07-18-2016, 05:38 AM
Quote:The workers would tell jokes. To get these jokes you have to know that toxicology results take weeks to come back, but autopsies are typically done within a few days of death, so generally the coroners don’t know what drugs are on board when they cut up a body. First joke: any body with more than two tattoos is an opiate overdose (tattoos are virtually universal in the rural midwest). Second joke: the student residents will never recognize a normal lung (opiates kill by stopping the brain’s signal to breathe; the result is that fluid backs up in the lungs creating a distinctive soggy mess, also seen when brain signalling is interrupted by other causes, like a broken neck). Another joke: any obituary under fifty years and under fifty words is drug overdose or suicide. Are you laughing yet?
Tattoos are often indicators of criminality. Among whites? I saw one real charmer a couple months ago: the fellow had "WHITE" on one arm and "POWER" on the other. No, that is not a reference to hydroelectric power. There's nothing bourgeois about overt expressions of that sort of fascism today. Ex-cons are practically unemployable where I live.
An obituary of someone under 50 with more than 50 years often tells of someone whom other relatives recognize. Thus a child who dies of an incurable disease will have parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, and uncles mentioned. An adult who dies of causes unrelated to alcohol, drugs, or suicide might have his work connections mentioned as well as an extended family. Yes, loved ones must pay for the obituary in most newspapers, which may be a difference between having loved ones who care about one and being socially isolated and abandoned.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.