'I hope," read an email from a colleague boarding an Osaka-bound shinkansen in Tokyo last week, "nobody sets himself on fire."
Black humor. There's nothing funny about a man immolating himself on a crowded train, killing himself and another and injuring 26 — but laughter is anarchic. It obeys no rules. It comes when it comes. Blame it on the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, or on the endorphins it secretes, or on the sheer absurdity with which we have to cope — increasingly, it seems, as the world gets older.
We're six months into a year that began with a terrorist assault on the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. To the perpetrators it made perfect sense: offenders of Allah and Muhammad must die — what else? Shocked and outraged, much of the world shouted back, "I am Charlie!" If the 11 dead Charlie Hebdo staffers are guilty, so am I. Fine, shrugged the avengers, we'll get you too. Attack followed attack. Wikipedia counts more than 1,000 dead in 125 terrorist events worldwide so far this year. This is getting surreal. We really are all Charlie, this could happen to any of us, anytime, anywhere: in church, in a mosque, in a cafe, on a street, on a plane, at school, on a beach; even (who would ever have thought so?) on a shinkansen — the common premise being that murder is justifiable in a good cause, a good cause being whatever the terrorist feels strongly enough about to provoke in him or her a murderous rage. Some kill the infidel for God, or political enemies for political friends, or members of one race for members of their own.