I don't know what it is about this country, but every few years we seem to get absolutely hysterical over things that in retrospect turn out to be sheerest sort of fantasy. Three hundred years ago, teenage girls claimed to have seen old ladies change themselves into cats, fly away on broomsticks and dance naked with the devil by the light of the moon. And the result was, if a cow got sick in the village, they'd pick out an old lady and hang her as a witch.

Fifteen years ago in the McMartin pre-school case, Los Angeles therapists (and the credulous prosecutors who relied on them) accused some 80 local residents of a whole string of improbable offenses, including the butchering of babies on the altars of local churches, digging up corpses, beheading horses, molesting children in hot air balloons, speedboats, car washes and in the storage room of the local convenience store. Although no one was ever convicted of anything (despite the longest, most expensive trial in American history), copycat accusations spread around the country and the world.

Five years ago the Los Angeles media suddenly decided that the city was suffering from a freeway shooting spree in which irate motorists were blasting other drivers right off the road. At the height of the (thankfully short-lived) hysteria, some people were afraid to go out to dinner at night or attend night classes for fear they wouldn't make it home alive. It ought to have been obvious to anyone not in a canvas strait-jacket that the media was blowing things wildly out of proportion (and indeed it was soon revealed that frequency of freeway shootings, low to begin with, hadn't increased at all).

Well here we are five years later right in time for our next national hysteria – the every-boy-a-bomber syndrome, which, as a parent, makes me feel a little bit absurd myself. No sooner do I get done telling my two sons how America’s First Amendment guarantees of free speech make it such a unique place then I pick up the paper and read about a Virginia Beach high school junior who was kicked out of school because two months ago he wrote a story for a state standardized test about a boy who came to school wearing an atom bomb strapped to his chest.

Although the boy wrote the story well before the deaths at Columbine, when state test graders finally got around to reading his essay, they immediately notified his principal, who promptly began expulsion proceedings. And this happened in spite of the fact that there was zero evidence that it was a threat, was meant as a threat or could have hurt anyone. It was a creative writing essay, not an ultimatum. Besides, where is a teenage boy -- or anyone else -- going to get an atomic bomb to strap to his chest? How could he possibly carry any such threat out, even if he had wanted to? Do they even come that small? No matter. The school, which had "a zero tolerance policy" for nuclear weapons in the classroom, summarily tossed out the kid on his ear.

In Port Huron, Mich., a week ago four other teenage boys (two 13 and two 14) were arrested for conspiracy to blow up their school after a girl overheard them saying they were going to buy guns and steal other weapons, which they then planned to use to blow up the school and rape the girls. The boys (at least according to the press reports I read) hadn't actually done anything concrete at all. The charge against the boys was rather conspiracy, which as I read it probably meant that the boys were sitting around one day laughing and guffawing and elbowing each other in the ribs in stitches over their wildest fantasies. A lawyer for one of the boys said the worst thing his client had ever done was "talking in class and running in the halls," but now the boy (and his three friends) are facing charges which carry the potential of life in prison.

Bringing the matter a bit closer to home, two weeks ago my own 14-year-old son was thrown out of school for having drawn a plan for blowing up the high school auditorium. If my son can be believed, he made the drawing (actually a crude hasty sketch in the front of his English notebook) with a couple of other kids more than four months ago when a winter rain forced his gym class to spend an idle hour in the high school auditorium with nothing to do (the same auditorium, incidentally, in which a few months later he would be wildly-applauded for his portrayal of Franklin Roosevelt in his school's production of "Annie"). But after the incident at Columbine, some literal-minded girl in his class suddenly remembered the drawing, whereupon she told her mom who called the assistant principal who then called me into his office to confront me with the evidence. Not only was there the sketch (which my son says he'd long ago forgotten was even in his notebook), but my son was "carrying two wristwatches" and had a photo of a bloody blender in which my son had supposedly pureed the family hamster.

To this day I don't know what the problem with the two digital wristwatches was (one was a Christmas present from me and the other was one my son found lying in the dirt with a broken band at a city bus stop), unless the assistant principal thought they were timing devices for as-yet-unassembled bombs. As for the notion that my son was planning to blowup the school, well my son may very well have had passing fantasies that day of blowing up the auditorium and the gym instructor too, but that's all they were -- adolescent fantasies.

The difference between him and the probably 200 or 300 other kids at the same school who at one time or another probably felt the same way was that he put his thoughts down on paper(and then left the page in his notebook). Indulging himself in destruction fantasies wasn't smart, but it also wasn't rare – otherwise books and movies like Stephen King's "Carrie," in which a teenage girl burns down her school, wouldn't be so wildly popular. Besides, I know exactly where he gets his notions. I remember spending the better part of my entire sixth grade drawing F-86 Sabre jets blasting MiG-15sout of the sky, shooting up ships and blowing up buildings, including no doubt my local elementary school too. The difference was, the school principal in those days had the commonsense to dismiss my "violent" drawings as the idle musings of a bored kid with too much time on his hands.

As for the supposed serious psychological problems demonstrated by my son’s pureeing of our hamster, we didn't have a hamster. What we did have was some plums, bananas and milk. One evening a couple of years ago, my son set out to make a fruit frappe in the blender. When he turned it on, it did indeed look so bloody awful it made him burst out laughing. I was there and when he called it to my attention I laughed too. With typical teenage excess, he thought it was so funny he got a camera and took a photograph. It reminded him (and me too) of the scene in "Gremlins" where the mom explodes a gremlin by trapping it in a microwave and turning on the power.

But in the wake of Littleton even innocently warped teenage humor was seen as proof of twisted minds and dangerous tendencies. I really think the assistant principal (who made a copy of the blender photo) half-believed that had it not been for his prompt action in kicking out my son, there wouldn't be anything left but a smoking crater where the auditorium used to be.

This is nuts. It's nuts for my son and it's nuts for all the other boys around the country who, according to the ACLU, have been disciplined, grilled or expelled in the last couple of weeks for such crimes as coloring their hair, wearing black trench coats, carrying chemistry texts (to learn how to make explosive compounds?), or merely displaying a tendency to "brood." To punish boys for thought crimes (especially at a time when -- despite Columbine -- school killings and indeed all school crimes are on the decline) is as ridiculous as what they did to witches 300 years ago in Salem, Mass. What on earth is the matter with our country that every decade or so its citizens go crazy over nothing at all?

Is it that people need crises in their lives and when there are no real ones around they make them up out of thin air? Is it because we've lost our national sense of community, don't know our neighbors (or their children either)? Is it because we rely too much on the sensation-seeking and ubiquitous media(academic studies show that people who rely on the media for their information about the world are more paranoid than the rest of us)?Or is it just periodic manifestations of our latent reptilian id? As human beings we're just wild at heart, and nothing will ever much change that?

Paul Ciotti is a former staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and freelance writer.