Carnage and Carrion.... Can't Believe It

This entry is taken entirely from this blog. I don't know if that is permissable, but I thought her post was pretty profound. --Carm

Barn’s burnt down, now I can see the moon.
This is my favorite quote. I first saw it printed in white on a black quotable card, hanging on Mary’s dorm room wall at NYU.

Weeks ago a dead deer was sprawled out on the side of Route 10, it’s head cramped against the divider and it’s stomach, slit open, guts pouring onto the sun bathed black top. For days this corpse laid there alone. I passed it nightly, cursing the scent that wafted into my car as I was parked in traffic near the body. Soon after a fawn joined the deer, broken neck, jammed up against the divider, soaking in the July heat. The next night I looked for the fawn, he was gone, the deer still remained, untouched in it's place. I became disgusted.

“If these were people, no one would leave them on the side of the road like this.”

I was wrong.

In the downtown business district here, on a dry stretch of Union Street, past the Omni Bank automated teller machine, across from a parking garage offering "early bird" rates: a corpse. Its feet jut from a damp blue tarp. Its knees rise in rigor mortis.

Six National Guardsmen walked up to it on Tuesday afternoon and two blessed themselves with the sign of the cross. One soldier took a parting snapshot like some visiting conventioneer, and they walked away. New Orleans, September 2005.

Hours passed, the dusk of curfew crept, the body remained. A Louisiana state trooper around the corner knew all about it: murder victim, bludgeoned, one of several in that area. The police marked it with traffic cones maybe four days ago, he said, and then he joked that if you wanted to kill someone here, this was a good time.

Night came, then this morning, then noon, and another sun beat down on a dead son of the Crescent City.

That a corpse lies on Union Street may not shock; in the wake of last week's hurricane, there are surely hundreds, probably thousands. What is remarkable is that on a downtown street in a major American city, a corpse can decompose for days, like carrion, and that is acceptable.

...................

On Clouet Street, where a days-old fire continues to burn where a warehouse once stood, a man on a bicycle wheels up through the smoke to introduce himself as Strangebone. The nights without power or water have been tough, especially since the police took away the gun he was carrying - "They beat me and threatened to kill me," he says - but there are benefits to this new world.

"You're able to see the stars," he says. "It's wonderful." [NYT]