Pat Tillmann's little brother tells the the religious wacks off

Tillman's youngest brother, Rich, wore a rumpled white T-shirt, no jacket, no tie, no collar, and immediately swore into the microphone. He hadn't written anything, he said, and with the starkest honesty, he asked mourners to hold their spiritual bromides.

"Pat isn't with God,'' he said. "He's f -- ing dead. He wasn't religious. So thank you for your thoughts, but he's f -- ing dead.''

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/05/04/SPG5K6FD091.DTL

That's pretty cool. I'm sick to death of religion. Like Bill Hicks said, "It's irrelevant."

Hi,

I loved Bill Hicks...he was great. I really wish he was still here; I'd love to hear his comments about King George the Simple and his court jesters.

Cheers,
Kim

So much for Tillman's being the icon of the Right.

I feel for his family. They have enough to deal with without all of the circus.

cojones run in the family.

Not like the Prez's stuffed package on that aircraft carrier.
Hot damn.

He felt he was doing his duty to his COUNTRY....not to the Right, or any party, or to the religious wrong.

I think Tillman was more complicated than the media whores would have you believe.

In other words, human. And tragically dead. And waved like a flag to get more killed.

in the 1st panel, having Tillman ask when he was going to get to kill Arabs. Nice touch.

Rall's cartoon is a disgrace.

Maybe you don't like the implication that he WANTED to kill Arabs. Fair enough. But these tiny frames are symbols of larger concepts which are in the eye of the beholder. If you accept that people join the military today to 'defend our freedoms against Arab terrorists,' then they obviously want to kill Arabs.

But the distinction between 'wanting' to kill and 'dutifully' killing is a false distinction to the dead Arabs, isn't it?

Maybe, just maybe...Rall implies 'live by the sword, die by the sword.'

Is that a condemnation or merely stating an inescapable truism which is tragic?

It seems to me that people who are angry about Rall's cartoon are not willing to accept that signing up with the US military when it is invading countries is taking steps to intentionally kill people.

Why deny this? How is it even possible to deny this? And this has moral implications. I'm not saying what they are but they involve killing.

but are quite willing to excuse Rall's smearing of another casualty of the War on Terror.

You're damn right I don't like Rall's implication that Tillman wanted to kill Arabs because its a sophomoric, baseless smear. Rall has a bee in his bonnet against the military...fine, I get it. What I violently disagree with is his needless attack on Tillman, symbolic or otherwise.

We may agree on the misuse of our military forces in this unjust war, but I am glad to have men and women who put their lives on the line in defense of this nation.

1)I don't think it is the 'War on Terror'.
2)I don't think this is a smear on Tillman. It is criticism of the people who define him as an extreme, idiot or hero, instead of what he was-human and tragically lost for no good reason.
3)Rall uses Tillman as a subject for the issues he addresses because people respond to a single known face in a way they don't respond to abstract numbers. It was Tillman's death that was waved like a flag to incite hero worship and cover up the unease of the leaked coffin photographs. So that is why Tillman is in Rall's box for being in Uncle Sam's box.
4)John O'Neill really was searching for terrorists and was prevented from succeeding by US ties to Saudi Arabia and US oil interests as he said to French journalists when he went to work at the Twin Towers.

So the background of the last 80 years of US and UK oil wars and slaughter of people in the Middle East are important to consider when deciding what the hell happened to Tillman and what he was doing there. Who did Tillman kill and why? Reasonable questions.

Does motivation create a hero despite the horrific slaughter?
This is the ethical question to consider when deciding 'hero' status.

Tillman didn't just put his life on the line. He put many other people's lives on the line and probably ended some, too, for what he erroneously 'believed in.'

And I think that is the incredibly complex ethical dilemma that Rall is harshly pointing at in a few tiny cartoon frames. And that doesn't eliminate my sympathy for Tillman or the bereaved family and friends he leaves behind. I don't mean that he is a villain OR hero.

This is very compelling from the report of the funeral and friend's and family testimonies:
------------------------------------
"Pat didn't want to be the focal point, but he liked being out front,'' McGinnis said, "if that makes any sense.''

Tillman's roommate in the pros, Zack Walz, took a newspaper clipping to the podium and read about how he and some Cardinals teammates had made up faux dog tags for themselves, declaring their unit a band of warriors. "Soldiers, battlers, lay it on the line,'' Walz said, sniffling as he scanned the clip. "What the hell did we know? Listen to the words. Listen to the metaphors. ... How hollow they ring.''

