death and dying

The scale and longevity of mistreating the remains at Burr Oak Cemetery is astonishing indeed, but it does have a familiar ring to it in the longer view of US history, if not human history generally, of attitudes toward and abuses of the dead.

This Halloween, apart from your garden-variety ghouls, skeletons, monsters, witches, vampires and zombies, Americans will be visited by the ghosts of past presidents, the spirits of dead soldiers, and by the souls of those who endured slavery. It is a season of reckoning, both social and political. The election, on the other hand, is about life, today, now. Or is it?

Ritual violence at this season’s film festivals…