Taki's Mag

An Irishman’s home is his coffin.
—James Joyce, Ulysses

The dead use a graveyard forever.
—Nathan Englander, The Ministry of Special Cases

Over the last couple of months, corpses have turned up all over the world. In August alone, the following bodies were found:

• In Bosnia, near Lake Perucac, the International Commission for Missing Persons discovered fifty bodies from the 1992 Visegrad massacre.

• Seventy-two bodies, apparently of migrants headed for the United States to seek work, turned up on a ranch in Mexico’s Tamaulipas state.

• Also in Mexico, divers retrieved the skeleton of a boy who died 10,000 years ago in Yucatan.

• A historian found the frozen and well preserved remains of an Italian soldier from WWI in the Dolomites near Italy’s border with Austria.

• Police in Boone County, Arkansas, unearthed the deceased Lisa Marie Davis and cast doubt on her husband’s explanation that he buried her beside their house for sentimental reasons after she killed herself.

• August’s most puzzling discovery was a British spy’s dismembered corpse. Thirty-one-year-old Gareth Williams was found stuffed into a sports bag in his London flat. Police originally ruled out suicide. A month later, they changed their tack and called it accidental suicide. Their explanation—wait for it—was that Williams had stuffed himself into the sports bag, locked on the outside, in an original-if-fatal act of autoeroticism. British police appear to believe, with considerable justification, that the public is as gullible as they are. This is the country whose cops framed innocent Irishmen for famous bombings in Birmingham and Guildford in 1974, killed an innocent Brazilian on an underground train in 2005, and have never had an officer tried for shooting an unarmed civilian or framing an innocent suspect. The word “impunity” comes to mind.

This month, the toll mounted:

• Reality-television chef Joe Cerniglia’s body was found in the Hudson River.

• An unnamed corpse turned up in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

• Police found another unidentified male body, this one in an advanced state of decay, in a Manchester, England, apartment. Detective Superintendent Neil Hunter told reporters, “It is frustrating identifying exactly who he is, but we are working on it and want to let friends, family, associates, and relatives know as soon as we can.” Following protocol, Manchester police will either declare the cause to have been suicide or, if the national press cries for a culprit, frame a vagrant or anyone else not related to Rupert Murdoch for murder.

• A young woman’s bound corpse turned up in a flat in East Cleveland, Ohio. Press reports said the police suspected “foul play.” At least they did not say she killed herself before she tied her hands and feet with ropes.

• A fifteen-year-old Algerian girl’s body was discovered on a roof terrace in the Saudi city of Mecca. Police immediately arrested two Yemenis on suspicion of attempted rape. (In Saudi Arabia, Yemenis are as common among the “usual suspects” as Mexicans are in Los Angeles, Muslims in London, and Algerians in Paris.)

The bodies might have lain decomposing for centuries until future paleontologists used them to speculate on our age’s burial customs. How will they explain the peculiarly English practice of putting their dead into sports bags and leaving them in bathtubs? If the bodies had not been found, there would have been no post-mortems, no frame-ups, and no idiotic suicide verdicts. The fact, though, is no one wants to leave the dead undisturbed. In Chicago, as Rahm Emanuel can confirm (and will undoubtedly rediscover when he runs for mayor), the dead are in great demand. Indeed, they may be needed to put him over the top in next year’s Democratic primary.

Illinois, alas, is not unique in its refusal to discriminate against voters who happen to have died. The Federal Election Assistance Commission found that Arkansas, Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Tennessee did not remove a single person from the voters’ rolls merely for dying between 2006 and 2008. In Alabama, Rhode Island and Virginia, many counties perpetuate the practice of keeping our (is “dead” now a politically incorrect appellation?) life-challenged fellow citizens on the voter rolls. Some districts in North Carolina, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Texas boast more registered voters in the cemeteries than in houses. This is the country that is teaching Afghans, Iraqis, and others under American military supervision the virtues and mechanisms of universal suffrage. Universal, in the American sense, really is universal—our Big Tent is expansive enough to embrace even the dead.

It is a good thing, politics apart, that the bodies have turned up. It is hard to grieve without a corpse. Those who loved them need something to bury or cremate, something to pray over, something to honor for the life it represented. Those who have lost family at sea or whose son never returned from war know the added horror when there is no funeral.

This drives the story in Nathan Englander’s brilliant novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, about the “disappeared” in Argentina during the mid-1970s military brutality. About 30,000 people simply ceased to be. Many of the youngsters were drugged, stripped of their clothing, and dropped from airplanes into the Rio del Plata. Families unable to bury them were unable to mourn. A group called Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo refused to abandon the search for their children, and the military admitted it could not account for at least 9,000 of the youngsters it abducted. At the time, Henry Kissinger was encouraging the murderers.

The need for the body goes back at least to The Iliad, when Achilles’s refusal to return the slain Hector to his father, King Priam, outraged the gods. Zeus decreed, “We’ll not let this corpse, brave Hector’s body, be taken secretly.” He dispatched Thetis to inform Achilles, “I’m here as messenger from Zeus. He told me this: ‘The gods are angry with you.’ Zeus himself is the angriest of all immortals, because, in your heartfelt fury, you keep Hector by your beaked ships, won’t return him. So come, now. Give him back, and for that corpse accept a ransom.” Achilles received Priam secretly, heard the old man’s plea for his son’s body, and allowed him time for the funeral rites due a prince.

It is the least we deserve, even if we lose the vote.