A Man Lit Himself on Fire Outside the Trump Hush-Money Trial

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week from the Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

From The New York Times:

The man, who had lingered outside the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse earlier this week, doused himself with accelerant at around 1:35 p.m. in Collect Pond Park, across the street from the building. Onlookers screamed and started to run, and soon, bright orange flames engulfed the man. He threw leaflets espousing anti-government conspiracy theories into the air before setting himself on fire. People rushed to extinguish the flames, but the intensity of the heat could be felt several hundred feet away. After a few minutes, dozens of police officers arrived to smother the blaze. The man was loaded into an ambulance and rushed away. The New York Fire Department said he was taken to a hospital in critical condition. A high-ranking Police Department official identified the man as Max Azzarello, 37, of St. Augustine, Fla. The official requested anonymity because the man had not been publicly identified. Mr. Azzarello had appeared outside the courthouse on Thursday with a sign displaying the address of a website where the same pamphlets were uploaded. The top post of the website says, “I have set myself on fire outside the Trump Trial.”

Our politics have become deranged, and the former president* is the person most responsible for this fact. Anything goes now, and I mean anything. On November 2, 1965, a Quaker named Norman Morrison handed his baby to some passersby and then lit himself on fire outside the Pentagon in sight of the office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. A week later, a man named Roger LaPorte did the same thing outside the United Nations building in New York. Both men were following the example of Buddhist monks in Vietnam who immolated themselves in protest of the repressive policies of the largely Catholic Diem government. It was a war, bloody and futile and far, far from over, that deranged our politics at that time in history. The derangement had a clear moral symptomatology to it. The issues prompting it were vast and compelling.

But this? This act in response to what? The spurious universe of rage and barefaced non-facts spun up by a criminal president* whose mental faculties long ago forfeited their tenure? A protest over the trial of a thuggish liar with holes in his brain for paying off a porn actor he’d boffed in order to keep it out of the papers while he ran for president? Is that worthy of this kind of sacrifice? Would Norman Morrison have thought so? Our politics have become deranged, and for no good purpose. In fact, for no other purpose than the desperate hope of a fallen grifter to stay out of prison.

At the park on Thursday, Mr. Azzarello had held up various signs and at one point shouted toward a group of reporters gathered there: “Biggest scoop of your life or your money back!” One of his signs claimed that Mr. Trump and President Biden were “about to fascist coup us.” In an interview that day, he said his critical views of the American government were shaped by his research into Peter Thiel, the technology billionaire and political provocateur who is a major campaign donor, and into cryptocurrency. Mr. Azzarello said he had planned to protest at Washington Square Park near New York University but thought that with the cold weather, more people would be outside the courthouse. “Trump’s in on it,” Mr. Azzarello said on Thursday. “It’s a secret kleptocracy, and it can only lead to an apocalyptic fascist coup.”

Some of the pamphlets referred to New York University as a “mob front” and also mentioned former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Al Gore and the lawyer David Boies, who represented Mr. Gore in the 2000 presidential election recount. Another pamphlet contained anti-government conspiracy theories, though they did not point in a discernible political direction.

I’m dreading what comes next. Azzarello’s motivation seems so garbled and incoherent that almost anyone can use it almost any way they want. It will be fed into the tireless maw of the political-media machine and God alone knows what twisted, mutant creature will emerge, snarling and snapping and walking blind into traffic. It’s so predictable that it’s goddamn exhausting. Right now I can’t make sense of anything, because people are killing themselves because our politics are deranged, and almost anything can happen.

Weekly WWOZ Pick to Click: “The Jester” (Jamie Lynn Vessels): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit to the Pathé Archives: Here, from April 18, 1949, is coverage of the official birth of the Republic of Ireland. “Eire’s many common interests with Britain will still keep the two nations close partners in the years to come.” Ha, ha. F*ck you. History is so cool.

There is some seriously bad mojo going on in the state of Montana as regards its mental-health system. From the Montana Free Press:

“Our wages are incidental to something far more concerning underway at a level of state hospital administration that doesn’t include us,” one staff member wrote in an email to MNA organizers. Montana Free Press has agreed to withhold the employee’s name out of respect for their fear of professional retaliation. “We have a crisis of patient safety and care, of shifting practices and processes, and a lack of regard of the medical team providing care at MSH that I never would have imagined could occur,” the advanced practice nurse continued. “It’s like being stuck in a recurring bad dream.”

The emails, hospital records and interviews with more than a dozen current and former hospital staff portray a troubled public facility suffering from turnover of key medical personnel. Those who remain describe bad management, concern for patient safety, fear of reprisal and burnout as the administration of Gov. Greg Gianforte pushes for reform at the facility two years after it lost certification from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Providers, many of whom asked for their names to be withheld out of fear of retaliation from the administration, say the latest changes in leadership and medical protocols make it difficult for them to do their jobs well, and don’t make the psychiatric facility safer for patients or better positioned to regain federal certification.

And then it gets a little weird.

