27.7 million: Viewers for the season premiere of Two and a Half Men — a shockingly high number, and the most-watched sitcom since 2005's Everybody Loves Raymond series finale.

27.3 million: Viewers who watched a rerun of Grace Under Fire on a Tuesday in March 1995. A rerun.

“He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

This is a strange experience. I can now identify events solely from reading jokes about it on Twitter. I recognized the above scene on sight, *despite* the fact that I have not seen a single frame of the VMAs this year. #FUTURETHINK

I shudder to think how disenfranchised I would have felt if I had been deprived of that long list of privileges.

That state of deprivation though is, of course, the condition that many of those rioting endure as their unbending reality. No education, a weakened family unit, no money and no way of getting any. JD Sports is probably easier to desecrate if you can't afford what's in there and the few poorly paid jobs there are taken. Amidst the bleakness of this social landscape, squinting all the while in the glare of a culture that radiates ultraviolet consumerism and infrared celebrity. That daily, hourly, incessantly enforces the egregious, deceitful message that you are what you wear, what you drive, what you watch and what you watch it on, in livid, neon pixels. The only light in their lives comes from these luminous corporate messages. No wonder they have their fucking hoods up.

Why am I surprised that these young people behave destructively, "mindlessly", motivated only by self-interest? How should we describe the actions of the city bankers who brought our economy to its knees in 2010? Altruistic? Mindful? Kind? But then again, they do wear suits, so they deserve to be bailed out, perhaps that's why not one of them has been imprisoned. And they got away with a lot more than a few fucking pairs of trainers.

These young people have no sense of community because they haven't been given one. They have no stake in society because Cameron's mentor Margaret Thatcher told us there's no such thing.

It starts out a little rambling, but about midway through, Mr. Katy Perry actually makes some salient and thoughtful observations and expresses them better than most I've seen. Between this and his also surprisingly good column on Amy Winehouse, I suppose I need to stop being surprised by him.