In an episode of “The West Wing,” magicians Penn & Teller apparently burned an American flag in the White House. It was a magic trick in a fictional show, of course, but the characters’ reaction was pretty typical: Many were alarmed and appalled, and the only attention paid to Penn & Teller’s show came because of that one trick.

And that’s the thing about flag-burning: It stirs such emotions that everything else gets lost. People get caught up in a discussion about patriotism — are you more patriotic if you condemn flag burning or if you defend someone’s right to do it? — and the original point gets lost.

(In “The West Wing,” Penn & Teller were making a point about freedom, not protesting. Even then, though, the point was lost in other people’s rhetoric.)

You won’t see much flag burning in workplaces, but you will see the fallout from extreme actions. If you scream at employees or stab people in the back, they won’t remember any logic that you may have had on your side; they will remember your nastiness.

A lot of people remember that Vice President Dick Cheney used profanity during the presidential campaign. They’re a lot less likely to remember whether the recipient had been acting like a jerk, or to think about whether they might have acted the same way if they were in Cheney’s position.

E-mail can lead to two dangerous overreactions: Sometimes it’s easier to make a nasty or insensitive comment when you can’t see the other person’s reaction, and it’s easy to send that comment to a bunch of people — letting you embarrass that person in front of colleagues.

Doing that may not burn a flag, but it will certainly burn a bridge.