Another night of riots in France. And we have to ask not “why,” but “why not?” So many felt the pot boiling in LA, and the arguments against class warfare here in the US seemed finally to disappear. But wait, the focus returned to Race, with Rodney King wanting everyone to get along. Was that because of LA’s urban sprawl, or the news helicopters’ topological smoothing of borders and fronteirs? Did we buy the Race argument because class seems so hard to swallow here in the US? Or was it because, as we watched a truck driver being pulled from his rig, we saw a severe local rage, and refused to acknowledge its sources? Did the psycho-geography of the local scene combined with a hollywood twist allow us to let it all become TV’s flow?

We don’t buy it in Haussman’s Paris, though. We have no choice but to understand Core and Periphery as those who have and those who have the State. If the State can’t keep up with it’s obligations, and resorts to violence to control them, over and over, then the State will be attacked. Or so we’d like to think.

The fact that the attacks come against local businesses, like LA, like so many other local rebellions, brings us to class again. Why, when taking the opportunity to Rise up, do we always shoot each other in the foot? We can hope that some focus makes Chirac eat his words of punishment and begin to formulate a dialogue with those whom he serves. The spreading of the violence to other cities only serves to siginify the unity of the periphery against the State that keeps it down.
After all, the rich don’t need or use the state, it is a nuisance, right? Free-market = freedom as a market.