(I'm still half-brain-dead from all the disruption to my schedule lately, but at least the bathroom repair is done. Things can start settling back towards normal now.)

Over the weekend, I was at a party to celebrate a couple of birthdays plus American Independence Day, and we took advantage of the fact that my friend lives in one of the few remaining tiny postage stamps of land within an hour's drive of here where it's still legal to own and use class C fireworks without a pyrotechnics license and an event permit. The subject of the laws on fireworks and the history of those laws came up, and I mentioned that I'd almost blogged on the subject Friday. But when I sat down to type out my arguments, I concluded that they were self-serving, callous, false to fact, and, well, basically lame. So my friend and her guests wormed them out of me, and I find out that I'm the only one who was there that night who still thinks the argument I was going to make is lame. You be the judge for yourself, I suppose.

Water them down all you may, even class C fireworks are still sources of white-hot flame and/or they're explosive. They can be made remarkably safe, but never fully safe. Americans have been playing with fireworks since before the revolution, and after a couple of hundred years of re-designing the fireworks themselves to make them as safe as possible and training everybody in the country in fireworks safety handling and plastering every surface of the packaging and of the fireworks themselves with extensive safety warnings, we had made setting off your own fireworks as safe as it can be, at least given the constraints of the species. And yet we were still ending up with at least one dead kid every other year or so, and long strings of maimings per year, and several very expensive buildings every year getting burned down. And once we'd long-since passed the point of diminishing returns on fireworks safety instruction and improvements and we were still ending up with pre-teen corpses and burned-down million-dollar schools, a not unreasonable question got asked. A lot of people, almost certainly the majority of us at the beginning, didn't like the question and didn't like the implication of the only possible answer, but we didn't have another answer. And the question was this:

We put up with dead kids in car accidents and dead kids in sporting contests and so forth because cars are too useful to live without, because any kind of physical exercise that's entertaining enough that people might stick with it long enough to get health benefits is likely to be strenuous enough to produce occasionally lethal injuries, and so forth. But is there anything about setting off firecrackers and bottle rockets and so forth that's worth even one injured kid, let alone a dead one? And after going back and forth about this as a nation for about a dozen years, the majority of us grudgingly conceded that the only answer we had was, "No, no benefit. It's just easily replaceable entertainment." And city by city, county by county, and in some places even state by state we started banning personal use of fireworks.

And here's what I was going to say that I now think is lame.

Dig out a pit in the back yard and line the outside of it with a circle of rocks or bricks, if the local laws will let you. Dump some dry tree branches and some chopped up tree trunks or roots and some scrap lumber into that pit with some cardboard and, some time between sunset and midnight, set the pile on fire. All you've done is create artificial fire, something humans have been doing since the Paleolithic. Big deal. You probably didn't even make the fire yourself, you probably started it with a plain old ordinary industrial fire-making tool, a match or a cigarette lighter or fireplace lighter. So you bought something that makes tiny flames and set some garbage on fire, big deal. And yet ... you and your friends and your neighbors who live within eye sight are not unlikely to sit and stare at that fire, chatting desultorily, for an hour or more. All it is is a fire, a rudimentary technology? No, it's art. And it's art that we'll sit and contemplate, members of our species, in substantial discomfort and while getting eaten alive by bugs, for longer than all but a tiny fraction of us would spend going over the whole art collection of a large, well stocked, well lit air conditioned museum of our finest art.

If there's that much artistic respect for routine artificial fire, how much more art is there to be had in playing with, manipulating, staging and controlling the timing of artificial thunder and lightning?

I know that there are more arguments to be made. The pro-fireworks case can be argued from tradition. It can be argued from relative harm. It can be argued from intensification, the class of risk analysis failures where trying to make things too safe ends up making people do stupider things with what you do let them have. It can be argued from the fact that we've taken every possibly dangerous chemical or tool out of our kids hands and then wonder why so few Americans go into chemistry or engineering or so forth. *shrug* All those cases got made, and came up short against a dead kid every other year and a couple of million-dollar buildings a year. But while I was thinking it, I was thinking this: as Scott McCloud argued, humans almost certainly felt the powerful urge to express themselves through art before our species even had a spoken language. Even if it's crap art, even if it's cheap folk art made by people who say things like, "here, hold my beer," isn't it worth it because it may be the only time all year those people make art?

No, probably not. I think not. Even though it's my own argument, when I see it written out like that, it sounds pretentious and callous and self-serving and lame. To me, anyway. You?