Tim Russo died overnight on Wednesday, October 18 at the age of 56 in the Cleveland suburb of Middleburg Heights. It was a shock to his friends and family especially his mother Mary Ann who he lived with these past ten or so years. The jarring irony that Tim would pass in such a "died suddenly" way during this post-vaccine pandemic of died suddenly notices all around us is, I believe, not lost upon Tim Russo in the continuum. Tim was not vaccinated for Covid-19 in this earthly existence and so we can state clearly for the record that Tim did not die from the vaccine. It has not been unnoticed that Sinead O’Connor also passed unexpectedly at the age of 56 this past July. Tim and I discussed her a lot this past summer since her big hit “Nothing Compares 2 U” hit the charts in the UK while both of us were living in London in 1989-90 unknown to each other in a strange parallel existence. He as a young CSU grad and Jones Day office grunt in the City and I living in Brixton, Lambeth South London never having seen (or heard of, lol) the Stone Roses punk rock band who played the clubs of Brixton in those days.
Ghosts of Plum Run
Tim’s ticket was up and the heart stopped ticking and no, it wasn't Commotio Cordis. Shit happens. "Shit's fucked up and bullshit" as his fellow Occupados of OWS would probably put his premature passing. Job would probably approve. "Aesop is afoot" is probably how Tim himself is putting it now because we have no other explanation. Tim was in fine health, vigorous as young stag leaping aroung Middleburg Heights flower beds gobbling up tulips and looking forward to his late middle age past times between writing his sequels to his great opus "Ghosts of Plum Run” (available on Amazon). Despite his premature demise the man was accomplished and literally accomplished his masterpiece. Not many of us can point to such creative fruits that we can leave behind in the nick of time. Maybe that, in fact, was what was behind Tim's blazing passion in pumping out paragraph after paragraph of GOPR these past four years. Tim was seized upon by a nearly forgotten piece of Battle of Gettysburg history in the formation of a Union regiment made up of immigrants - the 1st Minnesota - that suffered horrendous casualities being used to buttress the Union line at a pivotal moment on July 2, 1863 and bum rush the Confederates in a suicidal formation. It caught up in his feverish imagination for many intersectional and radical reasons but of course the big idea was that they were most likely the ones that saved the day and the Union. Tim loved the kind of drama that reaches out of the fog of lost history and grabs you by your short hairs. It was like finding a pearl in a field that countered the Ken Burns “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy effect. The fact that many of them were Marxist revolutionaries in Europe had Tim singing the Marsailles himself. Tim went and bought that field and started writing like their was no tomorrow. He was sure he was the writer who could dramatize it for the movie picture shows with much license and even add some rock-n-roll to the score. He settled for a book series to promote his movie idea and that decision led to a torrent of character development that only a novel can afford treatment of.
He Loved Writing To the End
"Content is King" is an expression that best fits Tim's online presence through twenty years. In fact Tim basically edited and narrated his own early years eulogy in absentia:
Go online, to his YouTube page, vimeo, his personal blog and Substack and it's all there, the full monte. I just found a nearly twenty year old column he wrote for Salon.com on the 2004 general election progress in Ohio. Being a GOTV specialist in his electoral politics capacities back then Tim knew the grassroots like a golf course maintenance guy. But soon he would be exiled from those clubs of political putting greens and lefty column spaces for his public fall into an FBI thought crime in online chat rooms in the early days of the world wide web - and what tangled webs they weave too. Tim had to convert those political experiences in new ways and despite the constant gales of fear and loathing that came his way. All in his own hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. If you knew Tim you can understand how brutal this must have been since in many ways he was like that kid Ralphie in "A Christmas Story" set in Cleveland c.1940s. Tim personified the best and the most frustrating aspects of what being from Cleveland means. He loved Northeast Ohio too much in the end to relocate and start a new life away. He paid dearly and for two decades but kept his loyalty to home and in a way his faith in community. Who among us could pull that off after being a virtual reality public stoning victim? Only one who inevitably had to discover the secrets of the decoder ring: Drink Your Ovaltine, signed Little Orphan Annie. A crummy commercial that exemplifies all our illusions about being in the know inside the inner circle. Tim’s illusions fell hard though.
