Zeitgeist found in Georgia

Breathlessly, almost gleefully, the reporters filed their stories from once-forgotten Noble, a small town in the northwest corner of Georgia. Now that the Canadians have their gold, the "eye on America" has refocused on the once-again Gothic South.\nIt turns out that Ray Brent Marsh, the operator of Tri-State Crematory, hasn't been following through on the job. Local officials have discovered more than 130 bodies hidden on the Tri-State property, all in varying stages of decomposition. According to Ray Brent, the crematorium hasn't worked for some time, so it's only logical that he and his accomplices have been stuffing dozens of corpses into tiny vaults and handing over urns of pulverized concrete to bereaved families. This scheme worked like a charm until one of the crematory's neighbors, while walking her dog, literally stumbled on a skull.\nHaven't I seen that in a movie?\nFinally, sighed television reporters. We'll have some body bags to broadcast. Up in New York City, it was a problem that the bodies were cremated, pulverized along with the concrete. The lack of bodies dulled the edge of the media spectacle. \nBut down in Georgia, there are bodies aplenty. The helicopter shots of huge plastic bags scattered all over the Marsh compound remind me of that television spectacular -- the Hale-Bop-Heaven's-Gate cult suicide. Remember those purple shrouds and the new white Nikes peaking out from underneath?\nOnly this time, instead of cultish order, the scene is pathetically chaotic, as if some child had hidden what he thought were his toys. It's as if Ray Brent is the silent character in Eliot's Wasteland, who quietly listens to someone ask him, "That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout?…Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men, / Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!"\nThe spectacle in Noble, Ga., is notable not only for the media shamelessness, or the similarity it bears to a 20th-century poetic masterpiece, or that it reminds us that many Southerners have two first names. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the absence of a contemporary Zeitgeist, an emblem for the spirit of our times.\nWell, folks, we may have hit upon something.\nIn the final analysis, Ray Brent and his accomplices do not bear the full responsibility for this fiasco. There are only two funeral home inspectors for the entire state of Georgia. Noble's former county coroner had complained about Tri-State, but to no avail, Michael Pearson writes in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Feb. 16. When the first set of bodies was discovered, the crematory had an unquestioned license to operate. Quite simply, it was a network of irresponsibility, carelessness and greed that allowed Ray Brent to stockpile the cadavers.\nRight now, Slobodan Milosevic is standing trial, in part for the killings that filled some of the mass graves during three wars in the former Yugoslavia. In Noble, they're emptying the mass graves of capitalism gone wrong. Pitiful neglect and bizarre profit motive aren't unique to Georgia and Tri-State. They're at work in the Enron collapse, vice president's Richard Cheney's energy policy manipulations, our inner cities and our happy-go-lucky war-mongering.\nThe lesson learned from Noble, Ga., is the lesson of emergence. We keep stuffing the implications of our education shortcomings and our international shortsightedness into dark corners, hoping they won't be discovered. But like tragedy in a tiny southern town, they will emerge. Piercing through the media haze that dulls our own senses and sensibilities, outlandish small-town tragedies always help remind us to look in the dark corners.