The mousy girl screams, "Violence! Violence!"

‘Riderless horses on Chomsky’s Camelot…’
- (Richey Edwards, Peeled Apples)

The riderless horse follows the casket in a military funeral procession, empty boots facing backwards in the stirrups. The tradition stretches back close to a millennia, to the campaigns of Genghis Khan, when horses were sacrificed so they would be there to greet fallen warriors in the next world. The most famous riderless horse used for US state funerals was Black Jack, whose oil-coloured mane swung in the cold Washington air behind the coffin of John F. Kennedy. Noam Chomsky wrote a savage critique of Kennedy’s foreign policy during the Vietnam era entitled ‘Rethinking Camelot.’ So - military funerals, sacrifices and fallen warriors, Kennedy, Vietnam, geo-politics.
All from five words of the chorus of the opening track.
Did Richey Edwards think all that through and condense it to one couplet so that, as with all good poetry, the fit, hungry listener might extrapolate meaning back up from the bottom? Or did he just think it sounded fucking cool?