Sundman figures it out! is an autobiographical meditation, in the spirit of Michel de Montaigne, of a 71 72 year old guy who lives with his wife in a falling-down house on a dirt road on Martha’s Vineyard that dead-ends into a nature preserve.
Incidents, preoccupations, themes and hobbyhorses appear, fade, reappear and ramify at irregular intervals. If you like this essay I suggest checking out a few from the archives. These things are all interconnected.
Précis
On September 10, 2025, the right wing Christian nationalist provocateur Charlie Kirk was murdered while speaking in outdoor setting at a university in Utah. A few days later a suspect was apprehended.
The next day, September 11, 2025, was the 24th anniversary of the al-Qaeda attacks which killed 2,977 people and injured thousands more.
Since the murder of Kirk, the MAGA right wing in America, led by Trump, Vance and other prominent members of the regime and their proxies and sycophants have made a martyr of Kirk and used his death to justify broad and deep assaults on the liberties of anybody not in their cult.
I offer some jumbled thoughts on these and other matters.
A remembrance
From a memorial page on the Rochester Institute of Technology website:
Philip M. Rosenzweig ’77 (computer science) was among the passengers who died when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center.
Mr. Rosenzweig was director of Sun Microsystems Laboratories Boston Center for Networking in Burlington, Mass. He led an advanced development group focusing on new network protocols and services. Before that, he led the firm’s PC Networking Group. He was instrumental in helping RIT develop a research relationship with Sun.
He served on the Computer Science/Software Engineering Advisory Board and the President's Roundtable. In 1999, he was recognized with a Distinguished Alumni Award.
I met Philip Rosenzweig only one time. In a corporate reorganization at Sun Microsystems in 1993, two managers (and the groups they managed) who had reported to me were transferred to Phil’s group. I met with Phil to ensure a smooth transition of the two managers and their groups from my group to his. I don’t remember much about our conversation other that it went smoothly and I left with a favorable impression of him.
At the time I resided in Massachusetts and managed a group of about fifty people, about half of whom were in Massachusetts and rest in Silicon Valley, California. I travelled frequently between the coasts, as did Phil Rosenzweig.
On the day he was murdered by Saudi fanatics from al-Qaeda, Phil was en route from Sun's east coast facility to California. This was a trip I had made at least sixty times in my nine years at Sun Microsystems.
During the time that I worked at Sun, its headquarters was a 10-building campus in Mountain View. In the late 1990's, after I had left Sun’s employ, Sun moved from its Mountain View campus to its newly-built headquarters in Menlo Park. (A new company, "Google," moved into the former Sun Campus.)
Although I never worked at the new Menlo Park facility, I learned from friends that after the events of 9/11, Sun installed a memorial to Phil there — a bench in a small garden.
In the early 2000's, Sun's fortunes changed drastically. The company was acquired by Oracle, which sold Sun's Menlo Park headquarters to another new company, 'Facebook.' I heard a rumor, don't know if it's true, that Facebook removed the Rosensweig memorial. I don't know if Phil’s bench is still there or not.
Every year when September 11 rolls around think of Phil — and of how many times I made the same trip he was making when he died. That’s not a pretty thing to say, I guess. But it’s true.
I'm an alumnus of Xavier High School, 16th St NYC. Among alumni, parents, faculty, etc, our school community lost 40 souls. I think of them. I know several other people who were affected by nine-eleven. I think of them. I was a firefighter for ten years. I think of the firefighters of 9/11 too.
Charlie Kirk
Let me be forthright: I thought Charlie Kirk was a loathsome human being and a key figure in the fascist movement that is a threat to the continued existence of the United States of America as anything remotely resembling a democratic republic. He was a skilled demagogue with millions of fervent followers, and the heir apparent to the MAGA movement. He was a Christian nationalist, a racist, a misogynist, a bully and a fascist. He disgusted me, but more than that he scared me.
But I take no joy in his death, and I never have.
I don’t rejoice in the murder of anybody. I would not have rejoiced if he had died in a car crash, for Pete’s sake. And I am especially unhappy that this awful man was publicly assassinated, because as a martyr he’s even more of a threat to the people and things I care about than he was when he was alive.
From the moment I heard that he had been shot, before I learned that he had died, I felt fear, and that feeling grows stronger by the day. I feared that people on the right would make Charlie Kirk into a martyr, a MAGA Horst Wessel, and exploit his death in an accelerationist way to hasten the transformation of the United States in to a white Christian fascist ethnostate.
