File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1996/96-10-28.110, message 65


Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 04:12:21 +0100
From: Antonio Mota <antonio_mota-AT-geocities.com>
Subject: M-I: [Fwd: Article about Kathleen Change...]


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I don't know if this (forwarding messages without nowone asking) is good
practice in this list, but here it goes anyway.


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Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 18:22:30 -0400 (EDT)
From: michael.browne-AT-Eng.Sun.COM (Michael Browne) (by way of andria-AT-panix.com (Andria Fiegel Wolfe))
To: Multiple recipients of <bad-AT-eng.hss.cmu.edu>
Subject: Article about Kathleen Change...



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----------geoboundary [this is from the Philadelphia Inquirer, sent by me completely without permission. -A] Campus figure sets self ablaze Kathy Chang was a well-known protester at Penn. Yesterday, after meticulous planning, she killed herself. By Michael Matza and Thomas J. Gibbons Jr. INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS For more than a decade she pricked the consciousness of university students with dance steps on the college green, outlandish costumes and social protests. Yesterday, in a gesture planned down to the smallest detail, Kathy Chang, a well-known gadfly of the University of Pennsylvania, delivered packets of protest literature to eight selected students and, two hours, later took her own life. In an act of immolation reminiscent of Buddhist martyrs, Chang used gasoline to set herself on fire on the Penn campus, leaving behind evidence that she had practiced for her end by burning meat with various accelerants. An elliptical note she left behind left investigators to ponder what motivated her suicide. Chang, 46, a colorful fixture at Penn for 15 years who had called herself ``Kathy Change,'' stood near a gleaming peace-symbol sculpture on the west side of Van Pelt Library about 11:20 a.m., doused herself, and exploded in flame. Witnesses saw a tongue of fire lick 10 feet into the air. Students rushed to the huge ground-floor picture windows as a campus security officer tried to put out the flames. ``They had no clue it was a person until they saw what was on fire start to move,'' said Dave Bermon, 21, a senior from Barrington, R.I., who was in the library, rushed toward the window, and pieced together what had happened from students closer to the scene. Chang, who liked to call herself a ``fun protester,'' was pronounced dead on arrival at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center with burns over 100 percent of her body. At the foot of the stainless steel peace sign, three bouquets of yellow and white flowers sat atop a circle of freshly sprinkled mulch as students tried to make sense of what happened. ``Just about everyone on campus knew who she was,'' said Ali Parnian, 21, a senior from Scottsdale, Ariz., who recalled her colorful, often scanty, costumes, sprightly outdoor dancing, and commitment to nonviolent social change. Students recalled her thin, wrinkled face and said she often surrounded herself with flags as a stereo blared messages promoting world peace, legalization of drugs and other causes. Once, recalled Parnian, Chang mocked militarism by wearing a mock ballistic missile as a phallus. ``I want to make a statement about life and death,'' read the note Philadelphia police found on the ground near her body. Farther down in the rambling passage, Chang asked that her body be left to medical science or used for organ donation. If neither of those things occurred, she wrote, perhaps her remains could be used for ``fertilizer or dog food.'' Brendan McGeever, a 20-year-old junior from Indianapolis, was one of the students who received a packet from Chang yesterday. She sealed the brown clasped envelope with two strips of duct tape and left it for him in the lobby of his dormitory. In November 1995, Chang was a guest on PennTalk, the cable-feed radio program McGeever hosts on campus station WQHS. No one who saw her on the campus could ever forget her, he said. Sometimes she wore just a G-string and a bikini top. Sometimes she wore an American eagle costume. Sometimes, she carried a large U.S. dollar sign. ``Her whole premise was that in order for the world not to end in nuclear war, there has to be a crash that wipes out the economic system,'' McGeever said, explaining the concept Chang called ``The Transformation.'' ``For many years, I have thought that Penn would be a good place to start the Transformation,'' Chang wrote in verse that she included in the packets. ``If this action I am taking succeeds, I hope it might spark some interest in what I was trying to say.'' In a one-sentence statement, Penn president Judith Rodin said the university community was ``deeply saddened by this senseless and tragic loss of life.'' Philadelphia police said Chang was from Springfield, Ohio. She listed an address in the 3800 block of Lancaster Avenue in Powelton and apparently also lived on and off with a man in an apartment in the 3300 block of Spring Garden Street. >From Chang's personal effects, police deduced that she had been planning self-immolation for more than a year, going so far as to experiment by burning chunks of meat. One investigator said police believed she had experimented with alcohol as an accelerant but rejected it because it didn't burn hot and fast enough. In 1986, Chang was captured in a newspaper photograph taking her message of social awareness to Logan Square. The picture shows her waving flags with the messages ``Peace, Liberty, Ecology, Democracy and Justice'' and ``Stop War, Pollution and Business as Usual.'' Looking for answers, McGeever turned to the four-page dialogue Chang wrote and enclosed in his packet. Titled ``To Be or Not To Be,'' it is an exchange between a character named Change and another named Con. ``You'd throw away your whole life just to be one day's headline and the next day's trash?'' Con asks. ``Yeah,'' replies Change. ``That one day will be enough to get the Transformation started.'' ----------geoboundary-- --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

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