Blogger Interrupted
I didn't know Tim Russo during his self-styled blogger years that followed in Ohio. He was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time of the internet blogosphere and he was the right guy to break inside scoops on state politics. His video work during the 2008 Presidential campaign went viral on youtube and was picked up by the MSM and eventually got pegged as the 7th most viral political video of that year. I was barely online with dial-up being spoon fed on the likes of Daily Kos and Salon.com while living in Detroit. Tim apparently was in the thick of a tremendous reboot. Politics being his expertise, this of course makes enemies. Enemies can be an occupational hazard for even the straightest of shooters in the sphere but for Tim it generated a conveyor belt of constant attacks on his character. Ad hominen to a sadistic degree. He weathered it but as the years went by he discovered a pattern that would not abate especially the more his profile as an influencer online rose. Paid writing gigs dried up and constant infighting on boards about his being hired when his record was discovered inevitably torpedoed job after job. Thus Tim learned to turn the inevitable on its head. He branded himself the "Exploding Inevitable" and ran for office. First in 2010 for the new County Council seat in his district covering Tremont, Old Brooklyn and a huge swath of downtown and the Eastside, then again in 2014 for Cuyahoga County Executive. He was through passively having to dodge the inevitable attack and decided for the proactive approach of running for office with his record on hand and in turn eviscerating his opponents and their henchmen directly door 2 door for their feckless smear campaigns. In a big way this put all of Tim's detractors on notice: he was not afraid of the public smear anymore. He didn’t stop there though. He shared that message by reaching out to other’s struggling with sex offender convictions and offering his version of hope with an amazing speech on how to confront the past while also confronting the cowards:
In between those two campaigns was something that was not necessarily inevitable in any of our lives: Occupy Wall Street of the autumn of 2011.
Occupying the Moment
I met Tim at Occupy Cleveland in 2011 but I never really got to know him in those heady days of spontaneous protest on Public Square. We were all so busy, putting out fires, organizing events and I was wary of him as I remember it. He was clean cut those autumn days/nights and not so much into General Assemblies and more into his documenting the occupation on video which I later discovered he was prodigious at. We had units apart from our GA's called Working Groups and that's where Tim hung his documentary/organizing hat on. In the years after the collapse of our occupation downtown we became allies in fits of various follow-up campaigns online then through long, endless ruminations and recriminations on the telephone line years later. What does stand out about Tim in those early weeks of OC was the night we planned actions around the lighting of the Christmas Display on Public Square. Tim had organized a projector with some of his techies in Tremont and at his cue light up the blank side of a tallish building behind the Old Stone Church with various stenciled slogans like "We Are The 99%". I stood next to him as he explained it was his guys that pulled this off in a maintenance room from across the square. He had that Chrismas Eve look in his glistening eyes of pure delight like he just saw Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer leap from the jumbotron of the festival stage across the church roof. The significance of this moment was that we as a First Amendment protest occupation were unceremoniously pushed off of Public Square to make way for the gaudy lighting displays and festival weeks before - or so was the official excuse - and now Tim and crew trumped that with a Bat Signal above the official throwing of the switch. I looked up and thought it could've been a bit brighter but hey, it was cool. I might've been a bit peeved he failed to contact the Tech Working Group per protocol, of which I was coordinating by that point ;-) Later I would have a face off with Tim inside the occupation’s Info Tent about exiling an occupado I thought needed to go. Tim ever the attorney defended this person with maybe some personal sympathies for the accused and their plight. He won the council and we dispersed like that stoning scene from one of Tim’s favorite movies, Franco Zeffirelli's “Jesus of Nazareth”. My favorite movie, “The Matrix” I would tell him years later included a scene where the two fighters would finish and one said to the other “You don’t know a man till you fight him.”
It was only years later that knowing Tim's backstory as Mr. Democracy Guy that I understood that moment in all its projected glory. Tim had found a kind of color revolution on his own home turf of Cleveland Ohio after all the years wandering the former Soviet republics in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Armenia and assisting as America's envoy of Democratic practices for NDI (subsidary of USAID). If you were a normie on that night and were downtown just for the lighting ceremony and seasonal festivities all you would've seen was a ragged car port tent with random sayings off to the far East sidewalk, a bunch of parading ne'er-do-wells smelling of pot in odd sweaters and glo-light apparel and a few blokes looking up at this strangely unseasonal statement. But for Tim it was like the Transfiguration and all's left to do was to make two more car port tents - one for Moses and one for Elijah. He didn't know it and I didn't know it then but OWS transfigured us despite the our occupation being such a "clusterfuck in cargo pants" in a winter of "discount tents" and then, lord have mercy, an entrapment operation by our own civic protection racket called the FBI and Justice Dept near its end the following spring. History doesn’t repeat but it often rhymes like a bad rap and watching the FBI presser happen on May 1st to fellow occupados was especially disturbing to Tim. Where I was more enraged at the sheer stupidity of OC members we explicitly warned about this kind of plotting, Tim was more sympathetic if freaked-out by its scope and the unjust consequences to the entrapped young men. It just underscored Tim’s commitment to the discipline of non-violence that OWS was fully commited to. Tim really did help me understand that through his experience of being entrapped.
