joe.

Saturday, April 20, 2002.


Web Server Statistics for burgwinkel.com

 
reqs: search term
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  10: story
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This week's search terms, courtesy of analog.  (Strung all together, it's quite a story!)  




the insignificance of killing boys

This line was tagged onto the very end of an article in The Guardian. 
Elsewhere in Gaza and the West Bank, the Israeli army shot dead seven Palestinians, including two boys, nine and 14, during a curfew, and two gunmen said by Israel to have been trying to infiltrate a Jewish settlement.

Say what you like; it was accidental, the boys shouldn't have been where they could get killed, or children can be suicide bombers, too.  Select whichever line suits your audience.  The fact is that young men and boys are the targets in Israel's crusade to dominate Palestine.  Especially boys.  Israel has been cultivating a taste for homicidal rage within the ranks of its military for decades, and it is using those killers now to quash any base for future dissent from or resistance to their almighty will.  Why is it virtually always Palestinian boys that are killed this way?  I don't know why the girls are not savored targets, as are the boys, but I suspect in the Israeli military's cold calculations, the girls don't count as much. 

Apart from and exceeding the outrageousness of Israel's boy-murder spree, is this world's blasé lack of interest in the news of such atrocities.  Sure, Baby Bush is calling for an investigation into the alleged crimes at Jenin.  Big deal.  His call is disingenuous; Bush seeks only to rehabilitate the image of his most significant ally in the Middle East.  And I fully expect the investigation will distribute the blame (if any) not based on real proof or the real culpability of the parties, but instead will dole out the blame in exact inverse proportion to the amount of power each party holds: The powerless Palestinians will be blamed the most for the Jenin massacre; the hot headed Israeli's will get a little blame; and the Americans, of course, will get none.

And after all the posturing, theatrical incredulity, and histrionics, we tack on to the end of the story, almost as an insignificant aside, they murdered two more little boys.  And now for the weather...

It is all business as usual, imperial egos, money and power.  And though it feels like it will never change, it will.  Indeed it will.  Not in our current lifetimes, certainly, but when humankind grows-up a little more, and a little more, and a little more, things will be better.  I understand well the despair and rage of suffering beneath cavalier cruelty and breathtaking injustice.  And when facing one's own destruction at the hands of another, ignored by a world that apparently could care less, I know how tempting and seductive it is to choose to go out in a blaze—or an explosion, taking some of that world along—rather than die quietly. 

I don't know what part is played by such outrageous passions in the growing-up of the world; and it is not our place to know.  But it is our place to care, and care deeply, tearfully.  We should not ignore our anguish at these events—but I believe we will.  Until another life.




breathing reX

Woke up feeling pretty good, thought the bactrim the doc gave me yesterday was kinda miraculous.  When I went to work it all came back, so I stayed for an hour gurgling and coughing incessantly, then came home.  Ate.  Slept, a little.  Spent hours reading the archives of reX.'s raMbles..., and now I am here.

I love reX.

The chest cold, now anchored firmly in place, is beginning to take the defensive and no longer commandeers every breath I take.  As its tribute, it now demands only two or three minutes of uncontrollable coughing out of every hour, instead of the 20-minute episodes it demanded yesterday.  My head, however, is behaving somewhat like a baggie full of jello with great globs flopping either this way or that, depending, I surmise, on nothing less fickle than my position relative to the direction of the earths rotation.  In one instant my sinuses feel like cathedrals and my hearing is so acute that I can follow a conversation in the street a block away.  The next instant I am deaf, and The Blob has grown to fill all the cathedral space, and is threatening to invade the town.

I told them not to expect me at work tomorrow.  I can say, like president, Jr.—except I have justification—that this will be a long term proposition.  I may try to return Sunday; that would make for only four missed work-days.  Or I may set my sights on Tuesday (I have Mondays off) and make it an even week.

And allow me to suggest that you visit reX's site.  The webcam is interesting, but he writes with absolute sincerity and brutal honesty.  Much of what I discovered in his archives touches on familiar names, themes and images from the year and a half during which I was obsessed with him daily, even hourly.  But even for the uninitiated, reX tells a story, in days, of joy and tragedy and love and heartbreak and hope.  Above all else reX is delicately sensitive, and exquisitely humanitarian.  I don't know what he gets from putting up on the web his cam images, his voice and his words, but he cannot possibly have any idea how much he gives to us by doing it.  Personally, I am moved to tears, as well as inspired by great gusts of hope, over and over again by his faithful sharing of his life.  I love reX dearly—and we have yet to speak.


