The Socialism of Flash Mobs; Or, How Glee Stole Your Freedom

Have you seen these people, the ones who get together in a public space and perform a seemingly spontaneous dance at the appropriate time? Then, after the music stops, they disband like, “What? This shit happens all the time,”?

Fuck those people. Who do you think you are breaking into song and dance like you’re goddamn Julie Andrews from The Sound of Music? I knew Julie Andrews, and you, sir, are no Julie Andrews.

As far as I can tell, the guiding principles of the flash mob are not that dissimilar to the guiding principles of Fight Club:

1. The first rule is, “Don’t talk about flash mob” – that is, you must pretend the flash mob doesn’t exist. If you watch video for these things, the people are always in different kinds of clothes. They’re just another group of subway passengers. They’re milling around, ostensibly minding their own business.
2. The second rule of flash mob seems to also be, “Don’t talk about flash mob” – after the stupid thing is over and they’ve ejaculated their pop sensibilities all over our unsuspecting faces, they AGAIN PRETEND LIKE NOTHING HAPPENED. As if to say they were the right people at the right time with the right ABBA song in their heart. This, despite the fact that they’re all winded from the effort.

Now, I’m happy to let people have whatever bullshit hobby they want to have, so long as it doesn’t interfere with my life in any way whatsoever. Build your HO-scale model trains and design your personal kitten-video websites and have your anonymous gay sex in truckstop bathrooms. Fine. That’s America. I’ll salute your doing it. But when you start gathering together to march in unison under the same anthem, belting out songs that seem to suggest everything’s fine and we can all let our guard down, I smell a commie.

Because entertaining as a flash mob might be, it – like it’s bastard cousin, the line dance – poses certain dangers to our way of life. The loss of individualism. The replacement of thought with mantra and song. The opioid effect of pageantry on the masses. Folks, I don’t want to be alarmist, but add a few thousand pre-teen Chinese boys with streamers and we’ve got the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics.

Recently, when I was an MFA student there, the propaganda department at Ohio State staged a flash mob to publicize the new student union that had just been completed.

A seemingly disparate group of cheerleaders, OSU employees, and band geeks got together to dance Journey’s epic rock ballad “Don’t Stop Believin’.” It was video-taped from every angle and got national news attention. I’ll let that sink in for a moment. The mind boggles, no? Here are my problems:

1. This is not a joyful explosion of youthful exuberance. It was a marketing ploy. A chance to sell the student body on the importance of working together and the beauty that can be created by putting one’s own goals second. The dance tells us to subjugate ourselves to the whole. Each gyration of the nubile young bodies seems to say, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
2. The use of the Glee version of Journey’s power pop ballad makes this flash mob – which went full-on viral, by the way – especially egregious. Glee is the national media’s version of the same ideal flash mobbing espouses on the local level. You think we’re not being controlled? Wake up. Every week, we can tune in to see foppish adolescents fighting the evils of high school through song and synchronized dance. And what is high school if not a metaphor for the free-market system of competition?
3. The Glee version of the song is soulless, stripping the last shred of our national spirit from the performance. The classic version, the one with heart and grit and America, was apparently not good enough for Ohio State. What does Broadway actor Lea Michele know about a small-town boy, born and raised in South Detroit? Nothing, I’ll tell you that.
4. See that old man at the end of the video, sashaying with Brutus the Buckeye? That’s Ohio State President E. Gordon Gee, and his appearance is where the deception behind this flash mob falls apart. We see the “mob” for what it is: not a spontaneous gathering of song-and-dance men, but rather a government-approved demonstration of control.

In the final analysis, the problem with the flash mob is that it isn’t a mob at all. There’s nothing more American than a mob: they are unruly and brash, they are reactionary. The Boston Tea Party was a mob. The Zoot Suit Riot was a mob. That’s the kind of America I love. Unreasoning. Violent. Apt to throw a fucking brick. No, the flash mob is nothing of the kind. The flash mob is all planning and timetables. It’s synchronized watches. It’s a Cold War-era military parade. But instead of high-stepping salutes to Khrushchev, we have jazz fingers. Instead of ICBMs, we have the pop and lock.

And that, my friends, is not my America at all.