And that is exactly what is happening.
Technology Square and fighter jets over Martha’s Vineyard
On the morning of September 11, 2001 I rode my bicycle two miles down the hill from the house across the street from Somerville (Massachusetts) High School (where I rented a room in a house with a bunch of Harvard and MIT grad students half my age) to Kendall Square, Cambridge, where my office at the MIT-spinoff software startup Curl was located. In the business park called ‘Technology Square,’ three eight-story buildings formed a “U” that opened onto Main Street. In the open area there was a lawn with some trees and a few benches. At bottom of the U was the Forrester building, which bore its name in bright green ten-foot tall letters at the top. Curl’s offices were on the top floor of the Forrester building.
I was the manager of Curl’s 14-person technical publications/information architecture group. (Curl was the fucked company I wrote about in my essay When I got Knifed; I had moved from Dorchester to Somerville after the incident I described in that post.)
Every morning at 10:00 my boss Steve, the VP of Engineering, used to hold a totally unnecessary staff meeting. At 9:30 on Tuesday, the 11th, I had a 1 -1 meeting scheduled with Lisa, one of the people in my group. She didn’t show up until 9:45, which was unusual: Lisa was a very punctual person and she lived within walking distance of the office.
When she arrived at my office for our meeting, she sat down in the guest chair, looking on the edge of tears. “I just watched a jet full of people slam into a skyscraper in New York,” she said. “I just saw hundreds of people get killed.” She then told me what she had seen on the news before coming to work. She was too upset to talk about work stuff, so I asked her if she wanted to go home.
Ten minutes later I walked down the hall to the boardroom in the northeast corner of the eighth floor, where Steve’s silly daily meeting was to take place. The eight or so members of Steve’s staff had just taken our seats when we heard a big commotion in the hallway. The meeting room door swung open and some people came in, pushing a big cart that had a television on it.
Steve vainly tried to tell the new arrivals that he was running a meeting, but everybody ignored him. Soon the TV was plugged in (the boardroom was the only place where it could pick up an over-the-air signal) and within minutes we were watching the horrific scenes of the burning towers. Soon people began leaving — everybody was going home.
I went to my office and called my wife Betty, who was home on Martha’s Vineyard. This was a land-line phone; neither of us yet owned a cell phone. And besides, the cell networks were all jammed and nobody could get a call through.
“You’ll never believe what I just saw,” she said. “I was on the back porch watering the plants when two Air Force fighter jets came screaming right over our house. I mean, right over it. I almost could have reached up and touched them. It was terrifying. I don’t know what’s going on, but it must be something big.”
Just before the bullet struck
According to an account from the Economic Times of India,
Kirk was answering a question about transgender mass shootings in the United States of America before he was shot dead. “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” an audience member asked Kirk, according to a CNN report.
To this, Charlie Kirk responded, "Too many".The same audience member informed Kirk that the number is five, and proceeded to ask if he knew how many mass shooters there have been in the US over the last 10 years.
“Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk asked.
A split second later, a gunshot echoed through the venue.
In the empty gym of the Akamai building
As it is today and has been since September 1994, in the year 2001 my family residence was on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, which is located about five miles south of Cape Cod. It’s about an 80 mile drive from Kendall Square, Cambridge, to Woods Hole, where the terminal for the Steamship Authority ferries is. During the years that I worked at Curl I stayed in a rented room during the week and went home on weekends to be with Betty and our younger daughter, who was in junior high.
On September 11, 2001 I would have liked to go home to be with my family, but in the chaos of that day all ferries had been cancelled, so there was no practical way for me to get there. Within an hour or so of the disrupted meeting in Curl’s boardroom, all of my co-workers had departed, leaving me to walk the empty hallways by myself.
One of the three buildings that formed the “U” of Technology Square was occupied by another hot new MIT-spinoff software startup called Akamai, and that word appeared in big blue letters on the top of the building as proudly as FORRESTER did on the building where I worked. I had a membership in the gym that was located in the basement of the Akamai building, and to my relief the gym was still open on September 11th when I got there about 11:30 that morning.
One staff person was at the desk, but other than that I had the place to myself. So I gave myself a good two hour workout — what the heck else was I going to do? — as TV screens all over the gym showed pictures of talking heads and flaming towers.
Before that day I used to sometimes see a fit young guy named Danny working out, and I had learned from somebody that ‘Danny’ was Daniel Lewin, Akamai’s co-founder — a hot-shot computer genius, and now a fabulously wealthy entrepreneur.
