There have been protests and rioting in London and other English cities (Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester), following the shooting of a black man, reportedly an armed criminal under surveillance. The prime minister and mayor were on vacation when the rioting began, rioting that has included looting and vandalism, followed by accusations that there have not been enough policemen on the streets. It is surprising news, reports that suggest that there must have been tensions slowly burning beneath the social surface—before the riot, before the police shooting. Some people have acknowledged deprivation, poverty, and unemployment, with one in five young persons having no work, and cuts in government programs, as possible causes for the disturbance; and others condemn the rioting and theft as thuggery. The young people involved have communicated by social media, using Facebook and Twitter to organize meeting and give advice about eluding the police. Looters have taken shoes, television sets, and wine. I found myself hearing the reports and trying to think of the English culture I was familiar with, wondering if there were signs to be found there. Literature did not immediately come to mind, though films did, some of them inspired by written fiction. I had just seen the old British television program of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, which—except for the great distinction between economic classes and the privilege of the upper class—did not suggest conflict. I thought of films I had remembered as being set in Britain: About a Boy, and An Education, and Bright Star, Control, Creation, Dorian Gray, The Duchess, The Edge of Love, Jane Eyre, King Lear, Kinky Boots, Last Chance Harvey, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Miss Potter, Never Let Me Go, The Other Man, The Oxford Murders, Pride and Prejudice, The Queen, Sense and Sensibility, Sherlock Holmes, Small Island, Split Second, Under the Greenwood Tree, When Did You Last See Your Father?, and The Young Victoria. So many of the films I could recall seemed to be about civilized white people in the rural English countryside, their concerns mostly personal. I did think of the Stephen Frears/Hanif Kureishi collaborations of decades past, My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, films that explored the roiling beneath impressive appearances, with their metropolitan mix of money, politics, sex, and wit; and I thought of Alfonso Cuaron’s futurist nightmare of several years ago, Children of Men. Art is not a handbook or manual, and many of its resources are aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual, of course; but one standard for judging it is whether it prepares us for the world we are to live in. Finally, I remembered English rock, with its roots in American rhythm and blues (and possibly the English music hall)—and the rude explosion of punk music, a music of alienation and anger that attacked the establishment. That can be a guide; it certainly was a warning. As might have been the violently expressive work of the painter Francis Bacon.
