PAPAL STATE OF INSANITY

Regarding the dead vs alive and dumping of bodies in seas vs. ceremonial corpse-schlepping debates. Remember what happened when we tried to “bring to justice” that other terrorist, the one who wasn’t Osama bin Laden? Seriously, imagine the GOP fueled brouhaha when “Obama” drags that guy into the U.S. to “face American justice”. Remember what American justice is? Its not the wild west, it’s a system of jurisprudence, and the same rights that applied to your Uncle Moe’s DUI case will apply to Osama bin Laden. Can you see that parodic 7 foot embodiment of the national terrorist nightmare in prison stripes in town for a carnival in our courts that would last for 20 years? Some fame seeking Mark Geragos type calling into question the (nonexistent) physical evidence? Al Queda targeting every judge, jurist, attorney, cop, press and family member at the carnival? The sea burial – off an American aircraft carrier in the North Arabian Sea – added a creepy, mysterious coda to a life that had been shrouded in secrecy for a decade. The body was placed on a board, tipped up and then “eased into the sea” (i.e. dumped), giving new meaning to the word “waterboarding”. The idea behind the deep-sea-dumping was to avoid a “Pilgrimage site” where Osama supporters could go hang out and take pictures or absorb its magical healing powers. It may not seem like a huge deal, but it seems as if the bigger and more vivid the collective remembrance is, the bigger and more vivid the memory, and that without ritualized and emotionally compelling acts of remembrance, dead people eventually fade and dematerialize. Do you think people would still be SO obsessed with Jesus without Easter dragging out the whole resurrection hoo-ha every year, and without Christmas reminding us how the little Lord Jesus had no crib for his bed?  1.5 MILLION people crammed into Rome for last week’s beatification of Pope John Paul II. Think of our own national holiday and parades celebrating the genocidal slave master who didn’t discover America. The Brits have pyres and folk songs and orange marches to elicit the outpouring of Ulster Protestant fervor that has kept sodomitical fop King Billy alive for the past 300 years. Of course these things resonate with people and they will all have been affected by the experience, and long after the event, his presence will be “real” to them. That’s why maybe it’s better to have that “Pilgrimage site” in the middle of the Gulf Sea. A venerated figure is kept alive because the fight they engaged in was a real one, and is ongoing. If the fight, or the society which fought it, ends, so does the deity. The end is always the end. And life after death is not immortality.