An essay in the Washington Post about the non-spontaneous riots in Ferguson, Missouri, included a digression on another kind of uprising: the “party riot,” what some college students do when they lose or win a big game or what breaks out at Mardi Gras or other festivals when revellers just want to have a good time.
From Marc Fisher & Wesley Lowery, Ferguson violence broke the mold in three ways — one of which is just unfolding now – The Washington Post:
On the left, the discord in Ferguson has been viewed by some as part of a larger fraying of American society, of a piece with the “party riots” that have turned Mardi Gras, celebrations of sports teams’ defeats (and even some victories), and college drinking festivals into scenes of violent confrontation with police.
“Can’t you see it’s we who own the night?” sings, of all pop figures, Miley Cyrus, and often these days, it’s white college kids — drunk more on cheap hooch than on revolutionary rhetoric — who face off against the authorities. Some leftist theorists see social rebellion in such street battles, an uprising against the ocean of student debt, the paucity of jobs, the growing sense that the American promise of social mobility has been broken.
Such riots are an expression of “the exuberant togetherness of crowds and a sense of postgraduate precariousness,” writes Willie Osterweil, an essayist and punk musician, in the New Inquiry.
What those bursts of violence have in common with the eruptions that follow police shootings of young black men is a new sense of accountability driven by the ubiquity of smartphones and social media.
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