I saw this once before during Katrina. Your secret plan was to manipulate the response during a life-threatening crisis, then highlight the distinction between the law-and-order side of the river---with Haley Barbour and Trent Lott in lily-white, yes-Massa Mississippi, as against the despair and panic of totally abandoned inner-city dinge in New Orleans. But what you self-induced against the most powerless brought you instead your lowest popularity as yet then recorded, until the next debacle at least (who exactly am I talking to here?) Do a size comparison men! Look at that casket viewed against that wing. Now don't you feel ridiculous, you big galoots?
See another article below for the contributions being made from "volunteers"--this in an organization where they tell you never volunteer! We're told it took nine 3,000-mile flights, or approximately 100 corpses per aircraft, and I say that because out of some necessity they started sharing the space in the caskets. Now that's poor people flying coach!
Didn't the air force have any child-sized caskets? Lord knows they kill enough children--just kidding! Collaterally speaking!
Air Force officials said the last 183 bodies were ferried back to the United States on a ninth cargo flight which arrived here at 2:55 a.m., EST, today. It brought the death count from the Jonestown religious commune to 912.
The 3,000-mile airlift in C-141 cargo planes began three days ago, and the pace was doubled Saturday as the military began packing the corpses of young children in twos and threes into the aluminum cases. One case on the eighth flight bore the remains of five infants and children, crewmen said. When the death count soared yesterday, a military spokesman said it would take much longer than the original estimate of two to three weeks to identify, clean and embalm all the bodies.
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November 24, 1978, Associated Press / Wilmington Morning Star, Bodies of mass suicide begin arriving in U.S.,
DOVER AIR FORCE BASE, Del. -- Bodies of at least 405 cult suicide victims began arriving from Guyana Thursday, and teams of experts spent a grim Thanksgiving Day identifying and preparing the first remains for burial,
Officials said the military airlift may take three days or more. It is being slowed by rainstorms and difficulty in getting the bodies out of the jungle camp where the cult members -- all Americans except for several adopted children -- died of poison or gunshots last weekend.
The first Air Force C-141 cargo jet arrived in a chilly and overcast dawn with 40 bodies, only one of which had been identified, according to officials. That identification was not released.
A second flight was to arrive about 9 p.m.
Volunteer airmen pallbearers lifted the first bodies in aluminum transfer cases off the plane to vans carrying them one by one to a morgue staffed and equipped to handle mass casualties.
The jet's pilot, Capt. Rob Lancaster, said he had carried bodies as cargo before and did not feel queasy about it.
"It is unusual, that's the word for it," Lancaster said.
The 405 followers of Rev. Jim Jones died in a mass suicide at their Guyana jungle commune over the weekend after some members of the group attacked Rep. Leo Ryan, D-Calif., and a party travelling with him on an investigation of the cult.
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November 26, 1978, The Sunday Register - AP, page A2, Volunteers unload bodies of 183 religious cultists
Air Force officials said the last 183 bodies were ferried back to the United States on a ninth cargo flight which arrived here at 2:55 a.m., EST, today. It brought the death count from the Jonestown religious commune to 912.
The 3,000-mile airlift in C-141 cargo planes began three days ago, and the pace was doubled Saturday as the military began packing the corpses of young children in twos and threes into the aluminum cases. One case on the eighth flight bore the remains of five infants and children, crewmen said. When the death count soared yesterday, a military spokesman said it would take much longer than the original estimate of two to three weeks to identify, clean and embalm all the bodies.
The Daily and Sunday Register of Red Bank (whose masthead actually says Shrewsbury, N.J.) seems to think of everything. This soldier is not leaning up against a stack of aluminum transfer cases. These would appear to be at the low brassy end of a mortuary retail level. Isn't our Uncle Sam thoughtful? The newspaper even has a working archive, but that's probably just candy to lull unsuspecting Hansels like myself to some hot, sticky ending.
You know, it was at the Dover Mortuary that we almost experienced the crack in the cosmic universe, at a certain moment somewhere in the past more than a decade, the moment when we came nearest to breaching the grand and inviolate delusion that is September 11th (also a mega-death ritual mind you, but a game of chess compared to Jonestown's checkers.)
It had to do with some errant human remains, and a memo written in the aftermath of 9/11, that communicated at a level of seriousness and non-deniability which isn't the kind of reality you can shake off. This sort of cornered poor Wally, the Shanksville county coroner, who was said to have matched all the DNA himself, separating out the guilty terrorist organic matter from the innocent Christian victim viscera. But you and I know that isn't possible, especially if you spend all day playing Perle Mesta to some energetic family members set out to advance their way up the chutes and ladders of a covert cabal. And after having basically lain fallow for two decades after Jonestown, these other "family members" now are popping up out of their prairie holes, speaking to their publishers, and massaging this mess as best they can.
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