Breaking: Arsonist Dies In Fire

Here’s the easiest way to tell if someone is an arsonist: if someone dies in a fire, who do they blame?

Anyone who’s not an arsonist will blame something sensible - the person who set the fire, the conditions that allowed the fire to spread, the lack of firefighters, the fire itself. An arsonist will blame the person who dies, because an arsonist usually believes that everyone else is also an arsonist. What did they do to catch on fire? Why weren’t they wearing less flammable clothing? Why weren’t they living in a brick house? Why didn’t they fight fire with fire?

An arsonist is someone who fundamentally believes that to die by fire is a vice and to avoid dying by fire is a virtue, which is why they believe they’ll never die by fire. They believe that they've appealed some larger power - they’ve hoarded the matches to fight fire with fire, they've made the appropriate sacrifices to appease an uncaring god, they were either born in a brick house or have lied, cheated, and stole to find their way into one. And if you haven’t and are a victim, that’s a skill issue on your part. This means an arsonist’s greatest fear isn’t, as most people’s is, to die horribly by something like arson. An arsonist’s greatest fear is knowing that they’re full of shit. Mortality is the great equalizer. It doesn’t matter what privilege or power you acquire in life, in the end we all die. The measure of how valuable a life we lived isn’t in the stuff we acquired or for how long we avoided the end, it’s in how we’re remembered. Are we remembered with love, or are we remembered as someone who built the thickest, most fireproof walls around themselves as the world burned and looked down on and laughed at those outside the walls who suffered? 

There’s nothing arsonists hate more than to have another arsonist die because it lays their own hollowness bare.  And you can tell this because when it happens, they don’t blame the things any sensible person would blame for a fire. They don’t feel empathy or concern. Instead, they anxiously nitpick everyone’s reactions to this death. Why aren’t you mourning more? Are you being sad enough? Who isn’t responding correctly and how can they be punished? Aren’t you the people who are supposed to care so much about people who die in fires? When a fellow arsonist dies, they’re forced to reckon with the fact that when they die, safe and of old age and locked behind those big, thick walls they built for themselves while the word burned, no one will mourn them. Even the people behind the walls with them won’t mourn, because to mourn would require an empathy that no one who’s the kind of person to lock themselves away in safety would ever have. They set fires not in spite of the risk it poses to them, but because of the risk it poses to them. Either it will burn people who they view as deserving to be burned, or they’ll die in a fire which is the only way anyone will be sorry to see them gone.

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How to mourn the arsonist who dies in the fire they set is one of those freshman year of college questions you either get asked in a Philosophy 101 class or by someone in your dorm while you’re high. And like most questions in that category, there’s no good or right answer. There’s no morally neutral thing you can say or do that makes everyone happy or displays empathy to all.  An arsonist has died in their own fire and now there are two opposed sets of grief: the grief of the victims who suffered at the hands of the arsonist while they were alive, or the people who knew the arsonist as a person and are suffering now that they died.

As anyone who’s ever watched a true crime documentary can tell you, to be an arsonist is a very specialized skill set. It’s not enough to set something on fire, if that were the definition then anyone could become an arsonist by leaving something in the toaster for too long. An arsonist is someone who sets fires deliberately and repeatedly. And when they aren’t stopped early from doing so, they become good at choosing their victims. The better and more prolific the arsonist, the more likely their victims will be the people who humanity at large is least likely to care about the grief of: women, racial or ethnic or religious minorities, LGBTQ+ people, the disabled, the sick, the homeless, the poor. The marginalized who are terrorized by the arsonist and have spent the arsonist’s reign in grief and won’t feel grief when they die. On the contrary, the arsonist’s death is almost euphoric, an end to someone who burned down the houses of them and everyone they know and love over and over and over while the world stood by in indifference. Asking them to feel or perform the grief and sympathy they never got because the person who hurt them also had a family is in and of itself an act of violence. So if the person who set fire to the things they love dies in a fire they'll say well yeah, we told you that was a horrible way to die, but it couldn’t have happened to a more fitting person. But while arsonists may be monstrous people, they’re still people. Even as they did terrible things, they had people who loved them and now are facing the grief not only of a loved one being gone, but of them being gone in the most horrific way imaginable. These are people who in life likely enabled this arsonist, who looked the other way and handed them kerosene and matches. Much like women who love serial killers, these people likely enjoyed the power of loving and being the one loved by the arsonist, they believed it protected them in some way from ever getting burned themselves. And so for them the pain is compounded and worse - not only are they dealing with the death of a loved one, they’re feeling a pain they’re not used to feeling the way someone who’s a frequent victim is to some degree calloused against. And it’s something they so feared feeling that they made the cosmic bargain to ignore and enable the pain of others in the hopes they would never feel that pain themselves.

There’s a frequently misquoted and misattributed to Steinbeck truism that the reason there’s not class warfare more often is because people are very prone to seeing themselves as a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. Often people aren’t wired to look at victims and see victims, they’re wired to look at the privileged who they aspire to be like and view their petty aggrievement as victimhood. Humans are social animals who want to feel empathy, but not so much empathy that another person's pain stops them from functioning, which is in and of itself a useful impulse. But that means we're also often stopped from feeling solidarity with those whose suffering is greatest because that’s too painful, and we need to find ways for our own sanity to make that suffering okay or right so it hurts us less. And that means to be viewed as a victim or inspire compassion in people, you have to give a very specific performance. You have to at minimum be able-bodied and attractive, and usually also white. You have to suffer an unimaginable tragedy but never get angry or aggrieved about it, and cry softly rather than raise your voice. You must have empathy for the people who committed the violence against you but never for those who are also the victims of it, and sacrifice your own humanity to lend it to the person who did something inhumane. As much as possible, you have to be an individual who was the subject of a random act of malice and never bring attention to there being any sort of bigger systemic issue enabling that harm in the first place. To remind people they’re in a system also reminds them that that system makes it so they’re much closer to being the disenfranchised person not having their suffering taken seriously than the person who has every little discomfort treated as an emergency.  And that reminder threatens the numbing every single one of us does by telling ourselves we live in a fair world that will treat us kindly, because if we didn’t believe that then we wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning.

