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Impeachment and "This Fire Has Burned Too Long"

Updated: Jan 26, 2022

He’s the arsonist some chose/To lead the main/Fire brigade/New civil service lows

In her Yahoo!News article, "Raskin uses a searing analogy to counter Trump free speech defense at the impeachment trial," reporter Crystal Hill explains how Lead House Impeachment Manager Representative Jamie Raskin (D, Maryland) countered First Amendment arguments used by Trump's lawyers by claiming that Trump's incitement of insurrection actually goes way beyond "the well-known phrase from former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. — 'you can’t shout fire in a crowded theater'” and was, in Raskin's words:

“... more like a case where the town fire chief, who is paid to put out fires, sends a mob, not to yell "fire!" in a crowded theater but to actually set the theater on fire. And who then, when the fire alarms go off and the calls start flooding into the fire department, does nothing but sit back, encourages the mob to continue its rampage, and watches the fire spread on TV.”

This reminded me that I used pretty much the exact same analogy with regard to Trump and his right-wing, racist followers in the song I wrote with Greg Gallardo and Matthew Emerson Brown in 2016 for my anti-Trump album, Eleven Nine, "This Fire Has Burned Too Long":

He’s the arsonist some chose/To lead the main/Fire brigade/New civil service lows

This analogy is made much more explicit in the music video I had made for the song:



This Fire Has Burned Too Long

(2016, Anders/Brown/Gallardo)


This fire burns us all

Forging what

We thought we knew

Our history disowned


This fire goes beyond

Fuel some up

But melt all down

Too hot for anyone


This heat just burns us up

We cannot fear too much


And I fear this fire has burned too long

Can’t save us now

And I fear it’s gonna burn us up


He’s the arsonist some chose

To lead the main

Fire brigade

New civil service lows


We’re complicit as a whole

The arsonist

An aspect of

A pyromania core


This heat just burns us up

We cannot fear too much


And I fear this fire has burned too long

Can’t save us now

And I fear it’s gonna burn us up


This fire is our own

It's this that defines our home


And I fear this fire has burned too long

Can’t save us now

And I fear this fire has burned too long

Nowhere to go

And I fear this fire has burned too long

Burns from our core

And I fear it’s gonna burn us up


Eric Anders, 2/11/21

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