Tim was one of the few older occupado's who persisted and stayed through a mercfully mild Lake Erie winter downtown to help assist as he could the younger, less resourced full time occupiers. He conducted the organizing of the disruption Sheriff's Foreclosure Sale that early spring - a very risky thing to pull off. I thought it was his greatest piece of work down there and told him so many times years later. It only hit me in later years the PTSD Tim probably had to overcome to shut down the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Dept. To me that's heroic and I've been around a lot of community organizers and union organizers on my tours. That stunt pulled us all together as a group and gave us a second wind to make it to May 1st. These moments infused us and Tim. He found his mojo on Tom Johnson Quadrant eventually and it couldn't have been more appropo for a guy like Tim Russo.
Despite the occupation's implosion after being set-up so brutally by the Obama Feds it led to other political moments like the Cuyahoga County Sin Tax speech that Tim assailed the County Council in the middle of his run for County Executive in 2014. This is by far the best Tim video in my bookmarks. He channels all the rage many of us have felt for decades seeing our neo-liberal politicians in the inner cities of America hand over the public’s funds lock, stock and barrel to billionaires pleading constant poverty:
With Tim's chops, Eugene McCormick at The Cleveland Leader eventually pivoted to Issue 3 of 2015 - the attempted leveraging of the Ohio State Constitution to legalize a marijuana monopoly for a few outside billionaires. I witnessed some of the inside stories on how Tim and Eugene's gonzo journalism at the Cleveland Leader website took down that syndicate. All done in a St. Bernie #19 Browns jersey. It led to another St. Bernie in the form of two insurgent presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders that totally absorbed Tim back into more exploding inevitable electoral nirvana... if it hadn't been for that HRC - another exploding inevitable, lol. This, of course, is not nearly a tenth of the stories I was a part of or know of the evolutions of Tim Russo. This was just part of the post Occupy Cleveland story. And it seemed from my point of view to eminate from a man of 44 years who was looking up at his handiwork like a kid on Christmas Eve at a shining star of Bethlehem that December of 2011 on Public Square.
The Middleburg Years
I only filled in the gaps years later when I really got to know Tim. I moved back to Detroit and meant to restart my life after taking care of my own mother - something Tim and I had common ground with. Tim would appear in my mentions on Twitter, we would tussle and annoy each other (never block!) till eventually that play led to a long conversation on the telephone. Tim persisted not I. My online takes were not the same as Tim's on the state of our country and world but still the long conversation continued. I learned that Tim ran for County Executive to get into the Cleveland State University's MAGI international relations master's program. Why? Because the president of CSU himself blocked his application while Tim was an accomplished alum of CSU. Tim was dogged to the doggeth degree. Tim was a hustler. He took the 7,000 or so votes he harvested from that county wide campaign and resubmitted his application exposing their mistake. I learned that Tim had gone through an epiphany while in the MAGI program: He discovered Antonio Gramsci - the Italian Marxist philosopher linguist and Tim had transformed into a bonifide born again radical. It led to a full rejection of all the assumptions his "Democracy Guy" younger self fell prey to about the motives of spreading western democratic institutions to the former Soviets. It was the intellectual piece that was missing from his Occupy Cleveland spiritual experience and it mashed up nicely with his Gandi non-violence convictions.
