Oakland loses its grip

For as long as I can remember, Oakland has enjoyed the reputation of being a second city, the kind of place without any there there, a rowdy, blue-collar, low-rent village across the bay from suffocatingly priggish San Francisco.

Even its mayor, airy Jerry Brown, has been less among the planets and more down on the streets since he moved to the East Bay. The battering about by San Francisco’s elitists has toughened Oakland to the extent that when its football fans yell, “Kill!” it is not just bully rhetoric. They expect blood on the Astroturf.

I say this by way of explaining the riots in my old hometown after the Raiders embarrassed their followers by sleepwalking through the Super Bowl. Usually, the fans of any team that loses so thoroughly, as the Raiders did to Tampa Bay, skulk away and drink their Buds in silence, crying softly into their burlap pillows. But not in Oakland.

In Oakland, a city no one has ever adequately explained, they riot in victory and they riot in defeat. “Who can tell,” one agonized merchant asked, “whether they are frustrated or overjoyed?” Good question.

For instance, when the Raiders won their Super Bowl berth a week before the big game, hundreds expressed their pleasure by breaking windows, vandalizing businesses, setting fires and driving wildly through the streets. When the Raiders lost the Super Bowl, the fans indicated their sorrow by breaking windows, vandalizing businesses, setting fires and driving wildly through the streets. While motivations varied, the techniques remained the same.

It is the dawning of a cultural phenomenon that merges victory and defeat into one big, wild, crazy, head-smashing party. We have become accustomed over the years in college and pro football towns to the kind of behavior demonstrated in Oakland, but it usually has to do with winning, A mob demonstrated its mindless characteristics just three years ago in L.A. when the Lakers won the NBA championship.

While Oakland elevated, or lowered, the sports riot to a new level by celebrating defeat, riots per se aren’t new. Unruly crowds probably gathered to trash their surroundings as far back as the Upper Paleolithic. It is not beyond belief to imagine the mob displeasure of Cro-Magnon over the unfair distribution of mammoth meat.

In more modern times, there have been election riots, religious riots, peace riots, food riots, fraternity riots, sex riots, verdict riots, anti-abortion riots, rock concert riots, race riots, labor riots and riots just for the sheer, whimsical hell of it. The British, whose traditional manner of expressing distaste has been an arched eyebrow, have become the soccer thugs of the world, rioting not after or before the games, but during.

It’s a cultural phenomenon that has emerged more vigorously with all the uncertainty in the world. We’re carving out our own little share of violence at a time when bigger stuff is going on. In Nigeria, for instance, 215 people were killed in November in riots caused, more or less, by a beauty contest.

Chaos began at the Miss World Pageant when a newspaper writer suggested that Islam’s founding prophet would probably have chosen a Miss World contestant for a wife. While the assertion may or may not have been valid, it was reason enough for the Muslims and Christians to go at it with a vengeance, causing Miss World contestants to flutter off like frightened birds.

Catholics and Protestants have turned towns and villages upside down for lesser reasons, but I’m not sure anyone would have cared had someone suggested that maybe Jesus wouldn’t have minded a little R&R; with a woman who looked like Miss Sweden. There were, after all, those rumors about him and Mary Magdalene....

Back to Oakland. I think we owe it for having pioneered the defeat riot, reaching out to grab a little, well, fun from an otherwise disagreeable situation. It’s manifested a new form of civil unrest, which will no doubt appear in future slogans as “Oakland, Home of the Losers’ Riot.”

We’ve had our share of riots in L.A., but nothing that would define who we are. There have not been, for instance, noisy demands for a price freeze on Botox injections or a riotous insistence by the Gray Panthers that collagen be covered by Medicare. It is possible that animal activists might riot in a demand that pet owners be legally described as animal guardians, but that remains to be seen.

Despite past performances, we are not known for rioting. Our old, laid-back image oddly persists, but that’s all right with me. May I suggest, therefore, that the mellow riot be our manner of protest, where we just get out there and, well, do nothing. There’s enough going on everywhere else to fill the quota of violence for this century. So be cool. Mix a reasonable martini, turn on a little drifting music and riot the days away by relaxing on a good chair and watching the world scream by.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.