Where Do We Put All the Iraqi Bodies?:
It's not a new story, not at all, that Iraqis are getting killed in staggering numbers. We've heard about the overflowing morgues, with their only partially functioning refrigerators, crammed with corpses like thirty-pound turkey cavities filled with stuffing. And yet the lack of space for the corpses doesn't seem to have stanched their flow. Now, with almost everyone jumping on board the civil war train, we can expect death tolls to continue into the thousands and tens of those thousands for at least a good couple of years. So there's a need for space in the morgues, god, just for the people who die of natural causes, which these days in Baghdad would be a death that doesn't involve a power drill or dagger. Just blown to bits? Natural enough.

For instance, Dick Cheney's not only got the Vice-President's residence, but he's got a huge ass piece of land in Jackson, Wyoming. One imagines that the snow pack of nearby Jackson Hole would lend itself to the keeping of a few thousand corpses, maybe just the victims from Sadr City, who can be lined up and frozen like an ancient tribe lost in the Peruvian Andes. We can even forget about them there, since it'd be on Dick Cheney's private property. Of course, if global warming gets the best of us, oh, Dick Cheney would be reminded regularly of the bodies that fertilize his lawn.

If not there, then what about just turning up the air conditioning at his residence in St. Michael's, Maryland, where the Vice President and Donald Rumsfeld can offer up their houses as meat lockers for, perhaps just the dead from Fallujah. That'll be the way to go. One city or region per space. Because Iraq needs to know it can securely store its corpses so that remaining family members can identify them. Since Rumsfeld's retired, and will obviously want to host dinner parties, he can just use the upstairs for the rotting dead. Just inform the guests to use the bathroom next to the kitchen because, well, there's just a mess up there.

It could be a pattern all over the nation, war supporters unwilling to send their sons and daughters (or themselves) to go fight for Iraq, but still opening their homes not to refugees, well, not living ones, but to the bodies and half-bodies and limbs and organ piles and bones and heads and eyes, goddamn, so many eyes, of the dead from their war. And it is their war. Here's a nice passive way to show how much it means to them: Joe Lieberman, all your kids have moved out. Tell Hadassah their rooms can now be spaces for three, four families worth of corpses from Basra.

What a plan, huh? Truckloads of corpses pulling up to the houses of Condi Rice, Bill Frist, Dennis Hastert, so, so many people. Hell, even William Kristol could use an office or two at the Weekly Standard for them. And here's the deal: you can put them somewhere that you don't have to see them if you don't want to. 'Cause it can be traumatic, to walk into a room filled with bloody, gory, dirt-encrusted, rotten bodies, all staring at you. No, no, not that. It's enough for the rooms to be filled and then closed. Just so that every time you walk past the door, you know what's on the inside, like the dogshit you dread cleaning up or the kitchen sink stacked with dishes you too tired to wash.

When all the houses are filled, for surely, they will be, that's when it's time to tell the President that his Texas ranch'd make a mighty fine mass grave. Instead of clearing brush on his vacations, he can dig trenches and holes, showing America, Iraq, the world, how much he's willing to work to ensure the dead peaceful slumber.