Posted on 10/07/2007 9:38:10 PM PDT by DogByte6RER
Making a run for freedom
Posted on Sat, Oct. 06, 2007
By NICHOLAS SPANGLER
The remarkable thing about running through downtown Miami at lunch hour in nothing but Nikes and a red, white and blue thong is how many people don't notice.
They were talking on their phones; shuffling documents; concentrating on walking.
Not until he climbed the steps of the Miami-Dade Courthouse did a few lawyerly types point and smile at the nearly naked man. He was Michael Tisdale, a lumberjack hailing from the Redland, protesting the state of the nation.
This had nothing to do with his being a lumberjack.
Internet research had revealed what he took to be a sinister conspiracy of immense scale, linking the war in Iraq to the global military-industrial complex and profits for key figures in the office of the president of the United States, basically at the expense of young soldiers who are getting their arms and legs blown off on a daily basis, and nobody cares!
''I don't get it,'' Tisdale had said earlier over coffee at Diana's, on Northwest First Street, clothed.
``Does someone in your own family have to be killed or wounded before it hits home?''
He has stewed for months. The memory of an event he knew only from newspaper accounts came back strong enough to be a vision: ``I see this Buddhist monk -- a man -- pour a gallon of gasoline over his head and set fire to himself and sit there and burn. That's a statement!''
His own statement was be less dramatic, maybe, but also much less fatal: a solitary man's final desperate sacrifice, retooled for the age of irony.
So at noon, outside the federal building on the corner of Southwest First Avenue and First Street, Tisdale said to those around him, ``I'm going, brothers.''
Then he took off his shirt and dropped his drawers. At this moment a man in a blue Volkswagen drove by and yelled ``Freedom!''
One block north, outside the county courthouse, 50 demonstrators materialized with signs calling for the impeachment of the president.
PATRIOTIC THONG
Tisdale's back wore a henna tattoo that read Freedumb Run and his nether-region a stylistically hideous but patriotic thong, bought some days in advance at a Lincoln Road boutique.
Tisdale is 44 and has gotten to this point in his life never having worn one. He's the kind of guy who, should he get to the beach, would wear swim trunks down past his knees.
His job, which involves salvaging dead mahogany trees, keeps him in decent shape but he is by no means buff.
Also, probably, only underwear models should wear thongs.
Now he jogged north, with a short jogging-in-place interval before the light changed at Flagler Street.
The bells of Gesu Catholic Church pealed; the kids at Miami Dade College used their phones to take pictures; the Haitian cabbies outside the Holiday Inn on Biscayne Boulevard nodded, because nothing under the sun ever surprises a cabbie.
FREEDOM TOWER
The Freedumb run was 1.2 miles long and terminated, sweatily, at Freedom Tower.
''What's going on here?'' said the guard.
''Freedumb run,'' said Tisdale.
''I understand that,'' said the guard, who didn't, ``but this is private property you're on.''
This might have been grounds for debate but before long, from out of nowhere, a beautiful woman on a black BMW motorcycle swooped down the boulevard and stopped next to the sidewalk.
Tisdale got on back and they headed south toward the courthouse on Flagler to the impeachment rally, already in progress.
As my mother used to say: "Oh my aching back!".
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