We're Playing With Fire

Four brief scenes from an American boy’s summer days nearly 60 years ago:

The first, at the age of 5, sitting on the concrete floor of my family’s cellar, carefully lighting one match after the other and watching them burn half-way down, playing with fire for the first time, enjoying the delicious knowledge that if I wasn’t careful I would burn my family’s house down – or at least my fingers. What power I was suddenly in command of!

Another summer day just a year or so later: Bored and walking along a railroad track near my family’s home in the dry hills of southern Wyoming, the silence interrupted only by the clacking of coal trains passing. I suddenly spot a few older boys I knew from the neighborhood. They’re bent over an anthill, cackling maniacally as they use a magnifying glass to burn the ants as they emerge in frenzied confusion from their anthill. I watch briefly with a mixture of fascinated curiosity, before I flee in revulsion, amazed not for the last time by the gleeful sadism of boys.

A year or so later I was introduced to another jolly game. An older boy showed a few of us fellows that if you take a clothes pin apart and reverse the wooden parts with the spring bent just so inside, then tape it back together, you could then insert one of the old fashioned strike-anywhere kitchen matches, head first in the open mouth between the opening of the pegs. If you then pressed down on the pegs, the spring would suddenly hit the match head, both igniting it as well as causing the match to instantly fly 4 or 5 meters through the air, a blazing missile to be avoided. For several weeks we boys warred with each other, as paintballers do today, and our mothers were furious when we came home with scorched hair and singed shirts. Fire was fun!

The last memory of summer folly was being shown, again, by an older boy, that if you take a can, open one end and remove the contents of the can, then make a pencil-width hole in the other end, you could then do the following: fill a pot with water, place the open end of the can down in the water with the end of the can with the little hole sticking up out of the water. You could then place a fire cracker firmly into the little hole, and when you lit it, the explosion, with the help of the water vacuum, caused the can to shoot loudly 10 meters into the air. Rocket science at the age of eight!

I did this many many times. Until one day I didn’t back away quickly enough after lighting the fuse, and the can shot up and hit me in the middle of my forehead. The force was so great that I was instantly knocked unconscious. But before I could collapse to the ground, the water shot up, too, and hit my face, bringing me back to staggering consciousness. For days after I wandered around with a bump the size of a goose-egg on my forehead. That’s the last time I’ve played with fire (..except where women are concerned..)

Yes, we humanoids have called ourselves many things. Homo Erectus – the Upright Man. Homo Sapiens – the Wise(?) Man. Homo Ludens – the Playful man. But perhaps the best description for us ought to be Homo Combustus – the Burning Man.

As is usually noted (by us) Man is the most intelligent of all the earth’s animals. But to be fair perhaps the order ought to be reversed. For no other animal on the planet is dumb enough to play with fire. Not a single one. But we do, and we boastful nitwits take pride in what we believe is our mastery over the most dramatic of the four classical elements.

Fire has always made for drama. The ancient Greeks told us that Zeus was angry with the human race because cunning humans were giving him just the skin and bones of animal sacrifices and keeping the meat for themselves – and so as punishment he kept the knowledge of fire from us. And when Prometheus, a minor god, went behind Zeus’s back and stole fire and gave it to the residents of Earth, Zeus punished Prometheus by chaining him to a rock and having an eagle devour the unhappy fellow’s liver, day after day through all eternity. I repeat - his liver (..humans years later learned to use fire to distill alcohol.. which eats what? Our livers of course. Clever and farsighted people, those Greeks.)

The Bible tells us God got Moses’ attention with a burning bush, and the all loving Father in the sky rained fire and brimstone down upon the residents of Sodom & Gomorrah, roasting small children alive for the sins of their parents. The Zoroastrians of ancient Persia, too, worshipped fire as the very symbol of God.

Since the beginning of our long and complex relationship with fire, we have learned to heat our homes, which enabled us to spread north to colder climes, to cook our food, which made digestion and the ingestion of more calories easier. We have smelted metal ore to make tools and the beams for tall buildings. We have used fire to make steam for locomotives, and burned fuel in internal combustion engines to move us about. And we have used fire not only to make weapons but to make weapons that make fire, like flame throwers and napalm. And please note, atom bombs are not called atom bombs by those who proudly make them. They call them thermo-nuclear devices!

Yes, Homo Combustus has utilized fire for a wide variety of entertaining and necessary endeavors. We’ve burned heretics and witches at the stake, we burned the initials of our ranches into the hides of our cattle – and slave owners once routinely did the same to their slaves!