>snip<

"It has been said over and over that he wouldn't want to be revered while we ignore the other soldiers lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. Would he want his former friends in football belittled, their values bashed as a way to measure his sacrifice? That's too easy.

Challenge yourself.

By the time the ceremony ended, after his brother and brother-in-law sipped the Guinness that Garwood poured in Tillman's honor, the funny, thinking, wild, crazy man had come to life. The family's loss, the loss of every soldier's family, seemed more real.

Tillman wasn't an icon anymore. He was a man you wanted to know, to spend time with, to lift a Guinness alongside. But that had become impossible, the price of war, because his brother was right. Pat is dead. He's f -- ing dead."

--------------------------------------
Tillman's death was waved like a flag by the White House to cover the impact of the leaked photos of all those anonymous coffins that make us think 'numbers.' Describing Tillman as a hero is a method of pulling in more fodder for the ranks currently being used to conquer the planet's biggest fuel dump by the world's biggest arsenal.

So there is a good reason to debunk the 'hero' status of the face used to sell this death march into the sands. And using a real face instead of a generic face to illustrate the point actually humanizes the issue which is the whole point. Not to insult or demean. That is merely theater in the tiny venue of four symbolic frames. The cartoon doesn't call Tillman an idiot or hero. It makes the point that he is tragically in between, just like the rest of us, except dead and now a tool used to get more killed.

Remember when the Israeli ambassador to a Nordic country recently went apeshit in anger at seeing an artistic display about terrorism that had a face of a beautiful Palestinian woman on a tiny sailboat in a sea of blood? The ambassador assumed the artist was paying tribute to a woman who had been a suicide bomber when the poetic text of the piece gave so much more information. It described how her own family had been slaughtered by Israeli troops and she had in turn done the same thing. It was an art piece about tragedy and loss of humanity through distorting pain combined with political lies of power struggles.

Sound familiar?

And you must consider more than the possibly good intentions in the minds of our troops as they carry out this horror. There are thousands of victims of our troops good intentions to consider too.

Their inability to recognize an invalid chain of command and illegal orders has them, sadly, complicit in an illegal war of aggression that got Nazis hung at Nuremberg in 1947.

Here's an ethical exercise to consider:

Imagine that someone hears voices in their head telling them that there are dangerous people at the bus stop who want to end the world. So he bravely charges and guns them down to save the world. Erroneously. He was told lies by a radio in his brain. The radio station is the real villian. Any heros here?

I think Rall means to point out the Big Lie that is used to send bright young people to commit atrocities with a kick in the head because of the huge gap between what people think is happening and what is really happening.

so why attack Tillman? Why attribute an ugly racist motivation for him to enlist? Why rub salt in his family's grief by launching such a baseless personal attack? Are you OK with Rall making political hay out of this man's death and calling Pat Tillman a racist drone?

Rall would have been better served by making the subject of the cartoon Joe Enlistee and tempering his zeal to cast all military personnel as ignorant, prejudiced killers

BTW, check out the last panel of the cartoon again and explain to me how Rall wasn't calling Tillman a "sap" or a "idiot".

Wrong wrong wrong.

I have even more respect for Mr. Tillman. What an amazing human spirit. He will be forever missed.

What a terrible, unreasonable loss :(

Just finished reading the entire article...It seems to me that some of us on the left had him misunderstood, too. I think back to the other day, when Ted Rall insinuated that he was an "idiot" for giving up an NFL salary to serve in the military. Upon reading of his thirst for knowledge and his knack for deep, critical thinking, he doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who naively marched off to battle in a fit of jingoism. This took thought. He knew the consequences. This article really opened my eyes. Pat Tillman wasn't just some statistic or mythical American archtype for the rah-rah patriots. He was human. Just like all of us.

was a good guy, and he got himself killed in a war of no
purpose. He was fooled into thinking there was anything
noble about these Bush wars.

about the whole Tillman story.... The fundy nuts want to sieze the moment of a famous guy's funeral so they can spout their superstitous mumble jumble and they get ran off!

I have no love for athletes. My primary and secondary school experiences led to that. But, I met someone sort of like Tillman in college who got me to think of athletes as individuals instead of as a class. It is ironic, that the athletes who are least likely to generate feelings of attraction from guys seem to be the most likely to be asses towards gays while those who are most likely to, have attitudes like Tillman's or the guy I met in college.

alright in my book.

Any reaction to rall's stupid words against Tillmann?