Thursday, December 04, 2003

REVENGE IS A DISH BEST SERVED WITH HORSERADISH

This story is ghoulish and disturbing.  $100 million in settlement money for the desecration of countless graves in two Menorah Gardens cemetaries which were “reorganized” to “accomodate” new “residents.” Or alternatively, they were “emptied” of “corpses” so they could “fit in more corpses.” The news story says that superceded remains were “thrown out.” Like you could get away with a few of those hanging out on your curb on large-item pickup day: “A broken cabinet, a ruined chair, Aunt Gladys (may her memory be a blessing) and two other dead dudes - ready for pickup!” Somebody took bodies to the dump.  Somebody did it on purpose.  And now everybody knows. 

The thing that makes me a bit more comfortable with this is that the guys who authorized that big dollar payout haven’t yet begun to feel the sting of the zombie’s whip.  I saw Poltergeist, dudes - your ass is ghost chowder.  Someday you’re gonna wake up with Roy Scheider screaming at you and your eyes dropping into your bathroom sink and hands hardened by latke-making and torah-hefting will burst through your floors to strip the flesh from your bones and drag you into a hellish underworld of flaming blood and supernatural forced circumcisions with molten knives and the horror of waking up at your bar mitzvah in your underware and you’re going to know with your last breath on this side of the mortal curtain that when you mess with Jewish cemetaries in south florida, YOU ARE MESSING WITH THE WRONG CORPSES.

totally innappropriate comment: I love horseradish!

Oh, and not to make excuses for the treatement of the corpses (no excuses for that), but the need to accomodate new graveyard residents is an old need in Europe - just think of the famous scene in Hamlet when yurik the grave digger finds the skull in the “new” grave he is digging. I think in Germany you only rent your grave for something like 50 years, then it can be used again.

But you probably knew all that.

"Did these bones cost no more the breeding, but to play at loggats with ‘em? mine ache to think on’t.”
Hamlet, Act V, Scene i

Just pulled out my complete works and must apologize for the tricks of the memory. Yorick was the inhabitant of the skull (in better days), not the grave digger.

it’s what they do in venice’s (italy) city cemetery, on the isle of san michele ... because, after all, an island is a very small entity to store a city’s entire dead past and, well, a corpse is a corpse.  except in venice, it’s not always planned, when graves empty out; it’s because the island is subjected to aconstant process of erosion.  every now and then a coffin goes floating out of its earthly tethers and adventures down the canale.

but, like elizabeth said, that’s not to make excuses for the treatment of the old corpses ...

of course you’re both right, and New Orleans is very much the same (the high water table obliges above-ground internment in mausolea of modest size in crowded boneyards).  But at least they knew what they were getting into when they got started.  When you lease a grave, you expect to be evicted eventually.  When you buy a grave, you figure it’ll be yours for time immemorial.  Getting kicked out of your very own bought-and-paid fee-simple grave, your remains unceremoniously jettisoned, in favor of a younger, prettier corpse, seems to be to be a particularly ignominous fate.

There’s definitely some flaming skulls, fat demons with whips and pitchforks, and mounts of turnip stew with salt pork waiting for someone.

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