FALL RIVER, Mass.--

They were plotting to blow up a bridge.

For some time now, I've been writing that America is rocketing back to the early part of the last century.

With wages slipping backward, unions being broken, immigrants changing the face of the country, Trayvon Martin standing in for the Scottsboro Boys, and the boss back to saying, "You're lucky to have a job," it might as well be 1900.

And now, as if on cue, police arrest anarchists.

Ah, anarchists, the first model of the "bomb-throwing radical." Killers of European leaders in the early part of the last century, they made a fetish of dynamite. "Ca ire," the French anarchists sang. "Every bourgeois will have his bomb."

Murmurs of "The Yellow Peril" return, as the Chinese manufacture all of America's toasters, televisions, and T-shirts. Every square inch of the country is hung with bunting, as a few old men politicians try to shoo women back into the kitchen and blacks back into the cotton patch.

It makes me want to buy a straw hat and suspenders, makes me want to smoke a cigar and bray about "isolationism."

The Industrial Workers of the World. Strikes broken up by club-swinging "goons." Back-alley abortions. Lynchings. Company "unions." A real "white man's country."

When I was in college, the few anarchists to be found were the children of semi-privilege, the sons and daughters of accountants and office managers who went to anarchist meetings because it was a sure and certain way to make your parents mad.

"We have to tear it all down so we can build a just society," the pimply anarchist said back then, blowing a cloud of smoke from a French cigarette.

Heady stuff, but no bombs. The mid-'70s were no time for dynamite. We'd had our flutter with that during the Vietnam War years, when hippies who were pathetic at the job planted a few bombs, robbed a few banks, and then ran, shocked that the masses hadn't risen on cue.

Anarchists are the too-sharp edge of rage at everything. The boss. Corporations. Low wages. The grind of the people at the bottom who wear themselves down with electric bills and health-insurance premiums.