LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Do not selectively de-politicize self-immolation
"I probably would have liked Bushnell," declares a recent column published by The Daily Targum.
Many share this sentiment for equally many reasons. I am keenly aware, for instance, that communities of fellow transgender women are grappling with an online presence where Aaron Bushnell, aliases LillyAnarKitty and acebush1, expressed admiration for — and a desire to be like — the transgender women who served, like him, in the Air Force.
The column references Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk who self-immolated in 1963, protesting the violent Diệm regime in South Vietnam. If there is a lesson here, it is that Quảng Đức was never alone. Fellow monks helped him plan and poured the gasoline. He burned, utterly silent and still, surrounded by people who prayed, carried banners and laid themselves before fire trucks, preventing their advance.
These communal acts, alongside ensuing protests and international state and media pressure, cement his life as political.
What our culture declares illegitimate protest is political. The deaths it permits commemoration as sacrifices — soldiers, firefighters — and those it deems off-limits become political.
"Stop glorifying self-immolation," writes Graeme Wood, placing the words genocide and complicit in scare quotes, unaware that such stylization is no less "deeply sick" of a political act than honoring Bushnell's act.
With one plea, we declare life and death above political leverage, but we are playing the same game before the sentence ends. "I do not want to spend time speculating," states the column, lampshading their unwritten speculation.
The column bemoans one self-immolation as needless tragedy but cites two others as key political moments and The Atlantic decries Bushnell's self-immolation as extremist "death cultism" despite honoring the Pulitzer-winning photographer of Quảng Đức’s own self-immolation in his obituary as diligent and politically poignant. These choices elide the fact that the moral line we claim to draw universally in mourning is always applied selectively and selected politically.
I, too, find Bushnell's death tragic, tumble through the endless hypotheticals, sympathies and imagined solidarities of public grief, as does anyone who holds space for loss.
Tragic, and yes — brave.
When I witness the conviction that "The (self-immolations) that do generate transformation often happen in circumstances very different from Bushnell's," I wonder what we both can do to fight for circumstances that can transmute Bushnell's act into change — the same change that the article forecloses as unlikely.
I wonder why the column invokes, as rhetorical capital, protests that their phrasing implies the author did not attend. Quảng Đức had a community behind him, inspired by him. We are Bushnell's witnesses — how will we respond?
I will continue to attend protests and organize actions, to grieve and honor what has already become part of a long tradition of political suicides, including those deeply entangled with my history as the daughter of Buddhist-Vietnamese refugees.
I recognize, as others do not, that Bushnell's self-immolation is no more a suicide than a hunger strike is anorexia — a medical framework that does not apply to historically grounded, non-violent protest.
The column calls Bushnell's act self-cremation. Doing so implies that Bushnell was already dead. But what the article forgets about self-immolation is that it centers the burning, searing itself into our memories in the eternal present tense — the symbolization of unimaginable agony as a rejection of complicity. That is what defines it, like other protests, as legitimate is not just what it can strategically catalyze but that the match was struck at all and what that represents.
I will not ask the author of the column, nor anyone, to agree with how I choose to carry grief for the politicized dead, nor how it galvanizes me. I ask only that we dispel our illusions that some ways are morally permissible, and not others.
Iris Nguyễn is a Senior in the School of Arts and Sciences majoring in English with a minor in creative writing.
*Columns, cartoons and letters do not necessarily reflect the views of the Targum Publishing Company or its staff.
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