Rush to Judgment
Atlantic, The, June, 2001 by Teller
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When I first heard the story, it went like this: One winter night a thirteen-year-old boy was watching TV with his friends. No adults were in the house. On came a show in which a handsome hipster doused himself with gasoline, set himself afire, and danced around. The hipster was dressed in a protective fireproof suit, but the innocent boy didn't know that.
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To him it looked as though soaking oneself in gasoline and setting oneself afire were safe and fun. The boy took some gasoline and a lighter into his snowy back yard and tried the stunt himself. He was gruesomely burned from head to toe—a victim of parental neglect, or irresponsible media manipulation, or maybe both. This was the story of Jason Lind, a teenager in Torrington, Connecticut, who suffered terrible burns on a Friday night in January. The story was misleading and incomplete, but it spread nationwide, ...