I didn’t learn until a few days later that Danny, too, like Phil Rosenzweig, had been on American Airlines Flight 11 out of Boston that morning.
Second Vatican on Kirk and martyrdom
The Catholic essayist and former professor of theology Karen Elizabeth Park, whose substack is called ‘Second Vatican,’ has posted one of the most intriguing commentaries I’ve yet seen on the subject of the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the reaction to it by some Christians and people of rightist political leaning.
In her essay Charlie Kirk and the Rhetoric of Martyrdom: Polycarp of Smyrna and what the "elect" see in Kirk's death, she says the following:
As soon as he was shot, before he was even pronounced dead, Charlie Kirk was already being transformed into a martyr — not a political martyr who dies for a cause (although that language is developing too) but an explicitly Christian martyr. Right-wing conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck tweeted this just after the shooting:
“Pray for healing and a miracle. Getting word that #charliekirk has been stabilized. I pray it is true. If it is THAT IS A SECOND MIRACLE 1. Trump 2. Kirk. The hospital is taking blood now. Our God is a God of Miracles. In Jesus name.”(Glenn Beck, Sept 10, 2025)
I’m not on X but I saw this tweet because it was circulating as a screen shot in the family group chat of one of my best friends. Her family are wealthy evangelical Trump supporters. They fully approved of Beck’s message. My friend was floored.
Park goes on to explain the Christian tradition of martyrdom, with an illustrative example of a fellow named Polycarp of Smyrna, who was gruesomely put to death in what is now Turkey in the year 155 for refusing to renounce his Christian faith. Fortunately for scholars of such things, there are accounts from contemporary witnesses about the manner of Polycarp’s execution and the meaning ascribed to it by his fellow Christians, who witnessed it.
About Beck’s tweet, Park says,
Beck’s [call for people to donate blood] was not about practical first aid. It was a call to a religious and imaginative participation in Kirk’s wounded body. That is how blood and death function in Christian martyrdom. The body of the individual becomes a sacramental offering — his or her death transformed into a group experience.
She goes on from there to draw some further conclusions. The essay isn’t very long. I hope you’ll make time to read it.
The Bronto at the Vineyard Haven Post Office
On September 11, 2011, the tenth anniversary of the attacks, there was a memorial gathering in the parking lot of the post office at Five Corners, on Martha’s Vineyard. By that time I had been a member of Tisbury Fire Department for three years, assigned to the company of Tisbury 651, a tower-ladder truck colloquially known as the ‘The Bronto,’ short for ‘brontosaurus,’ the dinosaur it was said to resemble when its platform was deployed and a hose was attached to the back, like a long brontosaurus tail.
On that morning the parking lot was empty except for the bronto. The tower was deployed, and from the bottom of the platform a large American flag was suspended.
There’s a brass bell with a lanyard mounted on the roof of the Bronto, and Chief asked me if I would do the honor of climbing up to ring the bell ten times at 9:59, commemorating the collapse of the first tower, in which many of the 343 New York City firefighters who died that day perished.
There were Boy Scouts in uniform and people bearing flags from the various armed services. Among the observers that day there was one man wearing Marine dress blues bedecked with ribbons — I was told he was a veteran of Desert Storm — and another fellow who wore casual civilian clothes and carried a sign bearing the words “Peace is Patriotic.”
One of my fellow firefighters that day — a self-described ‘conservative’ — was irked by the man with the sign. He said, “That guy. What’s he doing here? This is our day.” And I said, “It’s his day too. We’re all Americans. He doesn’t bother me.”
Later that evening I called the sign-man at home. His name was Chris Fried. He & I were not great friends, but I knew him. I thanked him for being there that morning.
Ward Churchill, Peter Thiel, Charlie Kirk, “Free Speech on campus”
Sometime around 2005 there was a big stink when a professor at Hamilton College, in Clinton, NY — of which I am an alumnus — invited a guy named Ward Churchill, a sociologist, to give a talk about something or other having to do with colonialism.
Now, at the time Churchill was getting somewhat known as a controversial fellow. But although it would later become well established that he was an academic fraud and plagiarist, those things hadn’t yet been proved.
Then, before his talk was to be given, it came out that Churchill had referred to people in the financial profession who had died in the twin towers on 9/11 as “little Eichmanns’. Which is of course an obscene thing to say, especially with regard to the mostly Jewish employees of the trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which lost 658 of its 960 New York City based employees that day.
