As the dear reader well knows, today, November 5 is the day England almost got lit – literally.  Let us, you and I, consider the singular atmospheric conditions of London in the Year of Our Lord 1605, a city marinating in a soupy paranoia, a veritable gumbo of religious animus and political backstabbing so vicious it makes modern electoral cycles look like a game of schoolyard grab-ass.  The air was thick with soot and suspicion, the Thames sloshing like a drunk’s conscience, and under the cobblestone civility of Parliament’s sacred underbelly squatted a man with a name destined for fireworks packaging and adolescent rebellion tattoos: Guy Fawkes.  A man whose mustache would later be weaponized by anarcho-hacktivists and Hot Topic merch designers alike.  But back then, he was just a hard-case Catholic mercenary with a penchant for black powder and a rather terminal disagreement with the Protestant ascendancy.

You have to admire the sheer, unadulterated balls of the plan.  This was 36 barrels of gunpowder stacked like a theological middle finger aimed directly at the Protestant establishment.  Fawkes wasn’t alone – he was the flammable tip of a conspiratorial spear wielded by Robert Catesby and a cadre of disillusioned papists who’d had enough of Elizabethan hangovers and James I’s anti-Catholic chokehold.  They wanted revolution, not reform.  They wanted to turn Parliament into a crater and crown a puppet queen who’d genuflect to Rome while sipping sacramental wine from the skull of a dead Puritan.  Fuck yeah!

Spoiler: it didn’t work.

Fawkes got caught red-handed (or, more accurately, red-fisted) clutching matches and loitering near the powder like a pyromaniac at a birthday party.  Torture ensued.  They stretched him on the rack until his joints sang soprano.  He confessed, of course.  They all did.  The gunpowder treason and plot unraveled quickly, and the conspirators were executed with absolute, theatrical brutality.

The plot failed, of course, but the myth metastasized.  Guy Fawkes became the patron saint of beautiful failure.  A martyr not for religion, but for the idea that the system is rigged and sometimes the only sane response is to blow it to hell.

So tonight, while the sky over London blisters with government-sanctioned pyrotechnics, raise a glass of something flammable to Guido Fawkes—the man who proved that sometimes the most dangerous weapon isn’t gunpowder.

N.P.: “Notice” – Joe Grah