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I am very sad
to inform you all of the death of my
friend
and partner on this website Tod Fletcher and his wife Susan Peabody.
They both died late on September 29, 2014 via a double suicide. Susan
had been bed-ridden for some 28 years with chronic fatigue syndrome.
Tod has spent most of his time being her caregiver. Although she seemed
to undergo a noticeable improvement a year or so ago, after stopping
all her medications, she took a drastic turn for the worse in early
September. She had considered suicide several times, in fact tried it
10 years ago, was saved only because Tod found her and took her to the
emergency room. They were basically rendered indigent by the medical
expenses, and over the past several years had faced possible eviction
for not being able to come up with rent. A few friends came through
with help at critical times, but the situation kept worsening. Tod in
any event did not wish to live any longer without Susan, such was his
love for her, and he respected her wishes to no longer endure pain. It
is very sad to lose them. But do we have a right to force people to
continue to suffer pain and grinding poverty? A tough question.
Tod was a prominent member of the 9/11 Truth Movement. He became a
member on 9/12/01, when he and i met as we had scheduled several days
earlier to discuss his pending article on the Genoa 6-7 summit (posted
on this site, under the name of Max Kolskegg). We of course discussed
the previous day’s events, and agreed that the whole thing had the
smell of an inside job. It took us a few months to fully grasp the
extent, but our intent was clear. Tod was a member of the 9/11
Consensus Panel, of which i’ve written several times over the past few
months. See this site. He also edited all but the first of the books of
the movement’s leading author, David Ray Griffin, to whom he was a
loyal and very crucial assistant, at times even stepping in to do
interviews when Griffin was unable to do so. He also authored several
articles about 9/11 and how it fitted the context of the global
capitalist crisis, and for a while had a show on Resistance Radio
concerning 9/11 and the global capitalist crisis, named “9/11 In
Context.” Episodes are linked, see the home page’s left sidebar.
But Tod was much more than a Truth activist. Well before 9/11, Tod was
part of the global anti-capitalist movement. From mid-1988 to September
2003, he and i met generally every week to discuss stuff we were
reading together, to edit each other’s articles, talk about current
events, etc. And we continued to be in close contact even after that
time, when first work took him away and then when he had to move from
the Berkeley area, where i still live, and did so to the very end of
his life. He edited every single thing i ever wrote intended for public
viewing, i did likewise. He and i worked together on a variety of
projects, including a short-lived periodical called Collide-O-Scope, on
teaching a student-initiated class at UC Berkeley during the Spring
1989 semester titled Against Authority and Capital, and on this
website, which i helped found in 2001 which he joined and revived in
2010. He authored articles about various related topics, especially the
ecological crisis and the anti-globalization movement. These can be
found at this site under either his name or under the pseudonyms Max
Kolskegg, Will Guest and I. Berg. He and i co-wrote this site’s
statement which can be read along the left margin of the home page.
These articles and writings were informed by his background in physical
geography, in which he was a graduate student and taught at the
University of California and several junior colleges. He influenced me
in the late ‘80s to dive head first into the topic of global warming,
something i’m still very involved in. He was as hard-core about global
warming denial as about 9/11 truth denial. He was the author of a
published book about the history of the Bodie-Mono Lake area in the
19th Century, “Paiute, Prospector, Pioneer,” published in 1987,
Artemisia Press. I got a copy from him as a gift in 1988, a year after
we met.He was invited to speak at an anniversary celebration at Mono
Lake University a few months ago, and could not go, but the school had
offered to have his remarks read if he mailed them in, and this
arrangement worked.
Tod did all this in spite of the incredible constraints placed upon his
time due to Susan’s illness. Susan earned graduate degrees in English
literature, and had taught classes at UC. At the time she was first
afflicted she had been working in the campaign to oppose the U.S.
government’s Star Wars program to militarize space. Her own pursuits
were of course short-circuited by her condition. They were both like
siblings to me.
