‘Yes – but does the administration have its own secret supply of food?’
‘That’s all I’m prepared to say,’ the President answered. ‘It’s a question of national security and I don’t wish to breach national security by shooting my mouth off.’
The Washington Post’s next edition carried the banner: PRESIDENT ADMITS GOV’T FOOD HOARD.
By midday Monday, the first panic was over. But the cost of the night’s destruction was estimated to run into hundreds of billions of dollars. In Los Angeles, seven downtown blocks had been burned into empty shells, and more than eight hundred people were homeless. After a tour of all the looted supermarkets, warehouses, and restaurants, the LAPD estimated that more than fifty people had died in the looting, and that several hundred had been seriously injured.
A pall of black smoke drifted northwards across the Hollywood hills, and the residents came out on to the streets to stand in silence and watch their city smoulder.
In Denver, the Brown Palace Hotel had been burned down, and it was almost impossible to see the mountains for smoke. In Las Vegas, rioting guests had stripped Caesar’s Palace, smashing windows and overturning gaming tables, and gutted seventeen restaurants. In Santa Fé, National Guardsmen had fought a three-hour gun battle with local vigilantes who had attempted to break into one of the city’s largest food depots. Eight people had been killed.
The Mayor of Chicago announced a twenty-four-hour curfew. Nobody was to leave their home until the National Guard and the emergency services had been able to clear wreckage and contain the fires. Anybody seen on the street would be shot. When she was asked on television if her orders weren’t too extreme, the Mayor snapped, ‘If you want to talk about extreme, go see what these animals have done to my city.’
Washington, DC, was comparatively unscathed, although there had been severe looting in several of the black neighbourhoods. At the first sign of trouble, the Army had been called in to surround the city centre, and by midnight there had been tanks and armoured personnel carriers positioned at Washington Circle, all the way along Constitution Avenue, and around the Capitol and the White House. One cynical news reporter, filmed beside a Sheridan tank which was parked at the intersection of 17th Street and Constitution Avenue, remarked, ‘The military must be congratulated for the speed and efficiency with which they took up a defensive posture to protect the American President from his own people.’
City life was allowed to continue in New York. The Mayor considered that curfews or military restrictions would not be ‘conducive to normalcy.’ The streets were appalling. There was broken glass littered everywhere, overturned automobiles at almost every intersection, and a fog of foul-smelling smoke. National Guardsmen patrolled Fifth Avenue in pairs, and M723 troop carriers sped across town, positioning guardsmen at potential trouble spots. But thousands of New Yorkers went to work as usual. They had coped with blackouts, transit strikes, Arctic snow, and torrential rain. What had happened during the night was only one more grotesque inconvenience.
At eleven-thirty a.m., after consultation with the governors of the worst-affected states, the President declared ‘a temporary state of National Emergency.’ He ordered special legal provisions for punishing looters, and immediately put into effect an aid-and-recovery programme out of federal funds. The New York Times was to call his actions ‘shutting the larder door after the food was bolted.’
But the national sense of shock was one of the strangest of Monday’s phenomena. It was expressed almost entirely on television, since very few people were prepared to confess to their friends that they, too, had been out looting the night before (in spite of the number of heavily-laden station wagons that had returned to the suburbs at dawn). In any case, most of the looters were law-abiding people who had acted completely out of character, and as Monday brightened, they began to feel ashamed and bewildered, and to look over the odd selection of food they had managed to scavenge, and ask themselves if it had been worth the hair-raising fright of smashing windows and burning stores and trying to elude the police.
Dr William Abrahams, of the Seattle Institute of Motivational Research, expressed his conviction on television that Americans had reached ‘that inevitable moment when their psychological model of themselves has been projected into reality – with disastrous consequences. Americans have always seen themselves as possessed of a divine right to affluence; blessed with a heavenly dispensation to go out and get whatever they want regardless of law, ethics, or basic humanity. Now they’ve put that vision into practice, and may God preserve us.’
At one p.m., the President appeared briefly on television again, and pleaded for ‘calm, constructive thinking, and prayer.’ He announced a forty-eight-hour amnesty for looters, ‘in the sure knowledge that most of you have repented of your actions’, and he asked that all stolen foodstuffs and goods should be returned to designated ‘loot points’ throughout the United States. The loot would be sold at clearance prices, and the money used to compensate city administrations, storekeepers, police departments, and supermarket chains.
By eleven o’clock that evening in the Central Time Zone, Busch Stadium in St Louis, Missouri, which had been signposted as a ‘Loot Amnesty Centre’, had been visited by only five uncomfortable-looking citizens, who returned between them two cases of corned beef, a leatherette swivel armchair, a broken portable television, sixty cans of petits pois, and a box of half-thawed soya-burgers.
By seven o’clock Pacific time, die Hollywood Bowl was stacked with 250 boxes of taco chips, bags of smashed cookies, and a truckload of garden hose.
The President later admitted that he may have made a ‘motivational misjudgement’ in announcing that the goods would be sold to compensate police and supermarket chains. Most people thought of the police as more felonious than the average man in the street; and most people believed that supermarket chains could easily sustain their losses. Apart from that, the supermarkets’ help-yourself technique of selling had convinced most people that the goods on the shelves were pretty much theirs already.
A special NBC film report at mid-afternoon showed a small country store in Forty Four, Arkansas. Looters had ransacked it during the morning, and had beheaded the proprietor with an axe as he tried to stop them. The whole store was splattered with blood, even the light fitting that hung from the ceiling. In an outraged interview, the President’s adviser on National Security said that the United States no longer had any normal right to condemn the barbaric practices of any other country, because the Americans who had committed this crime were ‘Neanderthals.’
Strangely, though, as the sun went down over the eastern seaboard, and the nation settled down for another night, the first shock and the panic began to subside, and were almost immediately replaced by boredom with the subject of looting, and irritation. Viewers began to call the major TV networks to complain that the extended evenings news bulletins were interrupting their regular viewing. A re-run of The Sting had been promised for Monday night’s NBC movie, and many television viewers were afraid they were going to miss it.
So by eight o’clock, most channels returned to normal schedules, except PBS, which doggedly kept on with interviews and analyses of the Sunday night riots. For most people’s attention-span, however, it was probably more than time to change over to something fresh. By eight o’clock, almost every available political commentator had been able to put in his ten-cents’ worth, and the news programmes were reduced to interviewing Naderites, John Birchites, and disaffected evangelists.