As Tim settled into his new life in his boyhood home in Middleburg Heights after his Masters degree in International Relations he continued practicing law online while watching over his mother Mary Ann. The Plum Run books consumed him of course but he also discovered Karaoke and was surprised himself of the response from the regulars. He was good and no stage fright. He revelled while singing Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America” in the faces of the more xenophobic patrons drawing attention to a nearly forgotten American narrative at the base of his own roots. Life's little pleasures. His stories at the Karaoke bars I found quite amusing especially the Michael Stanley Band incident. Then coronavirus hit and that was done - for three years. Our phone conversations took a more intense and wild turn - conspiratorial you might say - as both Tim and I were able to trace out the previous cause and effect that precipitated a world wide lockdown then mandated vaccines. "All roads lead to Ukraine" uttered years before Putin's Special Military Operation and the "RUSSIAGATE" fiasco, even the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Wuhan and the Bat Lady. Dick Pogue turning off the internet for Jones Day and the Powers That Be (an inside joke on mass censorship). Horse deworming. Qanon Shaman. If we didn't laugh we were going to cry and we had some hoots at the madness all around us the last four years. There were times we weren't on the same page and we had to straighten that out before going forward in these convos. Were we going to get vaccinated or not? Should we comply to the overwhelming and overarching design of the mass formation happening in real time in our families, communities, churches, workplaces and ultimately through the mandates. These weren't abstract electoral quibblings anymore about mass movements or general elections but about our very blood and health. Life and death. Tim knew what it was like to be an exile...other… and I was just being baptized into that church by withholding my consent to an experiment. I needed someone out there who could understand just how crazy and dangerous this episode was in history was and I couldn't have had a better phone companerno than Tim. He had just finished his legal work on the Purdue Pharma case on opiods and the Sackler family when Operation Warp Speed was declared the end of the pandemic in November of 2020 and I can't think of anyone who was more jaded on what is possible in the medical industry. In the end Tim was right about the mRNA vaccines and elected not to subject his body in sacrifice to the Pharma gods. The fact that he witheld consent while taking care of his mother is all the more heroic since I myself know my own family would have run me out of Ohio if I had made that choice while I took care of my own mother for five or so years. Tim knew how to draw a line and plainly put it about vaccine efficacy early on: “Shit don’t work”. Now that Tim is on the other side of the Kingdom I intend on calling upon him for intercession in regards to this mass medical lunacy going forward. A Patron Saint of the Unvaxxed and vaccine injured alike. A patron saint for the Nuremberg Code all the while the shit still don’t work.
Through this past spring, summer and early fall Tim was enthralled with the gift of a family of red shouldered hawks that nested in his front yard oak tree. The oak tree the family had planted over forty years ago as he told me on my visit to his home a month ago. A few times a week I would get an update on their nesting and brooding progress. I got all the details of feathers, flybys and of the young chicks fledgling attempts to leave the nest while Tim took his smoke breaks in the driveway. He was really looking forward to the coming years and the return of of the hawk family next spring. While there with my sister on that visit out front we got the nickel tour of the property and you could only marvel at the idea of actually living in your boyhood home at 56 while Tim explained not of few of the front yard trees were planted Christmas trees from youth. It was a beautiful, warm sunny September afternoon and Tim looked happy and proud to show us around the neighborhood. In a lot of ways Tim was planted himself and rooted in that yard and grew bigger than life. Big enough even to bear a family of huge bird of prey. He was rooted in Cleveland and wanted to bring back home from his early exploits and travels all that his talents could offer that town. I think he accomplished a good deal of that and he did it his way and then passed away quietly in his own bedroom he slept in as a boy. What a gift it is even if we are left in shock and sadness at the loss of his kind of friendship. I can't help but think that family of huge hawks were there at the ready as spiritual escorts for Tim's transition into the next realm. And he was happy.
He always admonished me to "lead with love". Our phone conversations would invariably end with him cutting me short with a "Gotta go. Love ya, bud" as his best bud Jonathan rang at his work break. I could always expect him to ring back in a couple days with another update with some mutual shadenfreude over beers. Like the Matrix series that he never watched ends though, “…it was inevitable. Every beginning has an ending” and Agent Smith was right. Love ya bud.
I didn't know about Tim's passing until Thursday night at midnight. Total state of shock but this piece gave me some needed closure. I'm working on something from my own point of view now and I'll share it with you once It's completed. God Bless.
What an incredible portrait of Tim you have drawn. You have animated his life force with every carefully placed line and shading. I see a perfectly flawed human being with a relentless wish to grow and an unshakeable commitment to "seriously and playfully" participate in life, from his God given gift's, despite its brutality, sorrows, anguish, failures and turbulence. I feel cheated of the future conversations we might have had on my annual visits to the mid west. Since he directly participated in the "color revolutions" of the old Soviet regimes, I have many things I wish I could ask him. I feel so fortunate to have met Tim just a month before his passing. He has left an indelible imprint. Thank you for your heart felt memorial that reads like a Rembrandt portrait.