{look upon my works, ye mighty}

So, I'm suffering from severe bronchitis, apparently brought on by having three plane flights within a week that were all longer than twelve hours, and aggravated by lack of treatment.

The word 'severe' was the pick of the doctor who made the house call today, not mine. My parents are taking me to get my chest X-rayed tomorrow to see how much fluid is in my lungs since I'm having trouble breathing. I ended up having to use my sister's oxygen machine today and the doctor is making me inhale Sultanol with salt water. My head was in my mother's lap as I lay on the couch and did that.

This is how my sister felt before she died. She also had bronchitis first before it turned into pneumonia and sent her into cardiac arrest. She lay on that same couch, she had the same treatment (but she couldn't swallow the pills so they were injected into her feeding tube in her stomach instead), and she struggled to breathe just like I am right now. She had a fever, I have a fever.

But I can tell my parents what hurts, I can tell them that I need oxygen and I can't breathe and my chest hurts. She couldn't do any of that. She couldn't even tell them to change her diapers whereas I can get up and go to the bathroom on my own.

Still, I'm sick and hurting in a similar manner to how she was. So that's good. That's something. I don't really want to get better. I want to get pneumonia (I had it once before and survived) and hurt like that too. Maybe a cardiac arrest, I don't know. That might be going too far.

But I'm an atheist and I can't believe that anything I do will make anything better for her now that she's dead. All I can do right now is be sick and be a replacement for my sister (my mother likes holding me on her lap the way she held my sister, she wants me to miss the spring term of college and go back in fall), and wait to see if I get better.

I half want to, because I hate being sick. But I half want it to descend into pneumonia so that I'll know what her final hours were like, what they felt like, how much pain she was in when she died. I wasn't there. I was in America, on the wrong continent. This is the closest I can get to having stood by her and watched her final hours the way my parents did.

I think this is the first time I've ever been sick and okay with it.

Now, most of you reading my journal know that I'm all for free press. Hell, I blog. That in itself is a form of expression that could be curtailed theoretically.

You probably also know that I'm against the Bush administration's decision to allow the flag-draped coffins of soldiers to be photographed, mostly because it seems ridiculous that those people would have died for their country and we can't even see that.

You've most likely also heard me talking bluntly about the lack of proper war coverage and how everything is being censored horredously, as opposed to in the past when the graphic images of the war-zones allowed people to see how awful war really is.

However, there is a huge difference between legitimate journalism and trading pictures of mutilated Iraqi corpses for porn.

Click the link if you want to read about how not only have American soldiers been exchanging incredibly horrific photos for amateur porn, in a trade-off that's soiling not only the whole idea of a free press but also the reputation of the American army. Like they aren't already been viewed as Geneva Convention-violators and torturers, we now have to deal with them being so completely disrespectful and jeering to the people they killed as to trade photos of them for porn?

Come on.

This is the army supposed to be 'liberating' Iraq, the strong arm of American 'diplomacy'.

Excuse me if I missed something, but how the hell is blowing someone's brains out, taking a photo, then profiting from the first two actions for the sake of free porn a diplomatic action? I can't see it as anything but barbaric.

Normally, I would be happy that these photos are up. I'd want to know where the American equivalents are though if it was only the Iraqi troops being shown killed, but I'd be glad that at least someone was showing what a gory debacle war is.

Note the normally, because all bets are off when a photo of a man lying in a mess of intestines and brains is being used as currency to get access to chats with underdressed females.

Such a fair trade, right?

So nice to know the family of the dead Iraqi is actually getting something to relieve the pain of having lost him - except they're not, since this is for the soldier's personal profit, and even if it wasn't, who would honestly, truly feel better about the death of the loved one knowing that photos of their corpse can get you free porn?

I'd go into a little bit about what this could say about the cultural link between violence and sex, but I'll save that for another day in favor of spotlighting another issue: the American press is ignoring this travesty.

The owner of the site was interviewed by European journals (you know, those people that live on that small, cultured continent and are in still shock that Bush got re-elected?) and is quoted in the article I linked to as saying "I've done interviews with the Italians, the French, Amsterdam. ... They were very critical, saying the US wouldn't pick it up, because it's such a sore spot. ... It raises too many ethical questions. ... I started to laugh, because it's true."

Someone enlighten me here: WHAT ethical questions could this possibly raise?

Soldiers killing people, fine.

That's what they're paid to do.

It sucks, I hate it, and I'm completely against the war in Iraq but ethically, it's accepted as standard behavior for soldiers.

Soldiers killing people and exploiting the dead bodies, (and thereby violating the first law of the Geneva Convention which states officiers need to "ensure that the dead are honorably interred, if possible according to the rites of the religion to which they belonged" so nice going there with making us look like barbarians again), is wrong on a whole different level.

You want people to see what the war is really like?

Stop flaming anyone that posts real, unedited photographs of the results.

Let the media distribute it publicly.

Have it on the newspapers, show it on the TV.

What you don't do is make people go to a porn site, where disgusting captions such as "What Every Iraqi should look like!" accompany the pictures, turning what should be a shaming experience into a poor display of nationalism and inhumanity.

If this made you think, pass it on. I got the link from nefthoron, and you too can either write about it, or just link people back here. The media won't do it? Fine. We'll just create such a firestorm that they'll have to pick up on it eventually because people need to know what's going on.