And if you think the practice has disappeared, wander into any up-to-date tattoo parlor and you’ll be offered along with tattoos the newest fad – branding! Now one can see happy 16 year-old Bettina, having lied about her age to the tattooer, who really didn’t care, emerging from his shop with Johnny, Jimmy or Brian’s name branded in large welts into her accommodating little backside!
And as for slash and burn agriculture you don’t need to travel to the Amazon to see starving locals employ fire to clear away vegetation. City workers in Copenhagen wander the streets burning thousands of liters of fuel as they scorch away unsightly weeds in the summer time. Other good citizens wander the streets, puffing on rolled up tubes of other types of vegetation, adding their smoke and Co2 to the atmosphere. And speaking of pollution, China needs to open a new coal mine nearly every week just to provide the fuel needed to produce the electricity for all the new computers catering to the Chinese’ growing internet addiction. Just wait until all their coming electric cars are hungering for electricity!

We burn and we burn and we burn.

Even in our literature, our poetry, our sex lives, we burn. “I burn for your burning kisses!” The fires of passion burn “within our hearts” if not in lower regions. We burn with ambition.

Other searing sensations? In Scandinavia those unhappy hopefuls who have been left standing in wait for a date to show up, are said to have been burned away – while we in America just say we’ve been stood up.

And when intelligence services like the C.I.A. or the K.G.B. deliberately sacrificed an agent like a pawn in a game, they were said to have “burned” him. At the moment increasing numbers of employees are being “fired” – an expression which came from being shot out of a canon – which were set afire.

And for generations Danes have loudly and proudly sung about their witch-burning King Christian standing by his tall mast in smoke and vapor, while the English have just as proudly sung
“Bring me my bow of burning gold
Bring me my arrows of desire
Bring me my spears o'clouds unfold
Bring me my chariot of fire
I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
'Til we have built Jerusalem”
Yes, the burning bows of the Middle East are missile launchers today, and the chariots of fire are armored tanks. Progress!

But wait a minute. “Enough negativity,” some skeptical readers may well be thinking. “Do we have to hear only about the burning of crosses by the hate-filled Ku Klux Klan or Hitler’s fiery crematorium ovens? Surely there is much good we have gotten from fire? What about the candles on birthday cakes, or at romantic dinners? Or the joyous and beautiful fireworks decorating the sky on New Year’s Eve? And isn’t there a happy hippie festival held every year in the desert of Nevada called the Burning Man Festival, where at the climax a giant human figure is set afire… for some reason or another?”

Well, yes. But as for candlelit romance, why is the harsh light of day not conducive to romance? Too much reality? Because we were only safe from being eaten by wild animals if we engaged in sex in darkened caves?

And as for fireworks, I was one of the hundreds of thousands of idiots assembled on Rådhuspladsen New Year’s eve 1999-2000, celebrating the turn of the century.. (even though technically it was the next year that the new century really began.) At midnight so many fireworks were set off that I really thought we would all be asphyxiated by sulfur poisoning as the heavy blanket of smoke spreading was indescribable. A few minutes into the explosive orgy, a group of young imbeciles began gleefully firing rockets sideways into the packed crowd. I was hit in the leg by one, a very painful experience I can assure you. And when I got home I discovered I couldn’t take my pants off. A piece of cardboard from the rocket had pierced my pants and driven part of it into my calf. I had to yank the pants off and was left with ti-øre sized hole after I dug the cardboard plug out of my leg with tweezers.
Fuck fireworks!

And speaking of colorful conflagrations, what does the Danish nation.. and world television coverage have to look forward to at the climate conference?

Self-righteous autonome-types and other self-proclaimed environmental activists, in their usual exhibition of their lack of imagination and morals, slinging bricks and cobblestones as well as Molotov cocktails at police, filling the air with more smoke, Co2 and petrol fumes, in their hormonal-based rites of sexual and alpha-male lust for power and attention. These same faces would have been seen at similar events down through history, watching with grinning satisfaction as witches, heretics, Jews and Gypsies were burned. Among a certain group of young blockheads the police have become the Jews and gypsies of today, something less than human and deserving of a fiery response (..just as some policemen consider them worthy of a good old-fashioned beating.) We Americans used to burn Vietnamese villages “in order to save them.” Blockhead young Europeans “progressives” will ignite firebombs to make our air cleaner, and in their game of cowboys and indians these flaming arrows will be sent against the wicked cowboys’ water canons!

Yes, we are told November was the warmest in history. Because we burn things. Who can still doubt that this long and ever closer relationship with fire is not also quickening our mad stampede towards destruction?

Will we rise again like Phoenix from the ashes? Or will our fate be one final suicidal self-immolation on the Wagnerian funeral pyre of our egos?

Hitler once screamed at his generals in impatience, “Is Paris burning?”

One day it may well be Paris and Pittsburgh, Beijing and Baltimore, Mumbai and Manchester, Hollywood and Horsens that are devoured by flames.

I understand there are flame-proof asbestos pajamas available on E-bay if you haven’t completed your Christmas shopping.