Wonkette
For the past four years, a bunch of employees at the famous Burr Oak Cemetery in Chicago have been digging up bodies, throwing them in the trash — not even recycling! — and reselling the plots for exorbitant sums totaling $300,000. The cemetery is now a crime scene, because apparently Capitalism is illegal now? In America? Barack Obama can basically be blamed 100% for this latest Police State crackdown, too, because his wife Michelle’s father is (was?) buried in that cemetery, making this a textbook conflict-of-interest case and an affront to hard-working people who live in small towns instead of big cities. [ABC]
What would TOTUS do?????/?
Now they are saying he is NOT there after all. I’m available ready to replace someone at WH Communications.
lolt-text
I’m no fan of graveyards, great waste of space that they are, but this is despicable.
They’ll be back. They just went to vote.
Thrown in the trash? Feh, think of the waste! Those bodies could be recycled for garden mulch or we could make buttons from the shin-bones!
Never too soon, btw…
And the funny thing, yah know, is that this is the situation normal in a lot of europe; cemetaries respect individual graves only as long as there is remaining family around, a hundred years or two, and then dig up the bones, put them in the charnel house, and re-sell the graves. I went to the Cemetaire des Marines in Sete, and saw the process.
So these dudes were just doing whats sensible.
BTW, is this going to turn into another r5acial stereotype, like Grape Nehi and Collards? Every damn time you read about a corrupt mortuary with bodies decomposing all over, or a corrupt crematory with a thousand bodies littering the yard and nearby woods, its always a person of color. Just saying.
Burr Oak? Burris?? COINCIDENCE????
Emmett Till’s body was one of many desecrated by the assholes working at Burr Oak. It’s really horrific how greedy and despicable these people are:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jFYNuuwXs5SbPA04xNN6DsOcNDOwD99DQH404
Tommmcatt: Oh ho ho, speaking of garden compost, here is a 100% true local news story. Local cemetary used a backhoe to dig graves, and mistakes are often made with backhoes, and graves sometimes aren’t where you think they are and all. Long story short, cemetary had lots of excess soil, and sold it to local landscapers, landscaper dumps load of soil on someone’s lawn to build a bed, and homeowner finds a shoe, with a skeletal foot in it. Whoops. New Jersey responds by passing a law forbidding the sale of cemetary soil for landscaping.
Gonna hafta change this joke: Q. Know how many dead people are buried in this cemetery?
Old A. All of them.
New A. Not as many as yesterday and fewer than tomorrow.
Please, wonkettiers, please make sure that when my time comes that I am burnt to ashes. Do not dress me up, pump me full of preservatives, have a stylist do my makeup and hair and put me in a silk lined box for display, you pervs.
You’d think grave robbers would be a more politically informed bunch.
…
So I’m thinking they never saw “Poltergeist”. There’s some bad hoo-doo coming at these guys. Better get rid of the TV.
Another triumph for free market capitalism!!!!
Senator Trailblazer’s bombsoleum shelter doesn’t seem so crazy now, does it?
WEARS TEH DETH CERTFICET?????/? !!!!!1!
By my calculations, if everyone who died was buried in a grave, the entire world will be a graveyard by the year 3559. Wake up people!
NoWireHangers: Just the original casket not the body. He was exhimed over legal issues and re-intered with a new casket.
choinski: It’s funny because it’s true. From Wiki:
“Kennedy won Illinois by less than 9,000 votes out of 4.75 million cast, or a margin of two-tenths of one percent. However, Nixon carried 92 of the state’s 101 counties, and Kennedy’s victory in Illinois came from the city of Chicago, where Mayor Richard J. Daley held back much of Chicago’s vote until the late morning hours of November 9. The efforts of Daley and the powerful Chicago Democratic organization gave Kennedy an extraordinary Cook County victory margin of 450,000 votes—more than 10% of Chicago’s 1960 population of 3.55 million—thus barely overcoming the heavy Republican vote in the rest of Illinois. Earl Mazo, a reporter for the pro-Nixon New York Herald Tribune, investigated the voting in Chicago and claimed to have discovered sufficient evidence of vote fraud to prove that the state was stolen for Kennedy.”
…Please don’t bury me
Down in that cold cold ground
No, I’d druther have “em” cut me up
And pass me all around
Throw my brain in a hurricane
And the blind can have my eyes
And the deaf can take both of my ears
If they don’t mind the size
Give my stomach to Milwaukee
If they run out of beer
Put my socks in a cedar box
Just get “em” out of here
Venus de Milo can have my arms
Look out! I’ve got your nose
Sell my heart to the junkman
And give my love to Rose
Give my feet to the footloose
Careless, fancy free
Give my knees to the needy
Don’t pull that stuff on me
Hand me down my walking cane
It’s a sin to tell a lie
Send my mouth way down south
And kiss my ass goodbye
-John Prine
Oh, my beloved city–take away it and a couple of the wingier states, and Wonkette wouldn’t have any material at all!
Tommmcatt: The bodies were used as fertilizer. They were thrown into the weeds.
More than 300 caskets at the cemetery were part of a money-making scheme orchestrated by four cemetery employees who, for more than four years, dug up bodies and dumped them in the weeds….
Being buried is overrated. Maybe what we ought to start doing is sitting the dead up on top of their graves so that families can see their dead ones when they come to visit instead of imagining them alive as they speak to their headstones. “Kids, doesn’t grandpa look nice today?” Maybe these grave robbers were on to something.
BadKitty: Love that John Prine song!
Prommie: Every time you read about a body snatching/corpse selling plot, it’s a person of non-color . So is this gonna be another White thing like autism and frozen yogurt?
restlessleg: In some Christian traditions the remains are dug up and placed in a common grave or an ostuary after a few years. This frees up space in crowded cemeteries. The body is an empty vessel without the soul.
problemwithcaring:
You forgot cable-knit sweaters and having sex with your shirt-tail relatives. We white people are big on those as well.
Paul Tardy:
Yes, but how does this relate to the gold standard or the federal reserve? Please answer in the form of an 4500-word essay posted on “Campaign for Liberty”.
Oh, and thanks!
I think this cements the theory that, among the public, Obama now “owns” the current corpse-based economy.
I see no problem. At least they aren’t “exposed” like ancient mummies. Your pelvic bones all over the news and such. Everyone gets a close-up of the skull crushing blow that killed you. The cavity in your molar you tried to hide so well.
Paul Tardy: Fuck that, I like the Zoroastrian tradition better. Put the body on top of a Tower of Silence for the vultures to pick clean. Every year send someone up to shovel the bones into the center of the tower.
IL for the comedy gold for like the past nine months.
also, the presnit.
AND we have another one (scandal, not presnit): pay to play for college admissions. not sexy but MANNN it pisses off The People.
WHARE IS NOBAMA’S BABY MOMMA’S DADDY’S DEATH CERTIFICATE??!?