In a column in the New Republic, senior editor Hendrik Hertzberg compared the Los Angeles riots unfavorably with the rioting in the ghettos 25 years ago. The rioters of the sixties, he suggests, were in a sense political animals, while those of the nineties displayed a crass and unappealing materialism.

Hertzberg, who was a cub reporter for Newsweek in the mid-sixties, recalls that back then, "the range of possibilities, negative and positive, 'revolutionary' and reformist, was seen on all sides as far broader than it is today." The riots of the sixties had, "however fleetingly, some twisted hint of the form of political demonstrations," and so were seen "as being part of the continuum of political action."

The more recent riots, on the other hand, had no such form and were part of no such continuum. "Members of gangs... improvised a role as shock troops, smashing the windows and setting the fires. Normally law-abiding citizens then stepped over the shards to help themselves to the goods... On television it all looked more like Mad Max than the Bastille."

O, for the days when people burned, looted, and murdered for the right reasons!

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