The big star of Fox News in those days was named Bill O’Reilly, and when O’Reilly got wind of the ‘little Eichmann’ story he launched a campaign to use his enormous platform to force Hamilton to withdraw its invitation to Churchill. The legions of Fox-watching flying monkeys took the hint and began a campaign of harassment.
From Inside Higher Ed
The Hamilton talk never took place. College officials resisted political demands that they call the speech off, but ended up doing so because of death threats to Churchill. While the Churchill debate shifted back to Colorado, where officials [were] trying to fire him, Hamilton was left with its own questions. The Churchill invitation came not long after a dispute over another aborted invitation, that one to Susan Rosenberg, a one-time activist against the Vietnam War who was indicted but never tried for a 1981 armored car robbery that left a guard and two police officers dead. Some faculty members, and many conservative alumni, criticized the college, saying that in the name of academic freedom it was inviting to campus people who could incite, but not necessarily educate.
Well, strange things happen, as the saying goes, and on whom should Hamilton College bestow an honorary degree and invite to be its commencement speaker in 2016, but Peter Thiel, who, if he’s not the actual antichrist, he’s close enough for me:
Ward Churchill was an obnoxious publicity-hungry jerk who gained fans by exploiting the grief of others. One of my Hamilton classmates lost a brother on 9/11, and I’m sure that there are plenty of other members of the Hamilton community who were similarly affected. I think it’s extremely unfortunate that Churchill was ever invited to Hamilton. But ultimately he was just a nobody with no power to do anything other than make people upset.
Peter Thiel, on the other hand — well, read my essays if you want to know how I feel about that guy. Unlike Ward Churchill, Thiel has enormous, enormous, power, and he is using it every minute of every day in ways that threaten the wellbeing of 999,999 of every one million people on earth. Giving that ghoul Peter Thiel an honorary degree shames Hamilton immeasurably more than letting Ward Churchill give a talk to a half-empty auditorium ever could.
Which brings us to Charlie Kirk, or as I think of him, the Ward Churchill of the Right. Only, with a thousand times Churchill’s charisma or rhetorical skill. Kirk was kind of a hybrid Ward Churchill/Bill O’Reilly.
I’m not going to waste my time documenting all the ‘little Eichmann’ equivalent things that Kirk said before he was murdered. People of good faith can find them easily enough with a little bit of Internet sleuthing, and I have no interest in dealing with Kirk stans, who are either willfully ignorant or acting in bad faith.
Kirk’s apologists say that he brought his ‘Prove me wrong’ schtick to college campuses in the name of ‘honest debate.” The liberal pundit Ezra Klein wrote that Kirk “did politics the right way.” Some prominent Democratic governors, among others, have said similar things.
But Kirk’s ‘debate’ was always performative; it was about showmanship, not the exchange of ideas — right down to his last unfortunate utterance, “counting or not counting gang violence?”
For, after all, why wouldn’t mass shooters who happened to be in gangs not be included in an account of mass shooters? Kirk brings up the notion of ‘gangs’ clearly trying to make people think of urban gangs of Black and Brown people — not, for example, motorcycle gangs of white people like those of the mass shooting in Waco Texas that left nine people dead.
If I went to college campuses and sat under a 'Prove Me Wrong' tent saying "There's no such thing as ‘virgin birth’. Mary was a teenage slut. Prove me wrong," would anybody applaud me for being 'willing to debate' that aspect of Christian doctrine? Of course not. Because the only reason for such a stunt would be to incite & upset. To troll, in other words. Yet that’s exactly the kind of stunt that Kirk pulled over and over over again, both on his podcast and in his college appearances. “Black people are not smart enough to fly an airplane or sit on the Supreme Court. Prove me wrong. Trans people should be stoned to death. Prove me wrong.”
His Turning Point USA organization promoted harassment of school teachers, college professors, librarians, and others — including people I know. He boasted that he was responsible for sending “80+ busses of ‘patriots’” to the violent riot at the Capitol on January 6.
Charlie Kirk was a troll, pure and simple. He was very good at it, and it made him very rich and influential.
And now he is a martyr.
