The young man had disrupted an unspoken code of manners. Inferences about the present may be drawn from the past, but they must remain at the level of inference. Emotions that may be enjoyed when they are formalized in a ballad are not enjoyable when they are spoken in a political rallying cry. The passage of time has filtered out all the ambivalence and unease about acts of violence, so that when they have been enshrined in song they are pure and simple.
