Burning Man

On November 3rd, a man named Malachi Ritscher set himself on fire near the off-ramp of a Chicago freeway. (Here's the AP story.) Apparently he was a long-time political activist who had suffered from bouts of depression; and, plainly emulating the 1963 death of Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Duc, Mr. Ritscher made the unimaginable decision to emulate Duc's act of extraordinary protest.

I just went through a Google search for Mr. Ritscher's name, and of the first 100 results, not a single one was for a mainstream news source: no CNN, no New York Times, not even the Chicago Tribune or Sun-Times covered a local story. Only the indie paper Chicago Reader, which I remember well from my years there, picked up the story. (To be more precise: according to the Reader, apparently the Sun-Times ran a small article before it knew who had immolated himself or why; since then, nothing until it reran the AP article this morning.)

Mr. Ritscher's suicide note read, in part, "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.... If one death can atone for anything, in any small way, to say to the world: I apologize for what we have done to you, I am ashamed for the mayhem and turmoil caused by my country." Much of the discussion, what there has been of it, has turned on the question of whether Mr. Ritscher's problems with depression somehow invalidate his act of protest. Was he, some wonder, ever clinically diagnosed, or was it an undiagnosed mental illness, or was it perhaps a simple low-level depression such as many suffer through from time to time? I suppose that some of this results from the example set by Thich Quang Duc, a monk who suffered from no mental illness, who indeed, according to witness David Halberstam, never once moved or cried out during his ordeal. Thus Duc's motives are pure, thus his act had meaning. By implication, then, Ritscher's motives were impure (because he was, you know, sick in the head, a mental defective, CRAAAAAZYYYYY), therefore his act had no meaning.

This argument is absurd--particularly when put forth in the usual blunt-instrument terms of conservative bloggers. (Read and weep.) If it was purely a question of depression driving someone to suicide, then why was it so politically overt? Typically, when someone attempts suicide in order to get attention, it is exactly that: an attempt, a cry for help. The method chosen would therefore be something with a reasonable chance of suriving; self-immolation ain't that. Once you pour gasoline on yourself and light a match, well, that's all there is to it, you're gonna die.

Plainly, Ritscher was trying, in his last moments on earth, to make his death mean something. And even if it was partially motivated by the awful circumstances of depression, making his death a political act was a last attempt to make his life, and his death, meaningful and effective, just as Duc's death had been. It must follow, then, that this was not a petty, self-involved death, a kind of mental implosion, a black hole of personality collapsing in on itself; it was a last attempt at expansion, at significance, from a man who had devoted much of his life to political activism. In his suicide note he wrote, "My position is that I only get one death, I want it to be a good one. Wouldn't it be better to stand for something or make a statement, rather than a fiery collision with some drunk driver?"

Mr. Ritscher was not a "moonbat," not "an aging hippie loser" who recognized the pointlessness of his liberal life and just decided to end it all. He voluntarily chose to endure what is perhaps the most painful of all deaths in the last hope that it might mean something. The fact that the mass media have so thoroughly ignored that sacrifice makes it all the more tragic.