From the Desk of…
I started an exercise in banal futility this week. After letting things pile up for nine-odd years, I’m cleaning and organizing my primary junk mail inbox. I do occasionally get important things in there, and there’s no real need for me to hold onto these Donatos promotional emails from 2015. It’s meditative, in a way. I only have 49,873 to go, a darn sight better than the 70k+ it was at earlier. Once that’s done, I can go to the auxiliary junk mail inbox, I guess. I don’t know how much is in there. Is it weird, you think, to spend this much time sorting emails? I have had some wonderful trips down Memory Lane doing it. They aren’t all junk. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that’s given to us, after all.
Sunday afternoon, Aaron Bushnell, 25, chose to self-immolate outside the Embassy of Israel in Washington, D.C. In the days since, we have learned that Aaron had recently relocated to northeast Ohio, where he had been involved in mutual aid projects with Serve The People Akron. The act of self-immolation has been practiced for centuries, though its associations in the United States bring to mind such cases as Thích Quảng Đức, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk drawing attention to the persecution of Buddhists by the Ngô Đình Diệm administration ruling South Vietnam at the time. Quảng Đức was around 65 when he took that action, and he was joined in the months to follow by Thích Nguyen Huong, Thích Thanh Tucd, Diet Quảng, Thích Tieu, and Ho Dan Van, people as young as 17 and as old as 71. Ultimately, the tensions highlighted and illustrated by this civil resistance led to the collapse of the regime. Inextricably bound to Quảng Đức’s act in the minds of many would be that of Norman Morrison, who at 31 chose to self-immolate outside the office of then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in protest of the Vietnam War just two years after Quảng Đức’s action. He was not alone in this: months prior, librarian Alice Herz had done the same in the streets of Detroit. She was 82. Hiroko Hayasaki, a Japanese-American Buddhist in San Diego, was 36 when she chose to self-immolate about a month before Morrison. A week after Morrison and specifically influenced by both Morrison and Quảng Đức, Roger LaPorte, 22, chose to self-immolate in front of the United Nations, right by the Dag Hammerskjold Library. That same day, Celine Jankowski, 24, did the same in front of her house in South Bend, Indiana. Florence Beaumont, 55. Erik Thoen, 27. Ronald Brazee, 16. Robert Rex Vice, 27. George Winne Jr., 23. Many of these folks, it’s hard to even get proper citations, and I’m really only trying to pull the anti-war American ones here because I can’t read Czech. All ages, all parts of the country. In 1991, Gregory Levey, 30, made his choice to protest the Gulf War. In 2006, Malachi Ritscher, 52, acted in protest of the Iraq War. Ritscher’s suicide note, archived here, claims that the “violent turmoil initiated by the United States military invasion of Iraq will beget future centuries of slaughter.” He goes on, saying “our country slaughters Arabs, abandons New Orleaneans [sic], and ignores the dieing [sic] environment. Our economy is a house of cards, as hollow and fragile as our reputation around the world. We as a nation face the abyss of our own design.” “War Protestor’s Public Suicide in Chicago Went Unnoticed by Media,” the headline about his act reads. So it goes.
In 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, 26, being yet again extorted by corrupt municipal officials and having his complaints fall on the uncaring and unhearing ears of a local government, stood in the middle of traffic and asked a simple question: “How do you expect me to make a living?” His act of self-immolation resulted in protests within hours. These protests led to the Jasmine Revolution, the democratization of Tunisia, and the First Arab Spring, the ultimate outcomes of which we still cannot see across North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.
In the present moment, Aaron Bushnell is preceded by a protestor in Atlanta, not unlike the invisible connection binding Herz and Morrison, but the legacy is longer than that. None of the actions so described have been without precedent, and all of their outcomes have been impossible to know in the immediate aftermath. It took thirty years for Bob McNamara to admit Morrison’s impact on him. Bushnell’s final statement is reproduced here in full:
My name is Aaron Bushnell, I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I'm about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it's not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.
After and until the flames prevented him from continuing, Aaron repeated the following command: Free Palestine. In a press conference the next day, Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Major General Pat Ryder stated that “our support for Israel’s inherent right to defend itself is ironclad” but that we “expect them to continue to adhere to the law of armed conflict and international humanitarian law.”
Any other news items will have to wait until next week.
The Brain Dump
When you saw only one set of footprints,
It was then that I wandered off because your whole deal was boring as hell.
i want. jalapeno poppers
"Duncan, would you still love me if I were a worm?" Leto II murmured, rolling onto his side. Duncan hesitated to roll his eyes, having just gotten out of the ghola tanks again. The hesitation was enough. Leto II had his answer.
definitely feels like the last snow of the year
the teen baristi at this cafe are quietly singing Natasha Bedingfield's Unwritten as they work to fill orders, despite the song not being audible to the front-of-house
is there a work radio I can't hear? is this some act of solidarity to get them through the day? both?
Haven’t been feeling very funny as late, for some reason.
At the Movies
I’ve started watching Fargo, so my movie consumption has taken a big hit.
Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997), dir. Michael Cohn ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Really suffers in spots from being a '90s Showtime Movie, but Sam Neill and Sigourney Weaver have kept this lurking on the fringes of my mind since then. It's still my first thought when I have to think about "grim reboots of fairy tales," even though the tone they try going for is really more Grimm than grim. I've always loved the Weaver old crone makeup/costume design.
The War of the Worlds (1953), dir. Byron Haskin ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ❤️
Wait, is that THE Dr. Clayton Forrester saving the day?
War of the Worlds (2005), dir. Steven Spielberg ⭐⭐⭐
Better than I remembered, but still a lot of children screaming and Tom Cruise as SuperDad. Also, for being so "anti-Iraq War" it sure seems pretty "pro-US military." STAND FOR THE FLAG, KNEEL FOR THE TRIPODS TO SUCK YOU OFF, SEMPER FI
I’ll do better next week… maybe. I’ll at least have Dune: Part Two to talk about.
One Picture
Aaron Bushnell, who died this week at 25.
In closing,
If you’ve found the tone of this dispatch a bit too somber, you’ll likely find no solace down here. You can ascribe it perhaps to the state of the world, or to the end of the winter, or to a passing melancholy. In the brief overview of political self-immolation, I emphasized choice and action. However, we don’t always get to make such choices. Earlier this month, an Indigenous nonbinary child in Oklahoma, Nex Benedict, 16, was beaten by three classmates in a school bathroom and died the following day. While autopsy results have yet to be released, while bullying is far from a novel concept, while the school’s district protocols may have been followed to the letter, current conditions and climates in the United States trend towards the violent persecution of all sexual and gender minorities as an outcome common to the American experience. Violence, targeted clearly but as randomly executed as a draft lottery. Violence, with the clear intention to intimidate. No real choices in the matter; no real preventative actions to be taken. The tragic result of cultural and historical factors outside Nex’s control. “For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind” (Hos 8:7 ESV). Sometimes we reap fields sown by others long ago. In a more contemporary idiom, “you get what you pay for,” and in true American fashion, those who pay aren’t always those who get.
Until next time, choose good.