Among The Thugs
Don’t know why it took me a week to remember this, but one of my favorite all-time books is “Among the Thugs,” by Bill Buford*. It’s about British soccer violence in the early 80s, and Buford embeds himself with the hooligans to figure out what makes them tick, assuming that they’re engaged in some kind of social protest. Instead he discovers that mass violence is really…fun.
I think there’s a better quote than this but this was the one Wikipedia offers:
“I had not expected the violence to be so pleasurable….This is, if you like, the answer to the hundred-dollar question: why do young males riot every Saturday? They do it for the same reason that another generation drank too much, or smoked dope, or took hallucinogenic drugs, or behaved badly or rebelliously. Violence is their antisocial kick, their mind-altering experience, an adrenaline-induced euphoria that might be all the more powerful because it is generated by the body itself, with, I was convinced, many of the same addictive qualities that characterize synthetically-produced drugs”
In the end, as I recall, Buford, an American college student, ends up traveling with a horde of Brits to Italy, where he gets the crap kicked out of him by riot police. Kind of like the anglophile version of Hunter Thompson’s Hell’s Angels adventures.
Totally worth $10. Weird that it’s not on Kindle.
*who many of you know as the guy who wrote “Heat”.
