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