Can't help you on the first one, it looks cool, but the link simply went to an mp3 site in Spanish. Aside from the usual bullshit about the state budget and gang shootings, even the FBI is involved over at Burr Oaks now. They found Emmett Till's original grave piled in the back, with squirrels living in it. That might have just made a good sound bite, though. My mom asked if the body was attacked, I had to explain that, aside from Till being dead a half-century, these are poor people with the means to buy only the cheapest wooden coffins. This isn't a non-story to me, I think it's shitty that people get fucked over like this, living people who lost money, and it doesn't matter if you think that spending money on a coffin is like buying stock in Enron. A few years back, there was that asshole in Georgia who piled the bodies up that were meant to be cremated. Get a fucking work ethic. Myself, I give a damn about my death. I've told people I want to be stuffed, then auctioned every year, the money going to charity, so a new writer gets me for 365 days and maybe takes me to conventions and book signings.
But I hold as much hatred for those four asshats as I do Anthony Abbate for beating on the Polish bar girl. I do write about these events in some of my stories and somehow some people think that it is worse written down than something that goes away on TV as soon as the next child molesting singer drops dead. It doesn't matter to me what anyone else thinks about fucking with dead bodies. Dead is dead. But I don't trust myself with a gun, a bat would be fine. I could thin the herd of the world's population without having to travel too far from my home. Then I'd sneak away to an island off Tahiti and try and forget everything I have seen or read about my entire adult life.
5 comments:
I just don't see the need for outrage. They're dead bodies.
Emmett Till's body--okay--that's different. Till is an icon, a call to action. He was a victim in life and apparently one in death. But his grave should have been a shrine and it should have been immediately apparent that someone had fucked with the grave within minutes. Not months after the fact.
I certainly wouldn't hurt anyone who disrespected a dead body. Not with a gun and not with a bat. I'd hardly equate digging up bones with trying to kill a waitress.
W. Moron Bush's grandfather dug up Geronimo's skull and used it for a trophy in his private club. It sits there to this day.
The guy who was stacking and tossing bodies in GA did it because he'd inherited a crematorium from his dad. Apparently he was bullied into taking over the family business and didn't even know how to run it. When the oven (is that what they're called?) broke down, he didn't have the funds to repair it. So that's when he started first burying the bodies, and then dumping them in a lake. I recall seeing photos of the guy in court and they had to put a bulletproof vest on him because of the death threats. I felt sorry for him. I was, apparently, the only one who did.
The worship of dead bodies is just mucho strange to me. I plan to have my remains burnt up. I don't care what, if anything, happens to my ashes. They could be poured in with the cat litter for all I care. If my body is dumped into a pig trough instead of a crematorium, that won't bother me, either. I'll be dead for Jove's sake!
They're inanimate pieces of rotting flesh and decaying bone. Get over it.
Outrage isn't a word I use, just like closure or shock and awe and all these other words we hear ever time there's a body found or a country fucked over beyond recognition. It's not about the bodies, its about the greedy fuckers who run the place. Till's gravestone was still there, kept up beautififully, someone else was buried there. The guy in Georgia? He can't handle it, sell the goddamn business. There is no moral compass for, I'd say a good tenth of the people living here, and that makes it, what, 200,000 people. Sounds right, it really does. Half the recent bodies at Burr Oaks were gang members, so I really give those guys a big fuck you, they should have been burned at the morgue. It's the people who try to do good that get screwed over every day and that is the thing that I'll never get over. That's why I put every jagoff here equal, otherwise I'd spend my days making lists of who is more evil. Thin the heard. The guy in Georgia, he was in over his head and was certainly losing money. These four people were taking from the poor, the fat broad even had a fake Emmett Till memorial fund running at her church. Other people I would not miss are any of our corrupt politicians, baby raping priests, and certainly all the cops who are no longer the cops my father worked with 20 years ago. If my heart is black at this point in my life, so be it.
It's not worshipping the dead to give them respect. And one big issue is not just that they did this to the bodies, but that they were hired to do a job and they didn't give a fuck about that job. They were lazy assholes who cared for nothing and that kind of behavior certainly extends into their personal lives.
Hemlock, you bring to mind a question that I've always held...when does digging up graves evolve from being grave robbing and desecration of a sacred site, to archeological research? Is there a specific number of years? Or is the considered relevance of the civilization being dug up by the diggers a factor (I'm sure it is)? I haven't been able to find a concrete answer to that to my disappointment.
Most all human cultures seem to revere the burial grounds of their ancestors and loved ones, with some Chinese and Native American customs practicing conversing with ancestors and asking for guidance and blessings, for example. Don't know how that relates, if at all, with keeping the dead bodies intact, but respect is shown for those who went before them, in the act of such reverence and care. Even if the dead person is actually long gone consciously and physically from the vessel, as inconsequential as it seems, the vessel was part of that person that the living choose to handle with care on its last physical journey into the grave or urn.
At the very least on the practical side, un-encased rotting corpses leaching into the water table and sticking up out of the ground is not a good thing healthwise, which is why there are laws concerning these things. In the least case, these morons should have every applicable burial and health law tossed at them to the maximum, IMO. And, fraud is not kosher either.
Well, I didn't say that they weren't assholes. They clearly are. I just wouldn't kill anyone over such a so-called crime. It certainly does not reach the level of the death penalty being prescribed as punishment--either legally or by outlaw methods.
As for worshiping at the site of your ancestor's grave---people who do that kind of thing do it a lot and would certainly notice if their ancestor had been dug up and a different grave marker placed at the site. If they didn't notice their ancestor had been dug up, then no harm done. Even if their ancestor's remains weren't there, the praying could still commence and since there's no one there to hear the prayer, well...I couldn't care less and neither could the absent ancestor corpse. No harm done.
Basically, the media has blown the reaction completely out of proportion to the crime committed. When you're ready to start shooting corporate executives in the head in the local parking lots THEN we can start talking about corporal punishment for four poor idiots who barely knew what they were doing. The media raises no such insane levels of outrage for the corporate monsters who have raped this nation dry.
Get a grip, people. They dug up some bones. Big freaking deal. (And, yes, Emmett Till's grave should have been a shrine. But it wasn't, so we--all of Society--are to blame for that--more than the four piss ants who re-sold his resting place.)
As for dead bodies...it should be mandated that all corpses be either cremated, donated to science, or ground up and used as fertilizer, or placed (without chemical treatment) in the soil where they can replenish the earth's resources. Dead bodies are nothing more than objects--garbage, if you will.
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