A Martyr for Peace, "Without fear I go now to God - your future is what you will choose today."

These are the last words of Malachi Ritscher's suicide note, before he doused himself in gasoline and burned himself to death by an off-ramp in downtown Chicago on November 3rd.

Why did he do it?

Here is the statement I want to make: if I am required to pay for your barbaric war, I choose not to live in your world. I refuse to finance the mass murder of innocent civilians, who did nothing to threaten our country. I will not participate in your charade - my conscience will not allow me to be a part of your crusade.

He killed himself over Iraq, and more.

My actions should be self-explanatory, and since in our self-obsessed culture words seldom match the deed, writing a mission statement would seem questionable. So judge me by my actions. Maybe some will be scared enough to wake from their walking dream state - am I therefore a martyr or terrorist? I would prefer to be thought of as a 'spiritual warrior'. Our so-called leaders are the real terrorists in the world today, responsible for more deaths than Osama bin Laden.

I have had a wonderful life, both full and full of wonder. I have experienced love and the joy and heartache of raising a child. I have jumped out of an airplane, and escaped a burning building. I have spent the night in jail, and dropped acid during the sixties. I have been privileged to have met many supremely talented musicians and writers, most of whom were extremely generous and gracious. Even during the hard times, I felt charmed. Even the difficult lessons have been like blessed gifts. When I hear about our young men and women who are sent off to war in the name of God and Country, and who give up their lives for no rational cause at all, my heart is crushed. What has happened to my country? we have become worse than the imagined enemy - killing civilians and calling it 'collateral damage', torturing and trampling human rights inside and outside our own borders, violating our own Constitution whenever it seems convenient, lying and stealing right and left, more concerned with sports on television and ring-tones on cell-phones than the future of the world.... half the population is taking medication because they cannot face the daily stress of living in the richest nation in the world.

I too love God and Country, and feel called upon to serve. I can only hope my sacrifice is worth more than those brave lives thrown away when we attacked an Arab nation under the deception of 'Weapons of Mass Destruction'. Our interference completely destroyed that country, and destabilized the entire region. Everyone who pays taxes has blood on their hands.

He killed himself for America.

How easy it would be to dismiss Malachi Ritscher as a nutjob. He clearly wasn't normal, but what I've read about him shows that he lived a regular life. He suffered from depression, but kept it together enough to be consistent in his work, recording live jazz for bands who otherwise couldn't afford to cut a CD. He was a loner who was well liked, and was active in the anti-war movement. Plus, there's this little known fact: unlike other forms of suicide, self-immolation is generally undertaken by people who are not mentally ill.

It would be easy to dismiss Malachi Ritscher's self-immolation as just another roadside attraction in Freak Show America, and have it take its place with OJ, Jon Benet, Michael Jackson, the Runaway Bride, Terri Schiavo, and the rest of the tabloid cast. But that dog won't hunt. We will never know anything of what was in Malachi's heart or mind when he committed suicide, but we have his statement of principle, ordinary writing and pedestrian anti-war rhetoric that it is, but nonetheless principled. No freak show here.

We could dismiss this act as an aberration, a political anomaly with no precedent, but we would be forgetting our own history. Malachi Ritscher is not alone in American history. He joins Norman Morrison, Alice Herz, Roger LaPorte, George Winne, Florence Beaumont, Timothy Brown, Richard Breeze, and a man whose name I never could find. Follow these links. Don't worry, there are no awful pictures, but there isn't much information either. All of these people were protesting a war, Vietnam or Desert Storm, and we have collectively ignored their final gestures and forgotten their names.

How many of these names did you recognize?

Now there's Malachi Ritscher, and the media is busy writing him off as mental. This is consistent with our history. Also consistent with our history is this:

There will be more.

RIP Malachi Ritscher(1954-2006)

If there's more, it's here.

Three Guys on 52nd Street, A Parable of Partisanship

There were three men I used to watch as I loitered in front of the Port Authority in NYC. Two of the men, who I dubbed Republican and Democrat, would start a loud, passionate, and profanely funny political argument on the sidewalk. A crowd inevitably gathered, including the third man, a short fellow, who moved through them trying for a better view.

I'll bet you can guess what I called him. Yep, same as the cop who dispersed the crowd and took complaints - pickpocket!

Finally, after the unhappy marks were gone, the three men and the cop would split the take.

If there's more, it's here.

Privatization’s Dark Antonym

In 1976, on a bathroom wall at the Washington, DC Trailways bus station, I read the following joke:

If pro is the opposite of con, what's the opposite of progress.

It was good for a chuckle at a dark time in my life, and I've always kept my eye out for funny antonyms since then. An antonym, for those not familiar with the word, is a word having a meaning opposite to that of another word. Think wet versus dry.

