Ruin and heartbreak.

On Thursday I drove to thepart of town the rioters endeavored to destroy:

I know, it’s a blasted hellscape. At the corner, some local folks were sweeping up glass and trying to make repairs.

The Fuck 12 refers to the cops; from what I understand, it’s police code in California for drug enforcement police, but apparently morphed into the police in general.

Fresh gang graffiti:

Can’t quite make it out - Centrals Rifa? 30s. The 30s would be Bloods, and this is their territory, according to Minneapolis docs on gang activity.

MVS-13, Monte-Visto, Sureños afflilation. Wikipedia: “Sureños are groups of loosely affiliated gangs[22] that pay tribute to the Mexican Mafia while in U.S. state and federal correctional facilities. . . Sureño groups are involved in many aspects of criminal activity including homicides, drug trafficking kidnapping, and assaults. They are also heavily engaged in human trafficking.”

Perhaps they have their own reasons for harboring antipathy to the police.

I didn’t take many more pictures, because traffic was taxing, and I got off the main drag to juke around and head downtown. Wanted to take a picture of the Globe in the StarTribune building in case it was destroyed by rioters, downtown being one of the assembly points for that evening.

As I write this the police station has been abandoned; it is on fire, and there is great rejoicing. Destruction is fun. What would be an individual act of abasement is elevated by numbers, and the act of destruction is transmuted into an accomplishment. Yes of course, the police station, hated symbol, but equal fire has been delivered on the liquor store across the street. It's one of the last neon facades left in town.

At this point I suppose I should be upbraided for caring about property over lives; not the case at all. Just noting the small brushstrokes of the urban landscape as they pass for good. I am worried about lives, inasmuch as the news just reported that the gas mains at the station have been cut and they fear a devasting explosion.

I am assuming that people concerned with such things are racing to prevent it, and that they may, as instruments of the existing order, be set upon, because they are spoiling the vibe. if there is an explosion, and it levels homes and kills people, will they be collatoral damage to be shrugged off? Ask this woman, who, upon learning the police station was burning, tweeted:

		She is, of course, one of the good people. She believes in the proper things. She is also a white woman in California offering to give matches to a fire that might blow to hell the homes of the people in Minnesota she might otherwise tend to support. But this is war, you see, and we need a not-nice revolution, and when it is done, and the ashes have cooled, and the proper people have been disappeared, we can all get back to solar energy. Sustainably, of course.

It is a multi-racial event, which I’m not sure the news stories communicate; watching the live stream, I saw lots of . . . this.

You can't bring about the Imminent Necessary Tomorrow without destroying the perfidious emblems of captalism, like Target. But please, people, focus:

That's a bookstore. If you're going to burn books, find a place that's "corporate."

I saw this on a livestream, and had to snap it.

"When our turn comes we will make no excuses for the terror."

Karl Marx. There's more than a few of his fans about, I think. It would not be ridiculous to assume that people previously given to direct action for ther sake of destroying the existing order wouldn't show up at these events and lend a helping hand, would it? People on reddit and twitter think there are neo-Nazis in the riots, trying to start something, but you know, I'm looking at the guys who have a lot of practice with the whole "break things because you're all fascists" pasttimes.

A housing development under construction was burned. It was supposed to supply below-market-rate housing: ah well. No matter. It is better that people suffer today if it brings about the necessary future. Every one and every physical thing is expendable.

They won’t win, but they can sow the despair that grows again next season. The weeds wil be inedible, and the people who starve will ask for bread. They will be told to steal it, as this is now the moral thing to do.

It's always odd how the people who preach destruction are assumed to have skills in constructing the replacement, as if the fervent desire to tear things down is just one element of an endlessly kaleidoscopic intellect that apprehends what is to be done, and precisely how to do it.

But the bread runs out. What then? Ah, look over there: another remant of the old, cursed order. Burn it, and we will be free. Not from want, not from the rule of others, but at least free from the old ways and the whispering voice of one's conscience. There is a new, louder voice in your ear now, and it approves of all that you do.

Until, of course, it doesn't.