One thing must be totally understood. Tod was an opponent of capitalism
who strove for its total abolition, be it corporate capitalism, free
market capitalism with “real” money, Keynesian capitalism with
government “planning,” a more “fair” wealth distribution and unlimited
money creation, state capitalism a la the former Soviet Union or North
Korea or Cuba, “green” capitalism even if it comes with worker-owned
co-ops making “green” commodities under “fair trade,”..... or any other
rendition. He made that thoroughly clear in his articles (aside from
ones with very limited focus such as on the Pentagon 9/11 matter), and
did so till his last piece extant, the introduction to the Miguel
Amorós article on anti-industrialism which is posted at this site. In
fact, as that piece indicated, he also opposed the industrial system
which capitalism spawned, which has made technology, production and
“development” the end-all to be-all of human existence, whose logic has
made it a supposedly unquestionable fact that all of our material
problems can be solved via pouring in enough resources, either monetary
or material, into developing new and better technologies, and has
reduced human beings to appendages of tee world-wide machine. Let no
one ever mistake his commitment on this matter.
Tod influenced me politically in a variety of ways. When we met in
November ’87, he had just started reading Capital, and was surprised to
hear that i never had. I had a bit of an attitude at the time, feeling
that i didn’t need to, since i had read The Grundrisse several times,
this being a book formed out of Marx’s notebooks regarding his grand
project about capitalism, of which Capital’s three current volumes
formed a small part, the beginning. I knew the whole thing, so why
bother with the pieces? Tod prevailed upon me to read it anyway, and i
am so glad i did. I came to realize how important and fundamental a
role the Enclosures played in continue to play in the emergence and
continued expansion of capitalism. They get a much more detailed
treatment in Capital than in the Grundrisse. The separation of people
from the means of producing their subsistence needs is indeed what
makes capitalist social relations possible and what ensures their
perpetuation. On this matter i owe Tod a big debt.
Likewise regarding a lot more. Thanks to Tod, i got to learn of many
people who have upheld and continue to uphold the ideas and values of
the real Karl Marx against those who call themselves “Marxists” who led
old Karl to state “I am not a Marxist.” See for instance
the Marx
Myths and Legends website, Amongst such people was the British
political activist and artist William Morris, whose rich legacy would
have been lost to the world were it not for people like Tod. I knew
relatively little about the Surrealists until Tod informed me of their
work, in particular Andre Bretons writings, and the fact that the
movement was still alive and vibrant even in the late 20th Century. And
thanks to Tod, i discovered the critique of the mechanistic materialism
paradigm which has dominated science for the last several centuries
with its metaphor of the mechanism or machine to explain all scientific
phenomena, a perspective which has been found wanting in every field of
science and challenged by process philosophy and its metaphor of the
organism. See here and here.
Dr David Ray Griffin has posted a tribute to Tod Fletcher and Susan
Peabody, it can be read here.
A memorial for Tod and Susan was held on November 22, 2014, at the
Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists. You can listen to it here.
Included is aninterview of Tod on Al Jazeera regarding 9/11, shows him
standing up well to an idiotic anchor whose questions can only be
described asidiotic and insulting.
And details about the suicide can be read in this
fine article by Shelly Ingram in the West Marin Citizen.
UPDATE: 9/11 truth activist/troubadour Vic Sadot has created a web page
with links to Tod's various works, be they articles or interviews. Much
of this material is on this site, but some isn't, such as the debate on
the 10th anniversary of 9/11 between Tod and Kevin Ryan on
one side and official conspiracy theory supporters Jonathan Kay and
Bryan Bonner. See here.
For myself, i say “Keep on Truckin,’ it’s been a long strange trip and
it’s gonna get stranger. But i will survive, we will survive.” I will
have to learn to do such basic stuff as posting articles and other
aspects of site maintenance, which Tod did, so i hope you all bear with
me.
Jeff Strahl, 1/26/15.
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