Why don't Americans riot?

   19 July 2007, terribly early in the morning

I’m reading through Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason — which I can confirm could be renamed An Assault on the Bush Administration — I just finished reading Nemesis, and I watched V for Vendetta again with Shima last night. I now feel like starting a riot, but then I live in the idyllic wonderland that is Canada: I’m not sure what’d I’d riot about. Why don’t Americans riot? This is what I can’t understand. You have a government that clearly operates in its own interests, not in the interests of its people. There is blatant cronyism in most everything the Bush administration does, from the laws it passes to the people it protects. Democracy is supposed to be by the people for the people. I don’t know what is up in America now, but it certainly can’t be called a Democracy. Now if the poor were getting less poor, they might welcome the slow march towards fascism, but as far as I can tell this isn’t the case. It is amazing what you can convince people they want. I need to read Manufacturing Consent one of these days.

|  

Comments

  1. You might also want to look up The Age of Consent: A manifesto for a new world order by George Monbiot. He’s a great writer.

    by martha on Jul 19, 14:07   #

  2. Cool, I’ll keep that in mind. I was thinking I’d stop reading books like that because it’s going to give me high blood pressure. Or at least it would if I wasn’t so super mellow. I think I’m going to start reading books about computers and math for the next little while. I feel like I’ve forgotten so much. Of course, it’s hard to read a math text book on the bus.

    by Ramanan on Jul 19, 14:15   #

  3. Have you had a chance to get through Parenti’s book yet? Some of it’s quite relevant to this.

    by Matt on Jul 19, 14:28   #

  4. Maybe they will start soon? Of course i’m just kidding; what kind of world would it be if the people elected to lead were held accountable?

    by haran on Jul 19, 15:10   #

  5. Not yet Matt; it’s next up on my list. It sounds awesome.

    by Ramanan on Jul 19, 15:42   #

  6. Maybe it’s because when some do riot, they get jailed and unfairly judged.

    Then again, maybe we aren’t angry enough to riot quite yet.

    by Ann on Jul 20, 05:10   #

Don't be shy, you can comment too!

 
Some things to keep in mind: You can style comments using Textile. In particular, *text* will get turned into text and _text_ will get turned into text. You can post a link using the command "linktext":link, so something like "google":http://www.google.com will get turned in to google. I may erase off-topic comments, or edit poorly formatted comments; I do this very rarely.