Like "Andorra," Frisch's condemnation of Swiss neutrality during the rise of Nazism, "The Firebugs" decries the complacency of comfortable citizens in threatening times.
To the policy's architects, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon represented a stinging challenge to American power and an imperative to consider measures that might have been unimaginable in less threatening times.
However, it's threatening times like these when musicians, promoters, venue managers and fans bond together better than ever and Ben hopes a fresh start for Independent will also prove to be an indirect shot in the arm for live music on the whole: Bands record videos here, photo shoots and there's space here now for local musicians to practice; we'll carry all that into the new premises.
Despite how threatening times do in fact seem, our leaders, and all of us need to honestly admit that in the name of keeping ourselves safe we may be making things much much worse.
Just for a change we could try focusing our attention on how fortunate we are compared to people in some other professions who work under immense, life-threatening time pressures, answer phone calls from irate clients, need to explain a 5 minute absence from their desk, or worse.
Instead, find a safe, non-threatening time (like a low-key night in) and place (like your dorm room) to chat.
Anyway, we don't get to find out how the advert's police officers would have reacted had anybody transgressed the agreed parameters of protest, because everyone's too busy having a non-threatening time dancing and encouraging people in cafes to join in.
This approach is certainly better than threatening jail time, but it raises a whole host of new issues.
It is not a partisan opinion to state that threatening jail time or the revocation of citizenship for those who exercise their First Amendment civil liberties is clearly outside the traditional norms and boundaries of liberal democracy (as offensive as flag burning or other forms of expression might be to us).
The feasibility of MFH implementation can be jeopardised by financial and socio-political constraints, threatening consultation time and interpreter use.
