A train pulls into a small station in east Bohemia. From inside, a middle-aged woman sees two teens on the platform, one in a spiked leather jacket, the other with a Mohawk haircut.

"Ugh," the woman says. "CzechTek."

From the TV news to train compartments, CzechTek has dominated public discussion across the country since 850 riot police drove 5,000 ravers off a rented stretch of land July 30 near the German border. While questions over police conduct and protests by ravers have fueled the story, cyberspace, politics, history and seasonal news cycles help explain how it transformed from a lone incident in a distant field into the political and social story of the summer.

"A complex of factors have, like in a melting pot, come together to make this a huge story," said Jan Jirák, an associate professor at the media department of Charles University.

First on the list remains the clash itself, combined with the availability of images of it. Police swinging billy clubs and pinning handcuffed teens to the ground will for certain capture attention. In the age of digital cameras and the Internet, anyone with a computer, TV or newspaper subscription can see hundreds of original, clear and shocking pictures of police struggling with ravers.

"There is a lot of footage out there," said Jan Culík, a professor of Czech studies at the University of Glasgow. "And a lot of it is shocking. One picture shows a policeman holding a gun to a [raver's] head."

Another factor has been the willingness of opposition politicians to side with protestors. Although the right-leaning Civic Democrats criticized the government last year for being too soft on the annual festival, whose location is kept secret until days before it starts, the political party's leaders and its founder, President Václav Klaus, sharply criticized the government this year for being too rough.

According to Culík, politicians have "created two myths for the public. Either the ravers were slime, ruining our countryside, or [were] sweet children victimized by fascist police."

Polls indeed show the public evenly divided on whether police used justifiable force. Like the woman on the train, about half of Czechs seem to view the techno fans as hooligans on the verge of trashing Mly´nec, a farming hamlet in western Bohemia, population 14, where the festival was to be held. Other Czechs seem to consider the ravers innocent youths beaten black-and-blue for the crime of wanting to hang out and dance.

The image of police beating young people remains especially problematic for the government, says Jirák, because it brings to mind violence used by communists to stifle opposition before — and during — the 1989 revolution.

Days after CzechTek, 15 politicians and former dissidents signed a letter criticizing Interior Minister Frantisek Bublan. Former president and world-renowned dissident Václav Havel added credibility to the ravers' cause by meeting with their leaders.

Even so, the story might have lost steam had it not unfolded during "cucumber season," the Czech term for the dull, news-free days of the summer, according to a former adviser to Havel, Jirí Pehe. "I think this became the big summer story because there was not much else to write about," Pehe said.

Sixteen days after the clash, the Czech News Agency still carried five stories on CzechTek.

Whatever its newsworthiness, Pehe said, the CzechTek scandal illustrates a fundamental reality about Czech politics. "Conservative commentators and the Civic Democrats should in theory support the police, even if they disagree with the method. But they are acting more like populists, using CzechTek as ammunition to criticize the government."

What's more, he said, "It shows how difficult it is in Czech politics to formulate good policy. It is quite sad. They really need to sit down and figure out how to fix this. The whole thing could easily be repeated next year."