Sometimes I imagine the world as a stage, and these people—the IRA, Hamas, Luigi Mangione—are the ones strutting across it in a hatchet-sharp tuxedo, demanding that everyone pay attention. It’s chaos, it’s terror, it’s… performance art? I don’t condone it. I don’t want anyone hurt. But I’ll be damned if I’m not fascinated by the sheer audacity of it.
There’s a certain poetry in throwing a wrench into the machine. Most of us tiptoe around, sending polite emails or muttering complaints under our breath. They jump in with fireworks strapped to their confidence, daring the world to notice. It’s reckless, it’s absurd, and it’s brilliant theater in a way that a thousand essays never could be.
I like to imagine the headlines as stage directions: “The world pauses. A single act, impossible to ignore, echoes across cities.” That’s propaganda of the deed distilled to its essence. Not ideology, not morality, just audacity. You can’t help but watch.
It’s this mix of danger and spectacle, of nerve and chaos, that fascinates me. The world expects everyone to sit quietly. They don’t. They scream, they jump, they disrupt. And in that disruption, in that reckless display, there’s a strange beauty. Not beauty of the deed itself—God, no—but beauty in the sheer, unfettered defiance of expectation.
Sisyphus Shrugged 