Jewish World Review May 8, 2007 / 20 Iyar, 5767

That's disinter-tainment

By Malcolm Fleschner

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | As a journalist, I'm frequently surprised at how misinformed most members of the general public are about what it takes to be a media commentator. True, a great deal of our work involves hard-nosed news-gathering, by which I mean attending exclusive cocktail parties to discuss with other highly paid media commentators how misinformed most members of the general public are.

But beyond this sort of journalistic legwork (so called because standing around chatting for hours is brutal on the calves), success in the news business today often depends on developing an eye for emerging trends. Not to toot my own horn, but I did get in "on the ground floor" by purchasing Google stock when it was trading at just $450 (I bought 1/8 of a share) while I also recall watching Emmitt Smith during his record-setting football days and thinking to myself, "Sure, but what people really want to see is how he dances the Flamenco."

So you can probably imagine how my trend-attuned ears pricked up when I heard about plans to exhume the corpse of legendary escape artist Harry Houdini. If these plans go through, Houdini will join such other notables as Jesse James, President Zachary Taylor and the Big Bopper in the ranks of famous people whose bodies have been dug up in the past few years so that forensic science can answer unfounded questions about their deaths that almost no one was really asking.

This trend is driven mainly by the descendents of celebrities looking to bask in what's left of a long-dead forebear's reflected glory. First they find some oddball who's dreamed up a conspiracy theory about how their famous ancestor was murdered, faked his own death, had a vestigial tail, died while carrying Elvis' love child, etc. Next they send out a press release and — bam! — the following morning Matt Lauer is at the door with a camera crew and a set of shovels.

This was what happened to 1950s rocker The Big Bopper, who was dug up at his son's request in January. The ostensible reason for the exhuming was to settle rumors that the Bopper had suffered a gunshot wound aboard the plane prior to the crash that famously also took the lives of fellow music stars Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens.

Predictably enough, the resulting autopsy revealed nothing unexpected except that the Big Bopper was, in his son's words, "in remarkable shape" for a 48 year-old corpse (The article where I got this information didn't mention how many other 48-year-old corpses the "Little Bopper" had dug up as a basis for comparison).

But my question is, what if they had found a bullet hole in the Big Bopper? Then what? Would they have dug up Buddy Holly to test his fingers for gunshot residue? And then, of course, to determine exactly what happened on the plane that fateful night, they'd have to unearth Ritchie Valens to see whether the "La Bamba" singer had died with his hand outstretched and his mouth shouting the word, "Nooooooo!"

So now, unless the old master can pull one last miraculous escape, Houdini will be the latest famous corpse unearthed, this time to prove whether he died, as long believed, of appendicitis, or was poisoned by his enemies in the phony psychic community. And, just to avoid having to do it all over again later, they also may be checking his tissue for signs of the newly discovered "gay" gene.

Well, since there seems to be no stopping this trend, I figure I'll just try to capitalize on it instead. That's why I'm reinvesting all my Google profits in a startup company that publishes maps to celebrity graves. But now they give you a free home DNA kit with every purchase!