Flash mobs started out innocuously enough. Groups of people would pre-arrange to meet at a particular location and engage in what was essentially a form of street theater, ‘spontaneously’ breaking into opera arias in department stores or Handel’s Messiah in shopping mall food courts at Christmastime, or performing some sketch and the like, with the bystanders initially taken by surprise but enjoying the performance once they caught on. It was fun and meant to entertain and educate and enlighten.

The advent of social media has enabled people to arrange for flash mobs to appear with very little notice and no prior organization and this has led to new forms of flash mob behavior. This has been of considerable value for organizing protest demonstrations in repressive countries, as we saw with the Arab spring. These were not for fun but had a serious social purpose.

But a darker side to flash mobs is now emerging and Cleveland has seen its share of them. Large numbers of young people are being notified at short notice by social media to gather at a location purely for the sake of disrupting the lives of people in that area. Recently we had a case where a street fair in the suburb of Cleveland Heights was suddenly invaded by a large number of young people who are reported to have rampaged through the crowds attending the fair, knocking over people and stalls, stomping over people’s property in the surrounding neighborhoods, and seemingly bent on just destroying the enjoyment of the people attending a local community event. As a result, that city has imposed a curfew that prohibits young people being on the streets in the evening unless accompanied by an adult.

Soon after, the Fourth of July fireworks display that is put on in my town also suddenly saw the arrival of about 500 youths who again tried to rampage through the large crowd assembled to see the show, but apparently the police were ready for them and managed to control to situation before it got out of hand.

What complicates the situation is that the young people in these mobs are almost all black and not from the small communities where the disruptions occurred (which are both racially integrated) but from the neighboring large city of Cleveland, so this has raised racial tensions. There are concerns that the curfew policy is racially motivated and will only be enforced against unaccompanied black youth. It seems that the city of Philadelphia has adopted a similar curfew policy to deal with flash mobs there.

In one of the community meetings that followed one of these incidents, a young man tried to explain the actions by saying that young people had nothing to do because the community did not provide adequate outlets for them, and that this kind of behavior was a backlash to that state of affairs. I must say that I have very little sympathy for this point of view. I do not think that it is the obligation of the community to provide amusements for young people and am baffled that they feel entitled to it. When and why and how did this feeling originate? Is it because young people today grow up with their parents taking them hither and yon to organized events so that they have not developed the ability to amuse themselves?

At the risk of sounding like a cranky old man (which I am but that is neither here nor there), when we were young the thought that our parents or the community had to provide avenues for our entertainment never occurred to us. When we had free time, we young people would get together and organize our own amusements, which often just consisted of hanging around talking or organizing pickup games on vacant lots or going to see films, and the like. We were pretty much left to ourselves and yet I do not recall being particularly bored.

Frankly I simply cannot understand the mentality of the young people who are taking part in these destructive flash mobs. There seems to be no motive other than to spoil the enjoyment of ordinary people taking part in a community event. What enjoyment does one get disturbing the peace and frightening and even injuring total strangers? After all, the events that were disrupted were free and open to everyone so it is not as if they were being excluded.

Now there are reported cases where flash mobs are being created for the purpose of looting, taking advantage of the fact that they can send out the call to the mob, gather, loot, and disperse before the police can arrive.

In some ways, the phenomenon of flash mobs that form purely for the purpose of disrupting events and attacking people is more disturbing than those which either have theft as their explicit goal or where some people use demonstrations and other forms of social protest as an opportunity to create chaos and then steal, as seems to be what is happening in England right now. These are disturbing but at least they seem to have some rational basis, however slight.

My sense of bafflement as to what is gained by these purely disruptive flash mobs is similar to my reaction to vandalism. What does one gain by simply defacing and destroying things? It does not benefit you in any way. It merely degrades the very community and the environment that the young people themselves live in, making their situations even worse. Destroying things and creating trouble and fear among ordinary people just because you think you can and want to, with no other purpose in mind, bespeaks a seriously antisocial mindset. It reminds me of the disturbing dystopian futuristic Anthony Burgess novel A Clockwork Orange (later made by Stanley Kubrick into a film), where the young toughs terrorize people just for the fun of it.

It is a bad sign when young people start destroying their own communities and daring the authorities to come after them for no apparent reason but seemingly just to show that they can.

Stephen Walt traces the beginning of the end to 1990 and the first Gulf war, which ushered in an era of American hubris about its ability to direct events in the Middle East to its and Israel’s liking.

It is noteworthy that he does not ask if the American empire is in a state of decline. He takes that as a given. The question is what has caused it.

It seems pretty obvious to me too that the US is heading for a major crash because of its unsustainable policies, a combination of oligarchical looting at home and disastrous wars overseas. What puzzles me is why more people, especially those in the upper levels of government, don’t see this and take the necessary steps to avert the catastrophe.

Maybe Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon from 2010 is right.

I fully expect the Tea Party to go on the war path over this Newsweek cover photo of their icon.

When the same magazine published a cover photo of Sarah Palin during the 2008 campaign that I thought was quite nice, I was taken aback at the protests that her wrinkles, pores, and facial hair had not been airbrushed away.

In the case of Michele Bachmann, not only do we see manic eyes, but also wrinkles, and who knows what else that I did not notice but I am sure will be highlighted by those who pay close attention to these things.