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« Onan: Cleared of charges | Main | Protecting the fragile self » Thursday, November 9, 2006Protest by suicideI've come across an underreported story via a post on Metafilter. It seems that a man killed himself in Chicago by self-immolation in protest over the Iraq war. Shades of the monk who was famously captured in the act by an American photographer on the streets of Saigon. This would seem to be an example of the kind of public, direct protest that Drake Bennett hasn't seen much of this time around. We know the man killed himself over the war because he left a long suicide note, at least according to the transcript posted here. On this evidence the man is clearly troubled; he regrets not slashing the throat of outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when he passed by him on Delaware Avenue in 2002. His beef is with more than the war; it's with the state of the nation as a whole. But his focus is on politics and on the killing of innocent civilians. The Metafilter writer sarcastically notes that this story hasn't exactly been all over the media. What if there were a picture, one wonders? [Updated 12:34 p.m.] Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:00 PM
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