Wednesday, May 08, 2013

When Corpses Are Buried Or Unearthed


The events in Worcester.... 

I watched an interview with the undertaker who accepted the dead body of the Boston bomber and now cannot find a cemetery that would accept it.   I felt very sorry for him.  He is just doing his job, and no religion that I'm familiar with would argue that the spirit of the person would remain in the corpse. 

Civilized people intern the remains of even the worst criminals, you know.

In an odd way this ties with the desire to turn the release of the three women held prisoner for ten years into a balloons-and-welcome-home-party.  What is odd about the way is that the two uses of mythology are almost reversed in the two cases.

The Tsarnaev case just requires burying the corpse.  The case of  Michelle Knight, Gina DeJesus, and Amanda Berry requires unearthing the corpses of their long and horrible imprisonments.  A proper analysis of everything.  Yet the immediate reactions appear to be the other way round:  People won't let the first corpse be buried and insist that the latter one already has been buried so that now it is time to rejoice?

I understand that there will be a proper investigation of what Ariel Castro did.*


But what I'm writing about here are the immediate emotional public reactions.
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*This post has been edited later to remove the pictures of the three Castro brothers, because only Ariel Castro has been charged in the case.