Sigh…


I’m sitting here getting weepy about Jerry Orbach. I suppose it’s easier for me to get weepy over one dead actor then it is for me to get weepy over the 70,000 or 80,000 or 100,000 dead from the tsunami. I watched a video of it this morning. It was a pretty day before during and after. Bright blue sky. With that much destruction you would think it would be stormy and threatening with dark sky’s and lots of thunder and lightning, like the back drop for a tragic opera. Sitting on the beach on a pretty day is not supposed to kill you.

I can’t really deal with that much death all at the same time, it’s beyond my ability to conceptualize. Those huge numbers are equal to people, the numbers get too large and I can’t make it personal. There are too many faces to think about. I’m sure at this point the people there are having a hard time taking it as anything less then personally. Maybe the numbers are too large for them too. Maybe you just shut down? How do you deal with that many dead? They can’t bury them one at a time, you can’t have 80,000 funerals. The dead must be “dealt with” instead of honored. You can’t waste time with the regular customs. They stop being “Bob” or “Sandy” and become another thing. That’s what’s really sad, that was somebody’s uncle and now he’s just another thing that must be buried, to keep ahead of the disease, the rot, the smell. They can’t even say goodbye, there won’t really be anywhere to visit, no markers, no service, nothing. The Russians and really, just about everyone but us, have mass graves from the war, but that was war time. It was a pretty day.

I can deal with the concept of a single dead man. I feel very, very bad that Lenny Brisco is gone. I think I’m also feeling bad for all those people but I don’t know them – not that I know Jerry Orbach either, but he’s familiar. Those poor dead people have only been in my living room this past weekend, Orbach was there for years.

I just saw that Shrub has another “coalition” set up. He just loves committee work. I think “coalition” is the only big word he knows how to use in a sentence correctly. He also said something about how giving we Americans are. Yeah. I can send $10, Wow. That’ll do wonders! We can send cash, but it takes the Government to send the earth movers and medics and helicopters. Shrub is our government and in his heart, he does not really care about a lot of dead brown people. True, there are a lot of dead westerners too. How much do you wanna bet it took a picture of a dead blonde to make him pony up? Norway has 930 missing. I saw that and went “Dayum. There are a 930 rich Norwegians? How many Norwegians are there anyway? That sounds like a lot of Norwegians. What were 930 Norwegians doing in Indonesia?

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder confirmed 26 Germans had died and 1,000 were missing across the affected region. He said he feared the number of German casualties would rise to "well into the three-figure range".

UK officials say 26 Britons have been killed, while the Thai authorities say 43 British tourists are dead.

Around 930 Norwegians are believed to have been in Thailand at the time and are still unaccounted for. Norway, which is sending a second aid flight to the region, has confirmed 13 dead.

France has confirmed 20 dead and there were also victims from Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland and Russia.
Swedish tourists have also been hard hit, with around 1,000 missing.

Correspondents say estimates of the numbers of dead vary and many western governments are maintaining conservative figures until they have firm confirmation of victims.

Why were all those people there? Is it some giant vacationland secret kept from us? Did the rest of the world leave us out of the loop on this? There is somewhere we ugly Americans don’t go? A warm, lush, tropical spot and we weren’t there? ( ed. to add, I did see one reference to "thousands of Americans missing", the hell? why aren't we hearing about them? are we embarressed?). It was a pretty day damn it.