When we read someone the Riot Act, we do so metaphorically, attempting to calm them down by reminding them that somewhere there exists legal language that would punish their unruly behavior if they don’t stop it right this sec.
But in his book “Riot. Strike. Riot.: The New Era of Uprisings,” UC Davis poet and provocateur Joshua Clover reminds us that there is an actual Riot Act, enacted in Britain in 1714 by King George I in the wake of “the Coronation Riots attending his ascension.” And we Yanks always pretend that all Brits were so in thrall of the throne! The RA calls itself “An act for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies, and for the more speedy and effectual punishing the rioters.”
Clover was writing five years ago when he posited: “Riots are coming, they are already here, more are on the way, no one doubts it. They deserve an adequate theory.” The author revels in “moments of shattered glass and fire,” believing they provide relief from “the grim continuity of daily life.”
He also takes back the word “riot” by refusing to see it as a pejorative. Not for him rejiggering the Watts riots or the Rodney King riots as “uprisings.” After all, the original Old French root of the word, the verb rioter, simply meant to quarrel.
A riot is the ultimate quarrel with the societal status quo.
Is what is happening in Portland, Oregon a riot?
Perhaps it used to be. While it is fatuous to pretend a bunch of scruffs lighting late-night trash-can fires and shooting Roman candles at the walls of a federal courthouse are trying in any meaningful way “to burn it down,” whatever was going on last week wasn’t a dinner party.
But if it was a riot, it was one created by the current short-timer president. Desperate, as at so many times over the past four years, to distract the fickle populace from his various shortcomings as a leader, he this time produced the bright, shiny object that is sending in unasked-for federal police to deal with a local situation.
And when these cobbled-together uniforms from various agencies naturally bungled the job they were nominally sent to do — “protecting federal property” — by rising to the bait offered by rioters and making with the night stick, the tear gas, the unmarked white vans, short-timer got what he wanted: another temporary distraction from his miserable inabilities.
Thursday night, when the federal agents were withdrawn from their duties after the strenuous objections of city and state leaders who didn’t care to be occupied, the monthslong protests over racial violence by police went back to being peaceful ones. (The feds were apparently still inside peeking out the windows, but their creation of a riot by standing outside and putting on riot gear was in the past.)
It was a victory for Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, who wrote that federal officers “have acted as an occupying force & brought violence.” She negotiated the withdrawal of the occupation with the vice president.
Even after that agreement, the short-timer couldn’t let it go. By doubly bungling the novel coronavirus pandemic — by failing to quarantine quickly, so that both American cases and American deaths could have been minimized in a matter of weeks, he is having to campaign with an economy in ruins — he can’t run for re-election on his record. So, distractions. So, “law and order.” The governor “isn’t doing her job,” he wrote after the negotiations were already over. “She must clear out, and in some cases arrest, the Anarchists & Agitators in Portland.”
That’s the spirit! It’s the kind of talk that works both for desperate short-timers, and for rioters. The rest of us — we’re not so easily distracted. We’re eager to go back to everyday life, even with its grim continuity.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.
