The Disposition of the Dead
Maybe I’m growing morose in my unemployment, but I keep running into stories that make me think about our attitudes toward death and corpses... The Post seems to be looking for controversy in this story about a film series being held at Green-wood Cemetery, suggesting that showing horror films there is in bad taste, or disrespectful to the deceased and their families. I don’t know about that, but in researching Central Park I learned that Green-wood (50 years older than the Park) was always used as a recreational site, disregarding the dead, and presaging the need for more parks in the growing city. I wonder how far back that sort of thing goes; seems like Europeans, at least pre-Enlightenment, wouldn’t have been so eager to dally in a graveyard. The same cemetery comes up in the strange story of the murder of councilman James Davis. A plot was donated for Davis, but when the family learned that the ashes of his murderer had already been placed in the same cemetery, they insisted on having him moved. That seems like a primitive attitude for a culture willing to party in the boneyard, but maybe it’s part of a more widespread atavism that goes with our current war mentality. Davis was also the first dignitary to lie in state at City Hall since 1918. Lying in state is a little weird for my tastes; a fetishism of the body that seems old-fashioned to me. It must make sense, though, to the fans of Celia Cruz, who crowded the wake of the late Salsa star, overflowing St Patrick’s, and lining 5th Avenue for her highly public funeral procession. This is all considered an honor, but in the case of politicians, at least part of the “honor” has historically been to offer definitive public proof that the person is really dead. We don’t stick heads on poles around here any more, but something like that was done with the corpses of the Hussein brothers, when our government made public display of grisly photos of their dead bodies, just for verification’s sake of course...
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Maybe I’m growing morose in my unemployment, but I keep running into stories that make me think about our attitudes toward death and corpses... The Post seems to be looking for controversy in this story about a film series being held at Green-wood Cemetery, suggesting that showing horror films there is in bad taste, or disrespectful to the deceased and their families. I don’t know about that, but in researching Central Park I learned that Green-wood (50 years older than the Park) was always used as a recreational site, disregarding the dead, and presaging the need for more parks in the growing city. I wonder how far back that sort of thing goes; seems like Europeans, at least pre-Enlightenment, wouldn’t have been so eager to dally in a graveyard. The same cemetery comes up in the strange story of the murder of councilman James Davis. A plot was donated for Davis, but when the family learned that the ashes of his murderer had already been placed in the same cemetery, they insisted on having him moved. That seems like a primitive attitude for a culture willing to party in the boneyard, but maybe it’s part of a more widespread atavism that goes with our current war mentality. Davis was also the first dignitary to lie in state at City Hall since 1918. Lying in state is a little weird for my tastes; a fetishism of the body that seems old-fashioned to me. It must make sense, though, to the fans of Celia Cruz, who crowded the wake of the late Salsa star, overflowing St Patrick’s, and lining 5th Avenue for her highly public funeral procession. This is all considered an honor, but in the case of politicians, at least part of the “honor” has historically been to offer definitive public proof that the person is really dead. We don’t stick heads on poles around here any more, but something like that was done with the corpses of the Hussein brothers, when our government made public display of grisly photos of their dead bodies, just for verification’s sake of course...
- alex 8-02-2003 11:50 pm