We’re on the bus down to the tube station, some old guy nearby is a bit worse for wear, off-focus, nursing a beer. Little does he know that he is about to be slapped hard a few times in the face, and that one of the slapper’s mates will film the slaps and the reaction on their cameraphone and the others will laugh out loud. And the surrounding adults will be too scared to back him up. The man’s protests to leave him alone, he’s just been to a funeral, you kids haven’t lived, wouldn’t understand, etc, are met with the totally-expected yeah whatevers by the unconcerned crowd. For a few days or so he is the mediated subject of adolescents’ fun, as the file gets sent from phone to phone and downloaded onto online youth forums. The pointless ultraviolence of Burgess’ droogs has arrived.

This happened just before the latest frenzy about the “kids of today”. Scare stories about The Happy Slapping phenomenon coincided nicely with critical mass being reached in stories about the menace of (probably black) kids in hoods (“hoodies” sounds like an adult trying to talk cool), kids bunking off for group-sex sessions – the so-called daisy chain, the concomitant outbreak of chlamydia, and, ooh, the mass breakdown of decency, standards, respect, please god protect us from this swarm of youth, etc. Tony, can you do something? No, but the Bluewater shopping centre can ban kids in hoods, and the Daily Mail can go front page with a kid’s face all bruised up from a filmed slap off. Oh yes, there can be plenty of tutting in the kids’ direction but probably little actual change (I’m sure it would be possible to get Vodafone to block the functionality, for example).

The hoodlums in hoods issue is the best illustrator here, because like the ridiculous coverage of “chav”, it reflects a generalised urban fear reduced to a Little Britain-esque preoccupation. They’ve been de rigueur in America for 20 years without such worries, and indeed part of the scenery for a while here. But when tongues start wagging it doesn’t take long before it becomes the latest big issue. John Prescott was vocalmost, adding to the hysteria.

The revulsion at hoods (personally I fear the ones round the neck of cobras more) accommodates a social pogrom. “Right, you’re wearing something that makes it difficult to see your face; you now constitute a threat to private property – you’ve forfeited your identity and your rights.” Central London’s Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre also banned groups of people wearing said garment and some weeks before the ToryWater Shopping Mall (off J7 of the Hell-in-a-Handcart Expressway) but this only received coverage after the latter announcement. The Elephant consumers and custodians are clearly of little concern to anyone other than themselves, but it does add an element of earthy working-class integrity to this infantile persecution.

Meanwhile, happy slapping is bound to increase in line with the frequency and volume of front page publicity it receives. In a culture driven by the needs of corporate capital, celebrity is the alchemy that distracts most successfully and a bastardised version of that acclaimed status (featuring in a national newspaper having slapped a woman bald from chemotherapy treatment, for example), fits the spiritual bill nicely.

Generation gap
As well as this entirely choreographed hysteria, the furore also has to be seen in the context of the generation gap. As I was explaining to my bourgeois ensemble after Vieira had slammed home the crucial penalty and celeb(e)rated in front of the away fans (children don’t take their cues from adult fayre, oh no, not at all), thirty-somethings like us for the first time are not down with the kids. I may know the difference between Roll Deep and Ruff Sqwad but my mind does not work like that of a ragamuffin scrote (neither does Riko Dan’s or Target’s). Moreover, all the well meaning commentaries in the broadsheets are similarly from 30-40-year-olds in ivory towers now clinically divorced from the streetwise youth experience (oh sure, they hear their kids rocking out to Linkin Park every now and then). They just don’t understand.

Those who came through into the Rave New World thought the culture wars had been won, societal change had been wrought and we’d reached eden. Not so, 10-15 years later we’re back in the mire worrying “how can we bring kids up here” as others consider their exit from the city. Not only do we see kids having the best time, but they film the experience and milk it for all its worth. Are some of us jealous? Probably yes.

Cull is also laying the blame, if blame must be dished out, at the feet of entertainment corporations and the guile-less governments who let them do what they like. With youth more than any other age group led by image, the society of spectacle, what they could do without is endless shots of talentless rappers big pimpin’ up the joint. Snoop Doggy Dog – not so much a case of “kick this evil bastard out” (Daily Star, 1994) as “stop him and his ilk being salacious vectors for false consciousness”. Then there’s Jackass and Dirty Sanchez, Tango ads and that twat Dom Joly. Yes sirree, those who have made successful careers and comfy homes out of the media, marketing, promotion and the like support in the broadest sense this life of rampant materialism, so don’t turn round and complain when it’s thrown back in your face by a cheeky blud from Wood Green. When the latest stuff hits the market without any regulation or guidance things get abused. Things always get misappropriated, guitars and amps weren’t supposed to make the horrible noise of punk; ecstasy was a medicinal drug. And should a 14-year-old have a cameraphone anyway?

This is the rock ’n roll culture of liberation and rebellion each generation bequeaths to the next – the uth, or at least those who are bothered by the clamour of recognition, have to be seen to be one louder than the last, otherwise their era will go out with a whimper. My wife recalls a time when a black girl screamed in her face as she walked past – no reason, no context, just a mad thing to do, the sort of thing you’d hear on 1Xtra or Westwood, jus bare jokes innit. But things will get worse – if you must see it in those terms – while society as a whole is deluged by multi-media possibility.

Naturally, the hatred of youths and their fads is a reliable tool of controlled social division imported from the brave new laboratory of the United Hates. A brief scan of Hunter S. Thompson’s fine study of the Hell’s Angels confirms the irresistibility to the US media of exaggerating the excesses of ‘youth’ movements; a technique that has been refined and successfully exported to countries with a similar language and penchant for buying in to hysterical media coverage and campaigns. And it is the buying in which makes this technique both so attractive to media companies and narcotic to the gorilla slappers themselves and those reacting to the antagonising stimuli with a mixture of cosmetic disbelief and violent farts.

Unable to see reason through the fear, you could pack yourself off to a gated development in Surrey heathland, safe from harm. You could let the grimey cats win the day. We suggest a more reasoned approach to the epidemic of uncontrollable juvenalia. Big them up, give them respect (cf, our Language article ), and be mindful of the Friday Thing’s appraisal: “We're not saying daisy chaining is made up, but schoolchildren do talk crap.” I may not ‘get’ kid, but we do know many live in a bubble word of hype, Chinese whispers and the most pointless things taking on extreme importance. You don’t have to facilitate that any more than you need to drive a big car and listen to Coldplay.