The Ungrateful Dead
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[Because of Halloween, (and coincidentally, Riggseveda's much anticipated return from volunteering in the Gulf Coast) I'm resuscitating an Ol' Shysteeblog post.
As far as I remember, the Archetype of the Greatful Dead (I can't stand their music, but that's just me) goes something like this:
Dead people who do not receive proper burial haunt the living until someone finds them a fitting resting place. A variation: dead people who have been killed unjustly haunt the living until they are vindicated by the truth. At that point the Grateful Dead leave you alone and sometimes give you a gift. Hopefully the gift isn't a live concert tape.
Psychologically it's a metaphor for confronting and resolving scary issues within ourselves. As a Society, I think the Katrina victims and the 2000 dead soldiers in Iraq haunt us all. Not to mention the dead civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Can ghosts cross oceans? Maybe really pissed-off ones can.
Resuscitated from a September 7, 2005 post at the Ol' Shysteeblog.]
New Orleans is now off limits to the media. I wonder why?
We are in Jefferson Parish, just outside of New Orleans. At the National Guard checkpoint, they are under orders to turn away all media. All of the reporters are turning they’re TV trucks around.
Pair that up with this little item from the AP:
Many, like the man whose body was on a wooden cart on New Orleans' Rampart Street near downtown may simply be buried in anonymous pauper's graves.
What's a pauper grave? It kind of sounds like a quaint, old-timey kind of expression. As George Michael is wont to say on his Sports Machine: "let's go to the videotape." Webster's online in our case:
Modern Translation: PAUPER'S GRAVE
Translations for "PAUPER'S GRAVE"; alternative meanings/domain in parentheses.
Spanish: fosa común (mass grave).
OK, then. Isn't that the type of shit the Nazis and Saddam Hussein used to do? US citizens are going to be rolled into ditches and covered with dirt in unmarked graves? Yep.
As long as nobody's around to see the dead, nobody will see the mass graves. Nobody can question a lowball body count.
Will every corpse be meticulously identified using the latest DNA technology like the bodies of the 9-11 World Trade Center stockbrokers? I'm not counting on it. These are poor black people we're talking about. Dignified burials for 10,000 people and identifying their corpses for family members takes time and money.
Just this past week we have numerous new additions to Bush's Afterlife Army of Torment coming from New Orleans and the Gulf Region. And they have more reason to be pissed than before. Not only did the Chimp leave them to die for no reason other than lack of concern, he's also not going to give them a proper burial.
The souls of those who died from the Katrina disaster will torment George Bush, his family and his associates for all eternity. But that is not nearly good enough. How much death, destruction and misery will he and his ilk spread before they meet their Maker and She smacks the shit out of them?
Why am I thinking about Tibetan depictions of hell right now? The Italians are pretty good at this type of stuff, though. My man Dante would have a field day with these evil bastards.
I don't even know if I even believe in hell. But my point is that it doesn't matter. You have to punish evil people while they're still on this earth so as to deter other evil people. More importantly, you need to stop them. Now. As quickly as possible.
Unless the Media raises a stink about corpses rotting in unmarked piles of dirt, this will be allowed to pass. And it will. I doubt the Media has the stomach to stand up to this latest outrage. The Army of Torment will be seeing them soon too.