So what's the antonym of privatize?

I hear that word all over the place. We debate privatizing Social Security, the National Parks, the U.S. Postal Service, NASA, the schools, the roads, the military, and even the Amazon rainforest.

To hear the politicians talk, everything is better if you privatize it!

So the antonym of a word so bandied about our public discourse is equally well known, right? It's not a secret word, but the fact that it is the opposite of privatize isn't exactly talked up. I had to think about it for a few minutes before I made the connection.

Now the better educated of you reading this are laughing at me, so for the sake of discussion I will spill the beans.

The antonym of privatize is nationalize.

Now, there's a word that is simply un-American. We don't do that! South American radicals nationalize. Middle Eastern nutjobs nationalize. People who nationalize come to bad ends!

And Americans don't talk about it. It's not an option - a total non-starter!

Why is that?

If there's more, it's here.

Take out the garbage, don't sweep it under the rug

Many, and I include myself, feel that our government is broken & the country is on the wrong track.

Before it can be fixed, we have to know where it's broken.

To me that means Congressional investigations and all the negative hoopla that surrounds them. It'll suck, but that's how American checks and balances work. It isn't pretty or pleasant, but it works.

Executive power grabs, Congressional corruption, war profiteering, Katrina negligence with thousands of dead, and doctored Iraq intel with tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands dead are things I want to see fixed, and they aren't gonna fix themselves.

Odds are the White House will resist, obstruct, pillory, and delay every Congressional inquiry of this sort. They'll cry partisan witch hunt, scream dirty politics, we'll all be sick of the acrimony, and gridlock will paralyze the Congress.

Good. Bring it on!

If the boat is sinking far from land, which is more important: Steaming ahead at full speed or plugging the leaks?

So my message to the people pimping bipartisan harmony and singing Kumbaya with Bush in DC is this:

Wake up and smell the corpses!

If there's more, it's here.

The Privitization of Cut and Run

Start with this news item:

Manhattan security company Kroll has withdrawn its bodyguard teams from Iraq and Afghanistan after it lost four workers in Iraq, its parent company said Wednesday.

Michael Cherkasky, president and chief executive of Kroll owner Marsh & McLennan Cos., told The Associated Press that the business in the two countries wasn't worth risking the lives of their employees.

Toss in this tidbit:

Bechtel Corp. went to Iraq three years ago to help rebuild a nation torn by war. Since then, 52 of its people have been killed and much of its work sabotaged as Iraq dissolved into insurgency and sectarian violence.

Now Bechtel is leaving.

The San Francisco engineering company's last government contract to rebuild power, water and sewage plants across Iraq expired on Tuesday. Some employees remain to finish the paperwork, but essentially, the company's job is done.

Bechtel's contracts were part of an enormous U.S. effort to put Iraq back on its feet after decades of wars and sanctions. That rebuilding campaign, once touted as the Marshall Plan of modern times, was supposed to win the hearts of skeptical Iraqis by giving them clean water, dependable power, telephones that worked and modern sanitation. President Bush said he wanted the country's infrastructure to be the very best in the Middle East.

But Bechtel -- which charged into Iraq with American "can-do" fervor -- found it tough to keep its engineers and workers alive, much less make progress in piecing Iraq back together.

"Did Iraq come out the way you hoped it would?" asked Cliff Mumm, Bechtel's president for infrastructure work. "I would say, emphatically, no. And it's heartbreaking."

And I'm seeing a potential threat.

These companies are no shrinking violets. They have worked in some rough places. If they are leaving, it's past merely bad in Iraq.

But that's not what's troubling me. As usual, it's Halliburton. What if they decide to cease operations in Iraq?

The preceding examples highlight the big difference between civilian contractors and our troops. One's duty is to its stockholders; the other's is to our country. If it becomes unprofitable enough, contactors will leave.

Halliburton has 30,000 employees in Iraq, and supplies our soldiers with food, clean water, and housing among other logistics services.

Can military logistics take up the slack if they leave? If not, will we be forced to withdraw our forces to save them?

Are some things too important to outsource?

I believe so, and will vote accordingly.

How about you?

If there's more, it's here.

Fall Down. Go Boom

Man, I hate losing a PC. There's nothing like it to point out the holes in your backup plan.

I'm not a novice in this department. I've been wearing out PC's since 1988, and I am regular with my backups.

So I'm back with a new PC, minus a few evenings to get everything back the way I want it.

Funny thing about new PC's. They have all of these stickers telling you what's under the hood. The faceplate of my new Compaq Presario is just covered in the things.

I bet burglars like that.

Take me...take me...take me.

If there's more, it's here.