Bring out your dead

The President spoke tonight and the big news is that he has taken responsibility for the failure of the Federal government to properly respond to the disaster in New Orleans. Tim Russert, Ted Koppel, and all the other talking heads are going on and on about how Bush is finally, for the first time since he was placed in office by the Supreme Court, accepting some responsibility for the actions of his own administration. Wow. Yeah, pat him on the back – what a guy. So all it took was the displacement of 1 million people and the total destruction of a major metropolitan area for this jackass to step up to the plate and act like an adult. We should be so proud.

But that’s not even what is bothering me today. What’s bugging me is this whole body recovery effort going on in New Orleans. Basically this consists of numerous teams of five people (four emergency workers and a chaplain) roaming the city looking for corpses. Have you heard about this? When they find one, the chaplain says a prayer over it, then "with dignity and resepect" (according to the head of FEMA operations in the city) it is loaded in a vehicle to be escorted, by police, to the morgue. Before the caravan enters the morgue though, the motorcade pauses, and another prayer is said for this single corpse. Upon completion of the prayer, the caravan proceed to the drop off point, the body is off-loaded, examined (again with "dignity and respect"), and then finally cleansed in "a manner befitting the traditions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam."

Call me crazy but there seems to be an awful lot of time spent in ceremony and ritual that could be better spent either finding more bodies or helping all those dogs stuck on porches. The reason it takes four people and a monk to load up a body is because of some wacky pre-occupation with providing dignity to the dead. Three guys and a cube truck could probably clear the entire city in 48 hours if they didn’t have to stop for all the prayers and give each corpse a parade. Load ‘em up and move ‘em out. In Galveston, back in 1900, they just stacked up the dead and burned them. Less time spent on funerals - more time spent rebuilding the city. If anything, the time for prayers was before the storm hit, and as I have maintained in previous posts – it didn’t work. Praying now, once they've arrived at the pearly gates, is even more ridiculous.

Maybe if we’d provided these people some dignity in life – a good job, decent housing, affordable health care, etc. – they wouldn’t have been stuck in the path of the storm and wouldn’t be dead in the first place. It’s too late for dignity. They’re dead. Dignity in death is one of those bullshit concepts rich people sell to poor people when they want to oppress them or send them off to war so they can have cheap gas –kind of like religion – it’s nonsense, and the sooner we as humans evolve past this need for there to be more to life than life itself, the sooner we can get on with making a better life for everyone, here and now.

And yes, when I'm dead, throw me on the fire, drag me through the streets, put corncobs up my ass - I don't care.

I'm dead.

Peace.