Media coverage of looting

When you've been away from this country, even for a few weeks, I must say that it takes a little time to adjust to the tropical climate, not to mention the bombings.

I use the word 'tropical' not in a prejudiced way, not as a geographer might. I suppose it is more awful in the summer on the banks of the Amazon than it is on the banks of the Hudson, but one difference I notice increasingly, as I shuffle between England and the north-eastern seaboard anyway of the United States, is one of the pleasures of England that don't get much attention either in the books or from the English, themselves, and that is the frequent splendour of the skyscapes. 

Because, I suppose, Britain is an island and any prevailing wind is always blowing across water and then meeting a different temperature on the ground, there are always clouds puffing along, and when the land is warm and cooler winds blowing you get great ramparts of cumulus cloud which remind me dramatically that you're in the land of Constable and, for that matter, Turner. I had the new impression that many of the dramatic and splendid skies which Turner painted on to his Italian landscapes might very well have been done from life sitting in a field in Gloucestershire, or on a cliff on the coast of Dorset. 

You tend to notice such pleasures only when they're missing and when I left London, my wife, who was staying on for a day or two, said, 'Well, you'll get back and you'll walk out of the airport into the oven of the outdoors and you'll see a leaden sky and you'll probably land up in one of those cabs which have a sort of grille, or partition, right in front of your face.' I call these penitentiary cabs for they do give you the impression that you've just been locked in there and are bound for Sing Sing. Well, so it was. 

I got home and turned on the air-conditioning and instantly telephoned my golf partner in the country, and I say, 'How's the weather at your end of the island?' 'Oh, beautiful!' he says. 'It is?' I say, 'Well it's hot here and there's a sky like lead and it's about 90 per cent humidity.' 'Yeah,' he says, 'it's pretty warm here too and, true, it is kind of a grey sky.' 

This indestructible New Yorker, born and bred here and seared and sautéed for 70 summers in New York heat, has a marvellous faculty to thank God for any weather he chooses to dispense, short of an earthquake or a hurricane. He doesn't know the difference between 60 and 90 degrees and, like an Irishman with his cold winds and dank skies in January, February and March, he doesn't think there's anything abominable about them. They are just life. 

Well, no doubt I shall get over this cantankerousness by late September, October certainly, when we, too, get cold winds blowing from Canada over the hot land and all the humidity and lead are wafted away and we, too, see blue skies as a kind of ocean, broken by great puffing clouds. And the light is as clear and blinding as the beginning of the world. 

So, under the grey hot sky, we turned to what somebody immortally called 'the good, grey New York Times' and we thrash our way through its dense polysyllabic prose to find out what's on people's minds. 

Coming back here two weeks after the blackout, it's rather like arriving in England just after the Second War when people were still nursing their favourite experiences of the Blitz. Everybody has his story about the blackout. At the airport even, a cheerful Customs man told me he was caught in the tube and got to his family 11 hours later. So far, I've not run into anyone who was trapped in a lift. That has always seemed to me to be the horror I should most want to avoid. 

A friend of mine, who is, as we say, in the media – he handles United Nations radio programmes in many languages around the world – he has an interesting theory about the wholesale looting in the Bronx, in East Harlem and Brooklyn. And, let me quickly add, by the way, that if the same catastrophe had hit London with the same results, there would have been no sign of looting over nine-tenths of London, as there was no sign of it over nine-tenths of Manhattan. What most people downtown, midtown, uptown remember now is youngsters wanting to help, a rush of volunteers to the hospitals and a general surge of companionship. 

But about the looting. My UN friend points out that though the electric power was paralysed everywhere and the lights went out and the underground stopped and air-conditioners died, refrigerators went off, and so on, one device that did not go out was the transistor radio. My friend had one and within minutes of the blackout he switched it on and the first thing he heard was that looting had started, tentatively, sneakily and the bulletin mentioned that the police were in the dark, along with everybody else, and powerless so far to do much about it. 

