The National Enquirer, the grocery store check-out newspaper of record, has photos of Whitney Houston in her coffin. The picture was taken at a funeral home in New Jersey. One of the images graces this week’s cover.
Some are pretending to be outraged by this. They say that the picture is in bad taste and crosses a line, whatever that means. Of course it’s in bad taste. It’s a photo of a dead body in a golden casket. The photo’s not what’s in bad taste, it’s the act of dressing up a corpse and making a spectacle of it that’s in bad taste. It’s morbid and tacky.
A corpse is something to be disposed of, not something to decorate and display like an expensive dress-up doll.
This isn’t the first time the National Enquirer has done something like this. They posted a similar picture when Elvis Presley died and it sold about a bazillion copies. They also posted a picture of Michael Jackson in a casket.
When I die, I want to be placed in a cardboard box and shoved in an incinerator, like a frozen hamburger in the broiler at Burger King.
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