So London’s burning, or at least parts of Tottenham, Hackney, Brixton, Walthamstow, Ealing, Enfield, and Croydon are (sorry if I’ve left any communities out), with parts of Birmingham, Bristol, and Liverpool joining the party.  Damn, I miss out on all the “fun!” It just so happened to be one of those rare occasions that I was in the US in summertime, and in fact it’s been a full seven years since my last summer in California. Who’d of thought my timing could have been so perfect? By the way, my gigs in La Jolla for the Comedy Store this last weekend were “smashing.” I really “burned the place up.” I “destroyed” ’em! I was a laugh “riot!” Have I missed a couple puns there? 

                      Since I’ve been away for a week, the details about what led up to the London riots are still a bit vague to me, but there is a bit of a parallel to the 1992 riots in Los Angeles in that both riots were triggered by an abuse of power by local police. In London’s case, it was the shooting death of Tottenham resident Mark Duggan in a gun battle. To put it mildly, London has been a firecracker waiting to go off, what with financial hardships, rising unemployment, and a general negative outlook for starters. Some of the reports on Duggan don’t exactly paint a portrait of a model citizen, though a father of four, but to Londoners, his death was just another example of the lack of respect the average Joe gets from The Man. 

                        A quick recap of what happened in 1992: A year earlier, four white police officers had been captured on video savagely beating Rodney King, a Black man, despite no apparent resistance from Mr. King. The four officers were put on trial in what appeared to be an open and shut case. Exhibit A seemed pretty indisputable. Somehow the jury found a way to ignore that evidence and vote for acquittal for all four officers. It was as though 400 years of struggle were once again proven to be for nought. People rose up in protest, but except for the brutal assault on an innocent white truck-driver who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the chaos was sadly confined to ghetto residences and businesses.

                          It makes sense that when rage mounts up and the bubble is burst, logic can easily go out the window. The LA rioters didn’t have the means or the patience to hire a bunch of buses to ride into Beverly Hills and attack the REAL enemy, so they opted for the “convenience” of destroying their own area. The rioters were in such a frenzied state, they didn’t care what they were burning, just so it burned.