Whose grief do you prioritize and who do you view as a victim, the people who suffered because of the arsonist or the people who loved them and are left to mourn their absence? Because there’s no right answer, but what wrong answer you choose says a whole lot.

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There’s no justification to commit arson. Every human life holds value, and violence is something that must always be condemned. But the fact that no one deserves to die violently is generally why we view arsonists as bad in the first place. That’s a fundamentally and near-universally held truth no matter what anyone - usually themselves an arsonist who believes that everyone else is also an arsonist - claims or says otherwise. If it wasn’t, then we wouldn’t all be standing here looking back and forth between each other and the arsonist who’s been burned to death by the fire he set and wondering what the fuck do we do now?

An Addendum Two Days Later

I'm currently unemployed, and one of the questions I get asked most when I'm in an unemployment era is "why don't you go back to writing? Or start a podcast? You're so good at that, especially when it comes to explaining politics!" Which first of all, "you'd be good at having a podcast" is one of those things that I'm never sure if it's an insult or a compliment. And second of all, I'm a woman, not a white man of middling attractiveness with a failed stand up comedy career, no one's going to pay me to publicly have an opinion.

But the more honest answer is that even if it paid well I'm not sure I would. It's not the barking into the void I mind - as anyone who's seen me yap can tell you, I don't require a whole lot of feedback or affirmation to do it, and there's a certain freedom and catharsis that comes from having an outlet to yell where no one's going to hear you. No, what I mind is that the writing I excel at is on some level educational. My talent in writing has always been explaining things or relaying information or taking a thing that a lot of people have swirling thoughts on and making a clear argument out of it. I'm good at pattern recognition and bringing coherency to chaos. And in the current news environment this is somewhere between the most useful skill I could possibly have and the most useless.

One of my other useless skills is being very good at being a prophet without realizing I'm giving a prophecy. When I first graduated high school almost twenty years ago (yikes) and was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, I was a freelance TV blogger. Thankfully I think most of those writings have been lost to the internet, but I remember complaining to my parents at the time I was doing it that I didn't think I could write fast enough. I was concerned about hitching myself to a medium that rewarded whoever had the hottest and fastest take, not necessarily the best one. I was faster than most people in that I could produce a coherent analysis in a day or two that would take most people weeks, but I still required a few days and people wanted instant gratification in a way I didn't know how to give nor did I want to learn. That, I felt, was a slippery slope, because often the most rapid response to something says less about what actually happened and more about your cognitive biases and what you want to hear. You hear an arsonist sets a fire, you assume who the arsonist is, you interact with whoever affirms that. And sure, I was talking about TV shows, but what about if you applied that to politics? Could you imagine a world where that was how we did politics instead of actually taking time to learn about issues? And God forbid, could you imagine how emboldened the arsonists would be if they figured that out? They'd set as many things on fire as possible and then present this front of being the reasonable people and perform victimhood, and because people have the biases they do in the chaos they'd believe them. It would stop being about reality or who actually did things, and it would only be about who could fastest and loudest point at whoever they didn't like and go "they did this!" and then since there were already five other fires, we'd all go sure, that sounds about right and move on. Like, can you even imagine what that would be like?

I'm mostly retired from firefighting except for the once every year or two I feel compelled to slap a couple thousand words up. Not because I think it'll help or necessarily be heard, like sometimes those couple thousand words are about a sunscreen I really like, but because sometimes my thoughts crystallize into something that I need to stop living in my head or in my drafts folder. But this morning as I was going about my morning routine listening to the fires of the day, I realized that I couldn't let this particular nugget go without adding an addendum. So here it is: for arsonists, the chaos of the fire is the point. The fact that there's no time to reflect, that people who are prone to doing that reflection or clarification are unable to keep up or scared off or silenced or ignored is exactly why an arsonist sets so many fires. They want to make it unbearable to be a person who lives in the world. They want to make you angry. They want to raise the temperature to a degree where inevitably someone - usually someone young and male and mentally ill who hasn't developed enough in their frontal lobe to totally grasp the gravity and consequences of actions yet - responds by becoming an arsonist themselves because that gives them cover. How can you stand all high and mighty claiming to be against arson when your side commits arson too? Don't you care that arsonists are dying? Aren't arsonists the really persecuted ones? And did this person commit arson only because I, an arsonist, have created an environment where people have a right to be enraged? Am I , the arsonist, the root of this problem? Are young, impressionable people whose entire lives have been defined by fires that have robbed them of any sense of community or connection to other people now incredibly primed to go "fuck it" and commit horrible acts of arson themselves because it's been so normalized and they're so desensitized and it's the only language they know? Sure, sure, but oh look, we can't get too deep into that because someone set another fire.

But anyway, I'm just an unemployed person yelling into a void on the internet. What do I know about arson.