Every station is covering the riot, with streams and loops of fracas and furore, expert analysis, vox pops with the man on the Clapham omnibus, and a none-too-subtle soundtrack of selections from Götterdämmerung. All the family’s there in the push and shove, from babes in arms to dowager aunts in their last bright bloom, some in hi-vis and others in home-knit balaclavas, all armed to their milk teeth or false teeth with whatever they had to hand. The root cause, of course, is complex: a combination of instabilities and infelicities, infighting, and interminable looking away. Yet, still there’s the insistence that everything’s black and white, and the last talking head is a chattering magpie, chak-chak-chak-ing at the zeitgeist, stealing meaning from the rolling, rolling news.
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Oz Hardwick
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