Post-Modern Drunk: Things To Do With Your Enemies When They're Dead
The news that Osama Bin Laden’s body was accorded a full respectful service and then buried at sea seems to have made no one happy. Conspiracy theorists have claimed that that means his death was faked—perhaps not remembering that Osama is a man who puts out a new tape every couple of months, and so if he starts Tupac-ing it up, the whole house of cards would collapse. Even if you believe that Obama lies about everything, you at least got to admit that his conspiracies are very complicated: inserting birth announcements into papers decades before anyone conceived he could become president, grades and birth certificates and entire histories carefully constructed to stand up to scrutiny. They wouldn't half-ass the murder of an old Middle-Eastern guy with kidney problems.

More understandable are the people who just wanted the body to be brought back so they could be some sort of ritual desecration, some symbolic way for all Americans to participate in his killing even a little by having the opportunity to spit on his corpse or otherwise defile it. The New York Post, always good for shit like this, interviewed a bunch of New Yorkers about what should be done with the body. Suggestions included that we should “hang his body from the Empire State Building,” “put the body in a plane without a pilot and crash it into the Victory Arch [in Baghdad],” “bronze it and stick it in Central Park,” and “cremate him, because Muslims are not supposed to be cremated.” Various places around the internet have also suggested feeding him to pigs, and putting him some place where any old American can come by and piss on him.

We are weird about corpses. Bin Laden is dead, and the bit that made him Bin Laden can no longer be found in that leaky sack of meat and bone that was pushed off the side of a ship. When Hitler killed himself, his subordinates attempted to cremate him and buried the remains in a garden. Days later, the Soviets dug up the body, and moved it. It was reburied several times, only for the KGB to eventually have a single officer pick a secret final resting place, so Hiter’s grave wouldn’t become a shrine. It remains to be seen if this officer, Vladimir Gumenyuk, will confess the location of the grave on his deathbed.

Avoiding the creation of a shrine, or an extremely complicated-to-administer gravesite (I imagine it as a version of Lenin’s Tomb, crossed with Shoot the Freak, crossed with the possibility that some extremely angry individual with some semtex would pay the site a visit at any time) was an ostensible reason for dumping the body of the most hated man in America into the sea. Giving it a respectful funeral in an unrecoverable and undisclosed place sounds like a smart move.

People have certainly done worse to corpses. A number of the regicides of Charles I from the English Civil War—most prominently Oliver Cromwell—were posthumously executed. After the Restoration of Charles II, Parliament declared him and three others guilty of High Treason. Their bodies were exhumed (Cromwell had died years earlier of a urinary tract infection), and the corpses were hanged, drawn, and then quartered publically at Tyburn. Cromwell’s body was thrown into a common pit. However, his head was placed on a 20 foot spike in front of Westminster Hall, where it stayed for thirty years, until a storm broke the pole. It was finally buried in 1960, three hundred years after being removed from his body.

That’s nothing compared to the Cadaver Trial of 897. A Bishop known as Formosus had been made Pope in 891, after having fled Rome in fear of the former Pope, John VIII, for reasons that are not entirely clear. John VIII had claimed that Formosus had corrupted the mind of the Bulgarians so they wouldn’t accept any other bishops than Formosus, and also claimed that Formosus was trying to usurp the papacy for himself. Formosus was excommunicated, but according to one witness, begged for forgiveness and agreed that he would remain a layman for the rest of his life and would never reenter Rome.

This is doubtful, since when John VIII died, Formosus became a bishop again and was eventually elected Pope in 891. His reign was short, and messy, and filled with politics and intrigue and stuff. He died after a reign of five years, and was buried. A year after his burial, his replacement’s replacement Pope Stephen VI (Boniface VI having lasted for fifteen days before dying of gout) held what was known as the Cadaver Synod or Cadaver Trial, where they exhumed Formosus, seated him in a throne, read charges, and tried the cadaver, eventually finding him guilty. The crimes were “transmigrating sees in violation of canon law, of perjury, and of serving as a bishop while actually a layman.” Fairly boring crimes for such a weird trial. He was interrogated by the Pope himself, who asked him such things as “When you were bishop of Porto, why did you usurp the universal Roman See in such a spirit of ambition?”

They found him guilty, stripped him of his vestments, cut off the three fingers on his right hand that were used for benedctions, and eventually dumped him into the Tiber River, which wasn’t deep enough to get rid of him. Rumors circulated that his body washed up and began to form miracles. A public uprising lead to Pope Stephen being deposed, imprisoned, and then strangled.

Pope Theodore II, the following pope, annulled the Cadaver Synod, and had Formosus buried in St. Peter’s.

Pope John IX, the pope following that one, reannulled the Cadaver Synod, and said you couldn’t try anyone after they were dead.

Pope Sergius III, the pope following that one, annulled the annulment—and, I suppose, the reannulment--of the Cadaver Synod (he’d been a co-judge).

The pope following that left it alone.

After that, dumping the body in the ocean with enough weight seems like a good idea.

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