Riot by Appointment

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Does that make Buford barmy too? Eight years is a long time to spend reaching the banal conclusion that "the crowd is in all of us." But Buford's investigation contains more than the mere revelation that the savagery of the crowd is infectious, or that violence is a narcotic. After searching for the reasons behind the calculated thuggery, Buford rejects the conventional explanations. Yes, the British working class has always been violent. Yes, soccer hooliganism is also symptomatic of the "rot of our times." But the brutish Brits depicted by Buford are not rebelling against economic or social oppression. There is no hidden explanation. "This bored, empty, decadent generation," he concludes, "consists of nothing more than what it appears to be. It is a lad culture without mystery, so deadened that it uses violence to wake itself up. It pricks itself so that it has feeling, burns its flesh so that it has smell." And the smell is pungent: it has the reek of the clockwork orange as the mechanism spins out of control.