For Stallman, the "Impeach God" message worked on many levels. An atheist since early childhood, Stallman first saw it as an attempt to set a "second front" in the ongoing debate on religion. "Back then everybody was arguing about God being dead or alive," Stallman recalls. "`Impeach God' approached the subject of God from a completely different viewpoint. If God was so powerful as to create the world and yet do nothing to correct the problems in it, why would we ever want to worship such a God? Wouldn't it be better to put him on trial?"
At the same time, "Impeach God" was a satirical take on America and the American political system. The Watergate scandal of the 1970s affected Stallman deeply. As a child, Stallman had grown up mistrusting authority. Now, as an adult, his mistrust had been solidified by the culture of the AI Lab hacker community. To the hackers, Watergate was merely a Shakespearean rendition of the daily power struggles that made life such a hassle for those without privilege. It was an outsized parable for what happened when people traded liberty and openness for security and convenience.
Buoyed by growing confidence, Stallman wore the button proudly. People curious enough to ask him about it received the same well-prepared spiel. "My name is Jehovah," Stallman would say. "I have a special plan to save the universe, but because of heavenly security reasons I can't tell you what that plan is. You're just going to have to put your faith in me, because I see the picture and you don't. You know I'm good because I told you so. If you don't believe me, I'll throw you on my enemies list and throw you in a pit where Infernal Revenue Service will audit your taxes for eternity."
Those who interpreted the spiel as a word-for-word parody of the Watergate hearings only got half the message. For Stallman, the other half of the message was something only his fellow hackers seemed to be hearing. One hundred years after Lord Acton warned about absolute power corrupting absolutely, Americans seemed to have forgotten the first part of Acton's truism: power, itself, corrupts. Rather than point out the numerous examples of petty corruption, Stallman felt content voicing his outrage toward an entire system that trusted power in the first place.
"I figured why stop with the small fry," says Stallman, recalling the button and its message. "If we went after Nixon, why not going after Mr. Big. The way I see it, any being that has power and abuses it deserves to have that power taken away."
Small Puddle of Freedom
Ask anyone who's spent more than a minute in Richard Stallman's presence, and you'll get the same recollection: forget the long hair. Forget the quirky demeanor. The first thing you notice is the gaze. One look into Stallman's green eyes, and you know you're in the presence of a true believer.
To call the Stallman gaze intense is an understatement. Stallman's eyes don't just look at you; they look through you. Even when your own eyes momentarily shift away out of simple primate politeness, Stallman's eyes remain locked-in, sizzling away at the side of your head like twin photon beams.
Maybe that's why most writers, when describing
Stallman, tend to go for the religious angle. In a 1998
Salon.com article titled "The Saint of Free Software,"
Andrew Leonard describes Stallman's green eyes as
"radiating the power of an Old Testament prophet."See Andrew Leonard, "The
Saint of Free Software,"
Salon.com (August 1998).
http://www.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/08/cov_31feature.html
A 1999 Wired magazine article describes the Stallman
beard as "Rasputin-like,"See Leander Kahney, "Linux's Forgotten Man," Wired
News
(March 5, 1999).
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,18291,00.html
while a London Guardian profile describes the Stallman
smile as the smile of "a disciple seeing Jesus."See "Programmer on moral high
ground; Free software is
a moral issue for Richard Stallman believes in freedom
and free software." London Guardian (November 6, 1999).
These are just a small sampling of the religious
comparisons. To date, the most extreme comparison has
to go to Linus Torvalds, who, in his autobiography-see
Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The
Story of an Accidentaly Revolutionary (HarperCollins
Publishers, Inc., 2001): 58-writes "Richard Stallman is
the God of Free Software." Honorable mention goes to
Larry Lessig, who, in a footnote description of
Stallman in his book-see Larry Lessig, The Future of
Ideas (Random House, 2001): 270-likens Stallman to
Moses: . . . as with Moses, it was another leader,
Linus Torvalds, who finally carried the movement into
the promised land by facilitating the development of
the final part of the OS puzzle. Like Moses, too,
Stallman is both respected and reviled by allies within
the movement. He is [an] unforgiving, and hence for
many inspiring, leader of a critically important aspect
of modern culture. I have deep respect for the
principle and commitment of this extraordinary
individual, though I also have great respect for those
who are courageous enough to question his thinking and
then sustain his wrath. In a final interview with
Stallman, I asked him his thoughts about the religious
comparisons. "Some people do compare me with an Old
Testament prophent, and the reason is Old Testament
prophets said certain social practices were wrong. They
wouldn't compromise on moral issues. They couldn't be
bought off, and they were usually treated with contempt."