Thursday, December 30, 2004

There Are Too Many Bodies. I've watched the Iraq stories for months and fumed at the way American broadcasters frame the news. Twenty Iraqis die and it's the third story. One American dies, and it's the lead. American lives are just more valuable, the way American music, American movies, American pop is more valuable. Our currency is on a different scale, even when it comes to death. I was so incensed, because one death is as tragic as another. Every person is a son, a daughter, a brother or sister, the center of a web of connections no less significant than anothers. But the other thing that gnawed was the sense that Iraqi bodies were just that - bodies. An endless supply of other-thans that could be reported as if they were sports scores. "At halftime, it's 15 insurgents to 13 Iraqis." And then the waves crashed on the shores of Thailand. And Indonesia. And more - countries that didn't exist for most of us, and now are fields of death and the byline for terrifying home movies - the apocalypse made real, shot on location in paradise. The bodies stack up like cordwood. Sixty thousand. Eighty thousand. One hundred twenty five thousand, I heard this evening. How to even imagine it? I try to compare it to cities I know. Everett, Washington equals 85,000. More than that. Tacoma equals 180,000. Not that many - not today. So imagine two-thirds of Tacoma, wiped clean by the wet hand of God, and that's what happened. But it doesn't work, because the mind cannot erase entire cities, highways, families, decades of history, like shaking an Etch-a-Sketch. The media has tried to reduce it to single stories. The Swedish boy. The distraught Canadian boyfriend. The supermodel and her boyfriend, who is still missing. The designer and his euphemistic friend, who still remains missing. The action hero who cheated death. It doesn't seem real. We're all keeping it at arm's length, and so am I. Death on this level is mind-shattering, and so it almost needs to be reported as a running tally, because if we do otherwise... if we try to bring it home... if we imagine the one person who we love more than anything, more than life itself... and imagine that they've just been obliterated, assaulted by the very sea and the howling rage of nature, their body only identifiable by tattoos and birthmarks, and then imagine that their entire family is also gone... and ours is also gone - our brothers, sisters, our father, our aunts and uncles... and every family we ever knew growing up... and every person we worked with or ever worked with in the past... every flirtation, every close friend, every science class partner... imagine your entire photo album of friends and acquaintances, all of them, every one, destroyed utterly. Dashed like kindling against trees and houses and fences and the earth, shattered like pottery. The mind cannot comprehend. The grief is so overwhelming it robs us of the ability to think, to walk, to breathe. The grief and shock becomes a raging wind that howls in our ears, knocks us to the ground, robs flesh of everything but pain, all around, everywhere, so much pain and nowhere to go to escape it, nowhere to be safe, nowhere to be whole again... God help the survivors. And God help all of us to get through this torrent of grief and horror. I will give money to the so-called relief effort. I will show up in church on Sunday. I will hold my wife harder than usual, and kiss Oliver good night and pray for him to be safe. Please, please, please, let him be safe. 9:24:21 PM     Speak up!  []

"Waah Waah Waah" - Dino Rossi Today the Washington Secretary of State certified Christine Gregoire as the Governor-elect, removing the tiara and sash from Republican Dino Rossi. This has been a long strange trip, and I stand by my previous assertions that Gregoire ran a spineless and overcautious campaign. She's won by a margin of .001% in a state that has a Democratic House and Senate and two women Democratic Senators. She should have mopped the floor with Mr. Rossi. But now the Republicans are just sad and desperate. They've dispatched "grassroots" people to write snarky letters to the editor saying that Rossi won two elections, while Gregoire won only one. Er, that's not true. Each recount has been a refinement of the vote - searching for errors, clarifying votes that weren't clear, and in each case increasing the vote tallies for both candidates (plus Libertarian Ruth Bennett. Probably Mickey Mouse and Superman picked up a few extra votes, too.) Gregoire won the final refinement of the vote - the clearest picture of the voter's intent. The picture was a tie - Gregoire won by a hair. Interestingly, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has had a poll up all day asking whether the state should revote, and every time I've checked it, it's been tied 50-50. But back to my point. Point being, the waah waah waah whiny ass Republican party. For the last week or so, Rossi and "Chairman" Chris Vance have been muttering about fraud. Vance said party operatives would be on the lookout for votes from dead people, felons, people who illegally voted from a post office box service, or other illegalities. "If we find 1,000 illegal votes, 500, 200, that's it. We have a compelling case to carry forward." "I would not want to enter my governorship with so many people viewing my governorship as illegitimate," Rossi said, reading from a letter sent to Gregoire last night. "The people of Washington deserve to know that their governor was elected fair and square," he read from a letter he had sent to Gregoire. "A revote would be the best solution ... and would give us a legitimate governorship." Earlier, Rossi blasted Gregoire, saying that recounting over and over "until you finally win" leads to an illegitimate governorship. - Dec. 24 Now Rossi's calling for a new election. He says that the election's been such a fuck-up that there is no choice but to do it over again. Sam Reed - again, a Republican - eloquently refuted that today when he certified the vote. "I saw serious mistakes being made. I saw them being corrected. That's part of the process. The system itself has worked well." There's really no options left for sore loser Rossi. He could ask the Legislature to call for a new election - that won't happen. Both houses are in Dem hands, and more than a few of Dino's ex-colleagues don't really think fondly of him. He could sue, dragging out legal challenges for months and months. But it would look desperate and sad and ridiculous, and based on his legal record, it wouldn't work. Or he could behave as the voice of the loyal opposition - the way I wish John Kerry would. But he won't. It's more fun to bitch about an admittedly convoluted election process than to respect the will of the people and admit you lost. 6:44:59 PM     Speak up!  []