Mad as Hell, There but not Here

After three days of riots, Londoners are not through. Catalyzed by police shooting a young man, Mark Duggan (shown), to death, the U.K. burning, looting and violent protests are about much more. The social programs and policies there are in even worse than than the U.S. equivalents. People are pissed to the point of rage instead of panic.

Here, we shall see the deaths of many, but not from police bullets. Rather, the slow and hidden demise of those from destitution, anguish, despair, anxiety and suicide will come with joblessness, hopelessness, homelessness and other lacks. We have a crazed and craven U.S. House and a timorous eunuch of a chief executive, the former leading us to destruction and the latter leading us not all. Millions of us will suffer.

In London, there's a similar divide separating the very wealthy and secure from hoi polloi. There instead of panic and despair, many express anger and worse. Consider the Amy Weston new pic here of a woman leaping, as it turned out to injured safety, from a torched building.

Here our arson is the dragon's breath of political posturing. Our legislators deny all responsibility for damage to millions of Americans and billions of cosmopolitans from their games.

Before my time, we had riots in many industrial cities and in my life, mass violence in Los Angeles, Newark, Plainfield and more. Americans for the moment seem so stunned by the evil visited upon us and the larger world that we react with sadness and fear instead of flames, stones and pillaging.

Yet we are not that far off of the English disorder.