In mid-December, hospital employees learned that Dr. Thomas Gray, the hospital’s longtime forensic psychiatrist and chief medical officer, had been escorted out of the campus’ main building and placed on paid administrative leave. The reason for his removal was not announced, and staff members told MTFP his abrupt exit spawned a degree of paranoia. Some described Gray, who had decades of experience at the hospital, as a cornerstone of the institution. If he could be removed so quickly for unknown reasons, who else could be? Gray could not be reached for comment. Four current hospital staff members told MTFP that the administration had prohibited Gray from speaking with them — and they with him — since his departure, despite his continuing to live in staff housing on campus for several months. The state health department did not deny that Hoffman lives in Wyoming, but, in a statement, said that he is “onsite every other week, and when not onsite is directly engaged with the day-to-day operations at MSH remotely.”

So they dump the institutional-memory guy for no apparent reason and they hire as his replacement some guy who’s going to work by Zoom from Wyoming. To the amateur eye, this plan is not promising.

We lost Richard Betts this week. One of the curious things about the Allman Brothers Band at their peak was that, despite the fact that Gregg Allman was one of the great blues songwriters of his generation—I mean, “Whipping Post” was a metaphor straight out of Robert Pete Williams’s recordings in Angola, especially “Pardon Denied Again”—it was Betts’s material that put the ABB on the charts—“Blue Sky,” “Jessica,” and “Ramblin’ Man,” which was the band’s only top ten hit. And no song has instantly lightened my mood more easily than “Blue Sky.” Betts also wrote “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” the majestic instrumental that is a five-star highlight in the band’s classic Live at Fillmore East album.

Betts lived hard, even by the standards of the Allman Brothers Band, which were considerable. He got kicked out, rejoined them, and then got kicked out again. He made some good music on his own with his band Great Southern, but he never got back to where he was when Liz Reed went airborne at Bill Graham’s place. But I’ll tell you what. After what happened in New York on Friday, I cued up “Blue Sky” almost immediately. It worked, as it always does.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look at what we found. From Smithsonian:

Archaeologists in Belgium have unearthed a century-old train carriage marked with the logo of the London North Eastern Railway (LNER). Nobody knows how the rare model ended up underground in the metropolis of Antwerp, 500 miles from the rail company’s English headquarters.The old train car was found during excavations of a 19th-century fortress known as the Northern Citadel, according to a statement from LNER. Made of wood and painted dark red with yellow lettering, the wagon is a “removals” car, used for moving people’s belongings from residence to residence. “The wooden removals truck is thought to be around 100 years old,” says archaeologist Femke Martens in the statement. “It’s a mystery as to how the carriage came to be in Antwerp, and unfortunately there’s very little left of the relic, as it disintegrated while being excavated.”

The Belgians are going to hang onto this relic, because, apparently, it’s too fragile to be moved, much less shipped back to London. I’m just going to chalk it up to the Freemasons and move on.

Hey, Live Science, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

Researchers described the humongous beast, called Bustingorrytitan shiva, late last year from fossils discovered in western Argentina. Now they’ve worked with an artist to re-create the Cretaceous titanosaur, a stockier type of long-necked sauropod, in stunning images and videos. B. shiva is among the largest sauropods ever recorded, with an estimated weight of around 74 tons (67 metric tons), according to a study published Dec. 18, 2023, in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica. It wasn’t the largest dinosaur—fellow titanosaur Argentinosaurus is one contender for that disputed honor, with an estimated weight starting at 77 tons (70 metric tons)—but B. shiva was still an almighty member of the ancient Argentinian ecosystem.

Apparently, southern South America was a quite literal stomping ground for giant dinosaurs, the kind that made other dinosaurs stop and say, “Damn, that’s a big lizard right there.” This, of course, makes the hearts of paleontologists go pitter-pat.

“In Patagonia, we are still at a stage where we are more likely to find something new than something known, and the unknown is often wonderful,” Simón told Live Science in an email. “In the publication we reported on a sauropod that became a giant, independently of others within their group.”

And that is how you live then to make folks happy now.

I’ll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake line. Wear the damn mask. Take the damn shots, especially the boosters, and especially the most recent boosters. And spare a moment for the good people of Baltimore, and for the people of Israel and of Gaza, the people of Ukraine, of Lewiston, Maine, and of the earthquake zones in Taiwan, Iraq, Turkey, Morocco, and Colombia, and in the flood zone in Libya, and the flood zones all across the Ohio Valley, and on the Horn of Africa, and in the English midlands, and in Virginia, and in Texas and Louisiana, and in California, and the flood zones of Indonesia, and in the storm-battered south of Georgia, and in Kenya, and in the flood in Dubai (!) and in Pakistan, and in the flood zones in Russia and Kazakhstan, and in the flood zones in Iran, where loose crocodiles are becoming a problem, and in the fire zones in Australia, and in north Texas, and in Lahaina, where they’re still trying to recover their lives, and under the volcano in Iceland, and for the gun-traumatized folks in Austin and at UNLV, and in Philadelphia, and in Perry, Iowa, and especially for our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, who deserve so much better from their country than they’ve been getting.

Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.