Free Republic

Last month, someone set himself on fire in Chicago to protest the war. There was a brief article in the Sun-Times and, thankfully, a subsequent column about it by Richard Roeper (who felt the act was a futile gesture). I missed both of these. The first time I heard about the incident was in the way that I usually hear about the less mainstream news: through the Internet. On Nov. 3 , several morning commuters witnessed something awful. A man named Malachi Ritscher doused himself with gasoline and lit himself on fire right along the Kennedy Expressway. He'd placed himself...

Malachi Ritscher envisioned his death as one full of purpose. He carefully planned the details, mailed a copy of his apartment key to a friend, created to-do lists for his family. On his Web site, the 52-year-old experimental musician who'd fought with depression even penned his obituary. At 6:30 a.m. on Nov. 3 — four days before an election caused a seismic shift in Washington politics — Ritscher, a frequent anti-war protester, stood by an off-ramp in downtown Chicago near a statue of a giant flame, set up a video camera, doused himself with gasoline and lit himself on fire....

The death of Malachi Ritscher was reported by a local television station as just another frustration for commuters driving into Chicago one morning when police were told that a statue was burning and slowing-up traffic along the Kennedy expressway.This was not how the anti-war activist had envisaged media coverage when on November 3, he set up a video-camera and a small sign reading “thou shalt not kill” next to Chicago’s Flame of the Millennium sculpture. He then doused his body in petrol and set himself on fire. Mr Ritscher, 52, had even written a lengthy “mission-statement” on one of his...

In their story today about Malachi Ritscher, an antiwar protester who killed himself in Chicago earlier this month by setting himself on fire in public to protest the Iraq war, the Associated Press failed to report that he claimed in his self-written obituary that had walked right by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2002, knife in hand, intending to murder him but that he decided against it--a decision he expressed shame over.Rumsfeld's brush with a potential assassin was mentioned, but buried, in opinion articles published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Harper's Magazine.Ritscher's self-penned obituary can be...

CHICAGO - Malachi Ritscher envisioned his death as one full of purpose. He carefully planned the details, mailed a copy of his apartment key to a friend, created to-do lists for his family. On his Web site, the 52-year-old experimental musician who'd fought with depression even penned his obituary. At 6:30 a.m. on Nov. 3 — four days before an election caused a seismic shift in Washington politics — Ritscher, a frequent anti-war protester, stood by an off-ramp in downtown Chicago near a statue of a giant flame, set up a video camera, doused himself with gasoline and lit himself...