grotesque

Strange news from Chicago. Four cemetery workers are accused of digging up 200-300 old graves and reselling the plots. They used a backhoe, and dumped the remains a weedy pile.

See:

Exposed bones, chunks of concrete and broken coffins litter the hilly, overgrown area about four blocks long, authorities said.

"Literally, they were pounded [down]," he said. "They pounded the other [body] down and put someone on top."

And see:

There were broken caskets and concrete grave liners in the mounds, too, and detectives said that when the grave robbers got tired or sloppy they just dumped the bodies on the ground.

So there were human teeth and leg bones, hips and finger bones scattered out there in the weeds.

See also:

"EMPLOYEE B said that sometimes during transportation a bone will fall off the back of the truck and land on the ground or along the roadway."

This is apropos of nothing. Read the readers' comments for the expressions of shock and disgust. It is objectively disgusting to imagine bones, gristle, flesh, and hair being moved en masse to an open weedy pile: it offends biology and anthropology. Olympia and I debated last night whether these acts qualify as "violence" when the subjects dismembered are already dead. The victims are the family members who have invested emotion in the ritual of commemoration. Even if it's not violence per se, it is offensive and gross, and really, really weird.

I recalled a scene from J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace which describes the main character's work in an animal shelter. His job, which he does poorly, is to cremate dead dogs. The other workers casually snap the dogs' death-stiffened legs in order to fit them better into the furnace, but the protagonist cannot bring himself to do this. Olympia let me know, in so many words, that she thought this analogy was inappropriate.