even better. They’re more idealistic, since students are involved, and idealism is always to be commended no matter how skither-headed the ideal, or inapplicable to reality it may be. Idealists are our purer selves, no? They’re the dreamers whose lofty visions would lead to better things, if only we listened.
Well. There’s been an argy-bargy in Blighty over hiked-up college costs, and the photos show the usual pyrotechnical exuberance. Smashed windows in the Tory HQ, fires set, triumphant faces agleam with the adrenalin rush of destruction, and signs that blare [EXPLETIVE] FEES FREE EDUCATION NOW. Spray-painted signs called the Tories “scum” and “pigs.” Take a look at the photos of the miscreants, and ask yourself what their majors might be. Economics? Molecular biology? (I suspect they’re mostly engaged in Colon Studies, meaning, every one of their college textbooks has a colon in the title. “Shearing the Flock: Mercantilism and Class Inequality in 19th Century New Zealand” or “Singing For Her Supper: Transgendered Nightclub Singers in Weimar Berlin.”)
Anyway. As you might expect, the protestors want free education to be paid for by taxing “the rich,” that unmolested demographic which generates inexhaustible wealth by building collector-units over the spots in the earth where gold bubbles up from underground caverns. Guarded by elves. (Who vote Tory.)
Will we see this sort of activity here when the cuts begin?