Banishing death broke our minds

or, how I knew Covidianism was a scam from the start

My involvement with the funeral and burial industry gave me what I needed to recognize that “the pandemic” was a manufactured crisis, and that recognition came within three weeks in Spring, 2020.

For 20 years, I was the executive director of a nonprofit called Funeral Consumers Alliance. Think of FCA as the Consumer Reports Magazine of the funeral and burial purchase. Our mission was two-fold:

-educate the public about their commercial and legal options for funerals with an eye to the sales techniques that tended to pad the burial bill to $10,000 or more.

-Lobby state and federal governments, when necessary, to rein in the excesses of the funeral trade, mainly by requiring honest price and service disclosures upfront, and by stopping monopolistic practices that drove prices up for the grieving.

During my 20 years I wrote state legislation, co-drafted federal regulations, testified to Congress and state legislatures, went on 60 Minutes, showed up in the NY Times and NPR advocating for grieving consumers, the whole lot. I personally spoke to tens of thousands of American families dealing with death and trying to avoid financial heartache on top of grief.

As you can imagine, most undertakers didn’t like me very much; I was the enemy. But I had enough contact with enough of them-some actual friends, some honest “frenemies”-to get an understanding of the day to day business of hauling bodies, embalming, cremation, and burial, that gives me baseline knowledge that not one in 500 Americans has.

I have watched death, touched it, hauled bodies*, smelled it, and experienced the commerce and emotions that accompany it. I know what death is actually like in the mundane real world, and I can tell you that very few Americans know anything truthful or realistic about it.

Because we banished it from our lives. Before the last quarter of the 19th century, there was no such thing in America (or anywhere, except for the ultra rich and royal) as a “funeral home.” There was no such thing as a “funeral industry.” Your family washed and laid out your own dead mother at home. The undertaker was really just a coffin-maker and general helper-out who came to your home with the coffin and extra chairs.

No one asked questions like “should I let my children go to the funeral?” because what could that possibly mean? What are you going to do, lock the children in the barn? The funeral is in the front room, and the corpse spends a couple of days there. Few children got out of their early years without being exposed to the reality of death, and not only because they saw animals being slaughtered. Because their grandparent died and were waked at home. Those children, you can be sure, grew up largely without the hysterical neuroticism about death because it was never hidden from them. There was no black velvet curtain hiding the truth so that the mind could create phantasmagoric fantasies.

Then came chemical embalming. Undertakers set about replacing blood with rose-tinted formalin to give the illusion of life while preserving the corpse cosmetically. Makeup—once reserved for actors and whores—was worn by every well-dressed corpse. The body was segregated from the world of the living by being encased in an ornate box with soft torchieres at head and foot, and it only appeared now at a funeral home. A special, cordoned off place for death that it might no longer contaminate your living space.

Most Americans today have never seen a corpse. Those who have have seen only an embalmed, made-up, and well-lit mannequin-like representation of a “loved one.” In the absence of real world experience, we have become stark-staring terrified of death. We think that without immediate chemical preservation, that grandma will turn into something that stinks and shambles like in the Walking Dead. We believe quite falsely that we can actually get a sickness or disease from being around or in contact with a corpse.

None of this is true, but you cannot convince most people of this because we have made sure we never had to encounter the reality of death, and we’ve built up enough neurosis that it will never go away for most of us.

I am not, obviously, the first person to notice this. Much has been written for more than 100 years about the modern terror of death and its consequences on our psyches and on how we live. But I tell you this: without this modern terror, the government’s oppressive reaction to the alleged pandemic could never have happened. It is our childish, desperately immature terror of death that softened us up to have our constitutional rights taken away, to have our businesses closed, to be forced to take dangerous injections, and to un-person our own families by re-making them as Vectors of Death and Doom.

We are not a sane people.

How did my professional knowledge show me in the first few weeks that the pandemic was a scam? Because I saw what was going on behind the scenes. I saw what egotistical “public health” people were doing to seize their moment, and I saw the eager media ready to scare the bejesus out of everyone for no reason.

The moment those pictures of overrun hospitals in Italy came out, the moment I saw the phrase “refrigerated morgue truck” in print, I knew the country was going to fall. And it did.

Let’s take just one example, refrigerated morgue trucks, to illustrate what happened. You may remember breath-taking stories from the early days of the alleged pandemic about how crematories were so backed up they had to bring in REFRIGERATED MORGUE TRUCKS. I use caps to demonstrate the fear and emotion used by the media, and by Americans, to discuss this issue. Tractor trailers with refrigeration and shelving became a palimpsest on which the entire public wrote its terrors and fears of disgusting, contaminating, evil death.

But I knew what you didn’t, and still don’t. Here it is: refrigerated morgue trucks have always been around and you never knew what they were because they don’t bear signs stating ACME Rolling Mortuary-It’s Mortu-Matic!(TM).

Whenever a crematory in Alabama, or New York City, or any place you like, has too many bodies to get them all cremated in a few days, they run out of refrigeration space. So do hospital morgues. This happens in most flu seasons, and it happens from time to time because the death rate isn’t linear, it’ s lumpy. Sometimes there’s a lot of dead people this week, but not next week.

None of these REFRIGERATED MORGUE TRUCKS were anything unusual. They only seemed that way because the news never talks about them or shows pictures of them unless there’s a natural disaster or some other acute mass death. But they’re rolling on our highways every day, just like coffin-trucks from Batesville casket roll down your freeways every day and you just don’t know what the brand name “Batesville” means.

The dead are all around you, all the time.

But my God. The shrieking, terrified hysteria around this in the early days of Covid. I knew where the country was going in the first week, because the media started calling me to get an interview. They were pushing me to give them dire-sounding quotations. “What about the REFRIGERATED MORGUE TRUCKS!?” a producer would say. “What about BODIES OVERWHELMING CREMATORIES!?” they would gasp.

I gave them the same calm, ordinary explanation as you read above in this essay. Not only did that not satisfy the media people, I could detect a low-key resentment, even a bit of pissed-off-edness, on the other end of the phone line. I wasn’t giving them the guts and gore they wanted, and a few actually asked me if I thought I was being too light and not taking a PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY seriously enough.

This is your media, readers. This is what they do behind the scenes. If they find an honest and rational source, they either ignore him, or they find someone else more hysterical to drown him out. What they won’t do is let you, the news consumer, hear a calm voice of reason.

Obviously, I was right in the spring of 2020 (many others were, too). America did exactly what I predicted it would do, except it went much farther than even a cynic like me imagined. And it was all possible because not more than a few of every thousand Americans has a sane, rational, or proportionate relationship with death.

*Dead people in morgues are usually wrapped tightly in thick plastic. When I transported bodies from morgues to funeral homes a few times, I learned that dead people feel to the touch exactly like a package of chicken at the supermarket. That’s because we’re just meat. We’re just animals. We’re just organisms. This is what death is like. Surprisingly mundane.