i've been thinking the past few days about the MP set on fire business, and have come to the conclusion that it was both horrible and deeply hysterical at the same time. i don't suppose i need to elaborate on horrible, but when i say hysterical, i mean that independent of any ill feelings i may have towards our police state. that would be kind of cruel, even for me. what i mean is this, there's something inherently funny about violence that involves setting other people on fire; it invokes cartoon images of daffy duck with his hair alight, or strong bad's children's book. it's violence of the wile e. coyote variety, and strangely enough, it gives us the first licence to think about it as something other than an act of violence.

once granted that license, one begins to realize that this fire-starting had far more symbolic value than (for example) if a meat cleaver had been taken to the guy, think: flag burning, sodom and gomorrah. really, the form of the act spoke almost as loud as its nature, and, even if unintentionally, made it more than just an act of malice or madness. it gave people an image, one of those pictures that speak a thousand words, that grow to become something larger than the event itself in the minds of people who care to mull over it.