“For Christians, persecution = righteousness”
Charlie Kirk, a conservative Christian, said that “‘empathy’ is a New Age made-up term that does a lot of damage.” This statement seems to me, and to many other people, to spit on the injunction Jesus gave to his disciples, as recorded in the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 12, verse 31:
“The second [commandment] is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
I have seen some of Kirk’s apologists try to explain this away by saying that Kirk believed in ‘sympathy’ — that is, pity — but not empathy, because it is literally impossible to feel as another person feels. Which I, admittedly not a Christian, think is hair-splitting obscurantist bullshit. It may not be technically possible to feel exactly how another person feels, but nevertheless that was Christ’s commandment. One of his two ‘greatest’ commandments. So I would think Christians would at least try. But whatever.
I posted this comment to Karen Elizabeth Park’s essay Charlie Kirk and the Rhetoric of Martyrdom:
Somewhere along the way I came into possession of a copy, dating to the late 19th century, of Foxe's Book of Martyrs. I don't remember where it came from — it was probably in a case of old books my wife purchased at an estate sale for $5 or some such. A few years ago I was pruning bookshelves and decided to take a look between the covers. I'm sure you know what I found — gory, ghoulish accounts of Protestant 'elects' martyred by the evil Catholics in the early decades of the Reformation, all told with great relish — glee, almost.
So I asked the google about that book, and when I learned its history I thought, "Well now, isn't that interesting. I thought Catholics owned the patent on this kind of account." (I grew up Catholic & was exposed to accounts of the martyrs at a pretty young age.)
After consulting E-bay and determining that my copy of Foxe's had no cash value I held onto it for a while, as a kind of curiosity. But eventually I threw it out with the garbage. I understand that it's important to keep copies of that book around in libraries and places of research. But it's just death porn and I didn't want it in my house.
To my comment on her essay, Ms. Parks replied,
Yes that book did much to strengthen the righteousness of the English Protestants —including our own Puritans. For Christians, persecution = righteousness, which is why many Christians go around claiming persecution even when they hold all the power.
Now of course one might truthfully say that people of other groups also seem to subscribe to the belief that persecution = righteousness. Certainly the perpetrators of the atrocities of 9/11 left plenty of evidence that they did.
But here in the United States, with Christian nationalists like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson everywhere in ascendency, it’s Christians who scare me the most. They now have the martyr they’ve been looking for. and their weaponization of the death of Charlie Kirk is already in high gear.
Christmas Eve in Danny Lewin Square
As I wrote in my essay A very Pazuzu Christmas: Santa vs Demon in the neurology Intensive Care Unit, on the Saturday before Christmas, 2024, my 41 year old son Jakob was taken by helicopter from Martha’s Vineyard Hospital to Boston’s Brigham & Women’s due to intractable seizures caused by an epilepsy medication mixup. There, after what was evidently a pretty dramatic reception by the toxicology trauma team, he spent the next two days in the neurology ICU before being transferred to the less intensive care floor for two days and then being discharged on the 26th, after which I drove him back home.
I spent those days just before and after Christmas last year going back and forth between Boston/Cambridge and the Vineyard. I arrived in Kendall Square late in the afternoon on Christmas Eve, and, after checking into a hotel there, I decided to take a walk down the street to Technology Square, where I had worked twenty and more long years earlier.
It was a cold and dreary day, and the inch of snow on the ground was enough to make walking treacherous but not enough to make anything look cheerful. The FORRESTER sign was gone from the building where Curl, Inc, had once been headquartered, and the AKAMAI sign was gone too. I thought about the meaning of time. I felt old and weary.
I turned to go back to the hotel and caught sight of a small street sign: Danny Lewin Square.
On Christmas Day I visited Jake in his hospital room before heading home to Martha’s Vineyard. There, Betty & I could sit on a couch and ponder together the Christmas story, if we felt like doing so.
I don’t remember what we did. Maybe we watched a feel-good movie with a spiritual angle to match our moods. Something like The Blair Witch Project, maybe, or The Exorcist.
Heaven help us all.
Passing the collection plate
I’m just a poor writer who’s trying, and not always succeeding, to make enough dough to pay his mortgage & car payments on time. (My situation is actually pretty scary right now.) If you enjoy my kind of writing and would like to help out, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. If you’d just like to make a one time-contribution, here’s a link to buy me a coffee (any amount welcome — pay no attention to the exorbitant suggestions).
I’m now offering ‘merch’ at my ‘Buy me a coffee’ page. The first item on offer: In Formation #3.
Cheerio!
All over the place...in a good way. Thanks.
I rejoice in the death of no one ... as Donne said any man's death diminishes me for i am involved in mankind.