TUESDAY AUGUST 9th 2011 15:38
There's an ominous* hum emanating from the imperceptible vibration of the nervous girls that last night piped-up thinking they could see smoke plumes erupting in Gorton from their City Centre flats as London burned, when cockeyed racist potato Nick Griffin aped mate Jeremy Clarkson by Twitter-predicting Salford was scheduling a descent into Hell. The famously endearing, absurd-sounding Manchester Evening News sandwich board posters are bizarrely generic this afternoon.
Where ordinarily they would read something like:
TRAFFORD MAN'S
BANANA PLANS
HIT SKIDS
Or
LEVENSHULME
PENSIONER'S
HEDGEHOG
ADVENTURES
They today matter-of-factly say:
2 FOR 1
AT
CHILL FACTOR-E
and
FANTASTIC
10 PAGE
SPORTS
PULL-OUT
Like some sort of offering to the looming Manchester Scally-Kraken.
Mancunian Twitter users are rocking in the corner, chanting the mantra that 'it won't happen here', or quoting Tony Wilson’s edict that ‘we do things differently’.
Mark Duggan did NOT fire at police. "If he did have a gun – which I don't know – Mark would run. Mark is a runner. He would run rather than firing and that's coming from the bottom of my heart" say his family who are understandably really upset and maybe a bit biased. Bringing to mind the kind of time a gyppo-kid drives his hotwired joyride into a motorway tunnel wall because he can't see over the steering wheel, and his family say he was 'no Angel' but had a heart of gold (cue slow-zoom into image of kid frowning over his shoulder in some rain slicked November Car Park with flames behind him and a tyre-smoke Halo crowning his slowly grinning face.)
But none of this matters. None among the bikeriding Nike Ninjas swarming on the City Centre know who the fuck Mark Duggan was - or his best friend, 23-year-old rapper Kelvin Easton, known as 'Smegz', for that matter, who died a similarly ignominious death being stabbed by a Champagne bottle in a Club earlier this year - they've just been bombarded with images of their scum-buzzard southern brothers helping themselves to their blackened-heart's desire and have decided they fancy a bit of that.
When I was in my first year of High School, I remember pathetically attempting to remove the swoosh from some expired Nike's in order to lash them onto the pair of unbranded 'market-movers' my Mum had procured me for PE, so I could survive High School.
On a Market Street corner, sovereign-ringed fingers cradle a virulent knacker-sack in tracky pants, while the other hand's thumb flicks the mounting ash off the end of a B&H.
It's always been hard explaining irony to a scally. Even when they're calling YOU a tramp while trying to take your money or stuff.
"Drop us a dollar, Yo?".
 |
| Grafts |
The night of my 18th Birthday, we're sitting in the corner of the football field of my old High School smoking weed at 11pm when three figures gradually materialise through the blackness. Two years earlier in the alley that ran behind us, a couple of my school friends had been pummeled onto crutches passing a gang of scallies (then ‘Townies’), the hereditary enemy of us ‘Moshers’. After an animosity stand-off, we all relax and begin "chatting bare maca" apparently. Their leader reveals an admiration for Pink Floyd, and espouses a belief that we cultural sub-divisions are basically all the same - just going about it in different ways. After about an hour’s good natured maca-chatting, one of his companions slips into an unguarded-account of how his cousin suffered the fairly unprecedented misfortune of an inguinal hernia at just 8 years old. In his limited physiological knowledge, he misinterpreted the ruptured stomach-muscle’s protrudence as an ascended testicle, and when talk turned to how he’d given it a curious squeeze - all hell broke loose.
Leader leaps to his feet and punches testicle-toucher, sat cross-legged, backwards into grass. Testicle-toucher does all he can to stand before getting kicked, trainer full in his face, a dew-soaked rubber sole squeaking off his teeth sending the amateur abdominal examiner backwards into black, while his leader anticipates and follows his trajectory, landing a few more merciless kicks thudding a hollow ‘THWOMP’ into his ribcage and a final sole-imprinting stomp onto his once-capped head.
Leader turns around and sits back down with us, seeming slightly embarrassed, and holds up his hands while looking down in his lap. Leader apologises, saying:
“I’m sorry about that…
I’m not a violent man.”
– causing uproarious laughter: half of us genuinely driven into fits, the other sickened beyond THC appeasing.
He was the nicest scally I ever met.
Words come through all fluhmplubbled 100 yards away as a defiant whimper limps through profusely bleeding teeth…or at least the spaces where they used to be. Leader immediately drops his skins and legs it after defiant punch-bag, sending him fleeing completely.
The demographic of Negative Alchemists: those who manage to maketh Gold the most scrubberish-looking substance on earth. They’re the ground-up chum of the upperclass. They’re Jonesing for your sports goods, athletically debasing their incongruously resilient, fertile bodies, and breaking all the rules no one bothered to set out for them. They're your bedrock, and you need them to stand upon to keep your head above the crud.
Look at the stores that were looted (NOT the stores that were damaged - in most cases they just saw glass and smashed it) no one was looting Grant Morrison's 'The Invisibles' from ‘Travelling Man’.
What happens in X Factor’s absence
And fuck Liam Gallagher's ‘Pretty Green’ - that sort of pandering to white trash aspiration is only slightly evolved from what motivated the looters.
It's undeniable there was a valid flashpoint, and an equal and opposite reaction, but everything that rippled northward was opportunistic Commercial rape.
Millionaire ex-pat Hollywood-ponce Russell Brand looked-on from Beverley Hills, then wrote a stirring account of a time he used to exorcise his Middle Class guilt by getting involved in protests, squaring up to his Riot-Geared peers.
Their power was illusory. They convened on Cities just as they knew everyone else was leaving, knowing there was zero chance of succeeding with the general populace around lest they found themselves on the receiving end of a bloody good ear-clipping. They would have been totally outnumbered. A clusterfuck for the Police, and a social and moral hierarchical bukkake for the average man, who would no doubt have fought back. It comes down to freewill. There's no Devil to punish you at the end of it. If you so desire you can take the bag off a bleeding geek’s back, but heaven or not we all intrinsically know it isn’t necessarily fucking ‘soul’ to do so. It's up to us whether we adhere to what we have universally decided to be right and best for everyone, meaning 'fuck-with not, lest ye be fucked-with'.
Clearly these kids have been brought up with the greedy creed: 'Do unto others, before they do unto you'.
While hand-wringing social commentators seek a measured explanation, the Ghosts of the Peterloo dead watch these gluttonous opportunists run amok.
Its important we apportion our disdain some free-reign, otherwise how else are we going to be motivated to change the cause of it?
*= Point at which I lost my target audience.
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