Flashmobs

Walking the Edge:

London's mobs seem to be using social media to organize themselves. There's no reason this can't be done very efficiently, as an asymmetric way of overcoming even the most robust police presence. After all, even a rich community with a very high normal police density can be the sudden locus of a flashmob of a few hundred gangsters, who can easily overwhelm the few policemen who would constitute a 'very high normal police density.' As with a terrorist attack, there is really no defense here except to harden the general society, so that there is a ready made 'anti-flashmob' of ordinary citizens who can pin down the gangsters long enough for a response to arrive. That response can be police, military, or what Major General Rick Lynch used to call 'concerned local citizens' with equal effect. What is important is that we have lost the 'find' phase of the old military rule to 'find, fix, and finish.' We need to be prepared to 'fix' them wherever they should happen to 'find' themselves. Finishing, assuming the fixing can be done, isn't that hard a nut to crack.

In America this phenomenon has a dangerous racial tendency, and in both directions. For all that commentators spoke of America being 'post-racial' just a few short years ago, the truth is that America has not become 'post-racial' at all. What America has become is antiracist. American culture is currently devoted to the proposition that racism will not be the rule in our society.

America has not forgotten its racial divisions, though. As the Buddhist proverb says, "To say you have forgiven but not forgotten is to say that you have not forgiven." What we have put in place is a set of protocols and social controls designed to suppress anything like racist expression. This is formalized and legal at the margins -- anti-discrimination suits are not unheard of -- but it is a system of social control as much as it is a system of political control. We, the People, have decided we do not want to be racists. At the same time, we remember what it was like to be racists: indeed, it is precisely because we remember what it was like to have a racist society that we have become so devoted to doing it otherwise.

This antiracism marks a real change from the bad old days, but it is far from a "postracial society." There is grave danger of having the old fault lines brought back into focus. The very young people who are engaging in this violence are the ones among us with the least memory of what the 'bad old days' were like -- they are least likely to believe in the change, because they did not live to see it.

That's the way it goes, as the opening lines of Quentin Tarantino's True Romance say, but sometimes it goes the other way too. We may be watching the tide break at the high water mark. This was as good as it got, perhaps: and now we shall roll back to the sea.

If not, it will only be because we dug in, and clawed the rest of the way.