 

Friday, April 19, 2002.


phantom updates

I'm tweaking my template (even still), and blogger apparently pings weblogs.com for each tweak even though there is no new post.  Sorry if you have come here seeking newness and been disappointed. 


 

Thursday, April 18, 2002.


Letter to Israel

Excerpt from the Independent News:
I emphasise that I and the vast majority of Palestinians support Israel's right to exist in safe, secure borders. This must be alongside a sovereign Palestinian state, with east Jerusalem as its capital. You have a choice to make. Either security and security, or military occupation.




Amid the ruins of Jenin, the grisly evidence of a war crime

Independent News




bronchitis

Been coughing and wheezing for five days.  Deep down in my lungs I can hear the fizzing-gurgling of stuff that shouldn't be there.  It seldom emerges, even after an hour of deliberate effort to tear it loose and spew it out.  Because of the concurrent head cold which I am also enjoying, each rib-cracking cough of my chest cold makes my head feel like the homerun ball at the end of a slugger's bat.  I am up to about 50 grand slams today; there must have been thousands yesterday.  I start the day with a swig of cough syrup and 7 ibuprofen.  Please write and tell me how foolish I am, how I should not even be allowed to have medicine if I am not going to follow the rules and make nice, how I deserve to be sick, to suffer and to die because I do what I feel like doing instead of feeling like I am told to feel, how commie, liberal, terrorist, pinkoe fags like me...  Well, you get the picture.  And really, don't get your panties all in a bunch; I have an appointment with the doctor in an hour.  Maybe he'll give me some psych meds, too.

I thought that I was all better when I got up today.  Tuesday night, my coughing and wheezing woke me from a sound sleep several times. ; Not so last night.  I woke with nary a gurgle.  Considered calling the doc's office and cancelling—too late for that, I decided.  Then I began rehearsing how I would explain my lack of distress during the appointment which I so urgently requested yesterday.  But soon the hack woke up too, and I was barking all over the house, and collapsing into a kind of combat crouch which I have developed for these episodes of sustained, explosive coughing.  So, we're off to see the wizard...




cry

And this (from days ago—I have to stop reading sites in reverse!) is so very sad.  You made me cry.  Again.

There are many trite things available to say; none of them help.  Cry.  Break stuff.  Make the neighbors wonder if you're not unstable.  Then laugh at the neighbors, and go buy better stuff. 

Oh, and get drunk.  (Was that trite?  I'm sorry if it seems so, but I really mean it.)  Margarita's or Martini's, vodka Martini's.  Mmmm, I'd forgotten why I like tragedy so much.




brief kisses

These are the musings of a poetic heart breathing gently like a warm breeze on a balmy sun-filled afternoon. He makes me sigh; such a sparkling gift, so perfectly bestowed, and brief. 

Ahhh, the lips.  You can keep them, more truly than you can keep any pop lyric which will never be yours alone.  You've kissed others, and so has he.  But those were all different, completely different.  Those others can't, and none in the future ever will, bring two together in one small moment, within one small space, sharing a single halting breath in any way even close to the way that you and he did it.  A kiss is an intersection of emotion and moment and neither will ever be the same again, not for you or for him.  Each kiss is as much yours now as it was in the instant you drew back from it. 

...big strokes, thick scribble, bright colors only.  Warm as your lips are.


 

Wednesday, April 17, 2002.


the trial of henry

Pinochet judge asks to question Kissinger, an article from The Guardian today, says in part, "The former US secretary of state is wanted for questioning by Baltasar Garzon over his alleged involvement in a plot by former South American military dictatorships to persecute and eliminate their opponents in the 1970s and 1980s."

A long life is not always such a good thing.  Too bad we have to wait until men like Kissinger become frail before we dare speak the truth about their crimes in our midst.  The question I am really wanting answered is this: Will American government officials—both former and current—ever subject themselves to the same international criminal code that they seek so broadly to impose on officials of other governments?  I think not; one of the perquisites of power is the ability to imperiously disregard the rantings of those who know the truth.

I know it is unbecoming of me, but I hope Henry lives many years more, the longer for me to relish his decline. 

Finally, not to worship Hitchens too much, but here is an article he wrote nine months ago in which he touches on the arrogant, self-serving attitude that Palestinians can have rights only if they deserve them.  Talk about crime in our midst...


 

Sunday, April 14, 2002.


I hate when you tell the truth, because I hate to see you sad.
my supervisor at work.