The Great Hollywood Peace Parade
Antiwar Angelenos mark the fifth year of war by throwing a party
By Ron Garmon
A year and a half on, the self-immolation of Malachi Ritscher is due a reconsideration as terminal performance art. During morning rush-hour on November 3, 2006, the 50-ish Chicago musician lugged a video camera, a sign reading “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” and a quantity of gasoline (then averaging about $2.25/gal. in the Windy City) to the “Blaze of the Millennium” sculpture on the Kennedy Expressway. There, in full view of gridlocked hundreds, he set himself on fire.
Police didn’t identify the ashes for days and the news didn’t cover the act as protest at all. Almost a week later, Sun-Times film critic Richard Roeper editorially dismissed what the musician did as “sad” and “futile” as if the deed was merely one more occasion to measure thumbs with Roger Ebert. In the interim, Ritscher’s statement had become an underground sensation, with the auto-flambéed peacenik’s self-penned obituary and other leavings pored over by friends, acquaintances, and the generally stunned. That it took so long for big media guns like Roeper to open up allowed many to ponder the horrible significance of this “normal” suicide. Reports of “alcoholism” and “depression” helped depoliticize the act to the point where Ritscher is now scarcely remembered at all, save as one more doomed hippie.
His was but an extreme manifestation of the apocalyptic helplessness now on display most everywhere. All recent economic news comes painted in uniform shades of horrible, with venerable investment banks collapsing, national debt spiraling and suburbanites torching their foreclosed houses for insurance. This familiar bankerly process of sweating the middle classes of equity takes place against a backdrop of inflation, stagnation, and threats of permanent recession. The choices this election year now narrow to whomever Democrats finally decide to pit against John McCain, who insists a century-long U.S. military occupation in Iraq would be “fine” with him.
The war is an issue Democrats have decisively fudged. Barack Obama continues to radiate a genial Reaganesque mushiness on particulars, while Hillary Clinton runs TV ads suggesting she’d sit by the telephone at all hours, toothily eager to bomb the mortal shit out of anyone, anywhere. CBS/NYT poll numbers show nearly two-thirds of the American people disapprove of the way the Iraq war is being conducted, with almost 60 percent declaring it a mistake in the first place.
Mainstream liberals remain sunk in gloom. Chalmers Johnson concludes in Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic that Dubya’s blunders are simply the latest in a long series of imperial disasters that must eventually consume all traditional liberty and destroy popular government in America, leaving us to face “a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent.” Feminist social critic Naomi Wolf, in The End of America, draws the same dreadful inferences from press restrictions, secret jails, extraordinary renditions, cop surveillance, large-scale domestic spying, and constant trashing of dissent, terming it a “fascist shift.” Whatever her gifts as prophet, such a prognosis would depress even Pee-wee Herman.
Mad Malachi Ritscher expressed similar thoughts in his online suicide note that ended with the homily, “The future is what you decide today.” That this sentiment can be put to more creative expression was shown to by marchers at the All Out! protest rally/street party staged in Hollywood last Saturday, March 15, by local antiwar coalition ANSWER-LA. Despite the lateness of the hour and very formidable excuses for citizen despair, antiwar activism is on the rise all across the political spectrum, with the radicalized trying new techniques, new alliances, and speaking out in startling creative ways about the looming national crisis. The accent is now on raucous dissent rather than moral outrage; a cheerful, two-fingered salute to the status quo. How the traditionally starchy antiwar left will absorb this new energy is but one question posed by the youngsters out in full puckish force.
As the current cycle of antiwar protest heats up, it is well to remember the fate of the last wave.
Published: 03/19/2008
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