Ann Landers

Dear Ann Landers:

Please tell me how certain people can appear to be perfectly OK when they are clearly insane?

Our sweet, innocent daughter was married last week to a Mortician 12 years her senior. He courted her for more than a year. One of the things that Impressed her so favorably was this man’s restraint and good manners. He never embraced her intimately nor did be try to talk her into sex, even after they were engaged.

Last night they were married. This morning our daughter phoned--in hysterics. It seems her wedding night was a nightmare.

Her husband asked her to take a very cold bath before coming to bed. He suggested that, she soak in the tub for about half an hour. When she came to bed he asked her to close her eyes and be perfectly still.

Then he said, “You may as well know that I am a necrophiliac as so many of my profession are. I can only make love to dead women or women who look as if they are.”

Our daughter fled in panic, packed her bags and checked into another room. She is at this moment in a state of shock and under a doctor’s care. Her physician has already agreed to cooperate in an annulment.

I think the man is crazy. What do you think?

--SAN FRANCISCO

Dear Mother:

I agree with your diagnosis. He is clearly nuts. And so is that statement about “other members of his profession.” Report him to the National Funeral Directors Association at once. The address is 125 West Wells St., Milwaukee, Wis. 53203. If your daughter’s story is accurate they will boot him out of the business.

Funeral Directors Respond

Dear Ann Landers:

We wish to draw attention to the potential danger in your erroneous and short-sighted condemnation of a widespread and thoroughly fundamental practice. It isn’t widely known, but universally suspected, that funeral directors and morticians are closet-necrophiliacs. It is even less well-known (and generally concealed) that the necrophile movement runs like a frankenstein suture through the whole of society--East and West, through every echelon of governmental and church authority. Because of the popular fears of such a subject, these groups and individuals have not revealed their true sexual identities. With the idiotic mentality you have displayed in advocating the impoverishment and incarceration of one of our colleagues for the “offense” of necrophile love, we have made the important and world-historic decision to COME OUT finally and declare ourselves Lovers of Death; Lovers of the Dead.

Let us underline the fact that we are not a revolutionary movement, but one which seeks to reveal the TRUE necrological character of this society in order to create an environment which is true to itself: our Western Civilization loves death and fondles its putrescent corpse in every aspect of daily life, in every cultural manifestation. The leaders of our society, its most revered men, are secret necrophiliacs who have nothing to fear in exposing their true natures. In fact, we believe that our country’s bicentennial is a most appropriate time for such an event. Ours, after all, is a necrophile society, engaged in necrolatry on every level of ideology--itself, the all-encompassing necrodialectic of thought, and desire, today’s currency of the absent spirit.

The Catholic Church, our great long-standing bastion of death-love, is a prime example. Recently the press revealed that the Vatican has kept the foreskin of Jesus Christ and the foot of Mary Magdalene encased for the benefit of the devout This blatant necro-nostalgia is in keeping with Catholic orthodoxy, particularly the human sacrifice of crucifixion and ritual cannibalism of the Eucharist. It is time the church fathers came out and engaged in the REAL THING.

Representation is not enough! We demand REAL BLOOD and REAL FLESH!

The love of death is manifest in official government policy, too. War, for example, is nothing more than necro-institutional lust for blood and guts. If necrophilia were accepted as it should be, we could enjoy war without the pointless destruction of valuable property. We are reminded of the prohibitive cost of killing even one Viet Cong suspect during the Vietnam War. Such monies could have been channeled more efficaciously into the purchase of terminated famine victims from needy countries like India to be used for the recreation of the death-starved millions here in the U.S.

Even the more responsible elements of the American left have admitted the correctness of recognizing necrophilia as a valid sexual outlet. In fact, the Socialist Workers Party recently endorsed the convocation of a national Necrophiliac Liberation Front when half of their central committee members admitted that they had been dead for years. Besides, many famous personalities are in reality dead: Cher Bono, President Ford, and the leader of North Korea, Kim Il Sung, all recently admitted that they too had been long dead, and had engaged in necrophile practices while alive.

However, institutional practices and government policy are only the tip of the iceberg. What is far more important is the continual latent desire for death and union with the inanimate in every facet of public life. “Life” in our great nation is no more than the pilgrimage to the tomb, a vampire obsession with self-destruction. From alarm clock to job to home and empty comatose “leisure time,” the masses follow their shadows to the mausoleum. Understandably fearful of precarious life, we have found that it is far safer to substitute a pre-fed, automatic conditioning, which through submission to authority and the repression of dangerous, potentially revolutionary creativity, all citizens can be embalmed with a numbing passivity: every eye is covered with a coin.

Rigor mortis is inscribed on every dollar bill, every official document, even the tags on mattresses, with an invisible venom. Not content with funereal ritual, Death is unconsciously exalted at every moment with ‘ cigarettes, manufactured food-like sustenance, suicide, impotence, patriotism, salutations to the flag, fear of the unknown, and the demolition of the Other.

Humanity, in its process of total self-objectification, succumbs and is devoured by its machinery in a frantic copulation with inanimate things. Class is united with class, race with race, man with woman, parent with child in the unceasing frenzy for Death and communion with the Dead. Feast on the dead! Napalm is no more than an exotic cooking oil!

Time is a dirge! Breath stinks of the grave, poetry rots, consumers sodomize pet rocks in a procreative suicide, seeking to be one with the unspeaking indifferent universe of ponderous dead Matter! People beg to be buried in their cars! And each day the honey hand of Death chimes the plague toll and the Living Dead mass produce more cream-filled chocolate-covered Death.

If you want to keep your job of spectacular advisor and if we are to keep ours, dear Ms. Landers, you know that the edifice must remain, and perfect itself with the explicit love for Death which we represent. If this is questioned, there is no telling what the masses would destroy in a quixotic pursuit of genuine life. It cannot be allowed, Give them religion, authority, ostentatious funerals, lovelorn advice--give them DEATH! Our society must be preserved.

We love Death. There is nothing so pleasurable as buggering decaying stiffs because for us it emblematicizes all that our civilization has achieved in five thousand years. We don’t have to converse, relate, hear unanswerable questions. We can cover ourselves with the plague blankets, kiss the frozen mouth which cannot whisper of frightening possibilities We can assassinate the present and stop the future. If we are to have order, security, Law--we must admit our necro-lust and drain life of every drop of blood. The more waxy, the more hideous, the more artificial, the more silent, the more we can lose ourselves in Death and strangle life. Long live Death!

V. Enom, Chairman,

National Funeral Directors Association