What occurred to my friend is a very plausible guess indeed. He thought, 'Who owns most of the transistor sets in New York City?' The answer would be much the same, I imagine, if the question were put in Hong Kong or Casablanca or Cape Town. The answer is the blacks, who cannot afford a plug-in radio, let alone a television set. And my friend pictured the usual swarm of youngsters, down in Brooklyn and up in Harlem, who trudge along the streets at night, carrying a transistor belting out hard rock and he thought, 'I wonder what these dramatic announcements are doing to them?' For, the radio stations, once they'd announced the extent of the blackout, grabbed, as all newsmen do, at the most tasty, the most dramatic news they can pick up – looting – with the implication that the police were still a long way off. 

It seems to me a very likely guess. Certainly, if I were very poor and yearned for a telly or a car and I picked up this news on my little hand radio, I might well go to the nearest supermarket or furniture store or TV shop and turn myself into Jean Valjean. The fact, it is not denied, is that once people in those districts saw that they could plunder freely, the looting grew less sneaky and more leisurely and soon the young and brash were joined by the middle-aged and the old, amid joyful cries of 'It's Christmas!' and 'Poppa, give me a hand with this chair!' and 'Man! How'd you like a fine, cabinet colour TV?' 

Well, by now of course, and inevitably, the sociologists have joined in the enquiry to figure out deep and subtle reasons, denied to you and me, about why it happened. One of them, more accurately described as an historian, came up with an article in the New York Times which drew a striking analogy with a famous, or infamous, incident in New York in 1902, when poor Jews mounted a protest against the rising price of kosher meat and formed a boycott against retailers who went on buying from the wholesalers. There was some rioting and there were demonstrations and the incidence has gone into the books as the Kosher Food Riots of 1902. 

Well, this week, the professor had what was coming to him from a host of old Jews who were there in 1902, or whose parents were, and who have very sharp, non-sociological memories of the riots. To a man and a woman, they find that the professor is comparing apples and oranges and failing to distinguish between a protestor and a looter. Many of these letters – there was a whole page of them – were written by old folk who'd learned their English in the public schools here and were grounded in grammar and turning spoken English into written English. Consequently, they write a simple, articulate, moving English beyond the reach of most sociologists moving in the foggy stratosphere of their professional jargon. Thus one old man wrote, 'The women who took part in the 1902 incidence had a grievance which they expressed by direct action, only against the retailers whom they felt were the cause of their misery. Although they destroyed the overpriced meat they could not afford, they did not steal, they did not wantonly destroy property, they did not attack anyone and they did not loot.' 

Many of these people point out that the 1977 looters were not raising a protest against white society or the rich, they were uniformly bankrupting – by raiding the stores of – small black shopkeepers, their own kind. One old lady wrote, 'How can the professor mention in the same breath the brave souls, who risked life and limb to speak out against greed, and the looters, who sought only selfish gain?' 

To me, the most moving letter came from an old Jew, one Morris Katz, who grew up on the Lower East Side. 'My father worked six, sometimes seven, days a week and I was asleep before he left for work and asleep when he came home from the sweatshop. It was a struggle in those days to feed a family. I don't recall any rioting for kosher, Italian, Polish or any other ethnic food; honesty and self-respect kept the open pushcarts and their owners safe. We helped those who had less. And in those days, forming and joining a union was difficult and dangerous but we did it for our own betterment and security. I cannot deny there was rioting in 1902, but it was food, only.' 

Another man put it in a nutshell: 'You cannot compare the principles and leadership of today's rioters with the overworked, exploited people of 1902 who had no sort of welfare, no rent support, no Medicaid. They were poor immigrants who had a decent cause and a fair complaint.' 

I don't imagine that the news of the blackout looting will have helped, in any way, the people who are still poor, still self-respecting and who also have a decent cause and a fair complaint. The New York Times, coincidentally, has just done a survey of public attitudes to welfare and it finds that the word itself, because of the vast abuse of welfare, is a red rag to most people. And by 'most' I mean an overwhelming majority of the rich, the poor, conservatives, liberals – all but the blacks. The survey also found, however, that whenever questions were put about the need for welfare, but the word 'welfare' itself was suppressed, 'Americans', it says, 'display a deep compassion for those who are destitute and helpless.' 

This is a fascinating and, at times, heart-rending contradiction, which I hope we might go into next time.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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