He seems to be wearing either a ticket pass or a water bottle around his neck? On drugs or just plain suicidal?
“On drugs or just plain suicidal?”
He overdosed on the meaning of it all and the symbolism was his dealer.
Maybe he wanted to imitate Latimer and it was a bag of gunpowder. Of course, being a liberal, he wouldn’t have known the difference between black powder and smokeless, so it didn’t do him any good.