Shall we stuff the president?
The BA 747 sat idling at the Gate at Heathrow airport. Our departure time of 9.00pm for Nairobi came and went. Two hours elapsed. Suddenly two men in black bearing equally black cases entered the plane and we took off. Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first independent President, had died earlier in the evening and I had rushed to their airport with just my passport.
During the flight I managed to corner one of the black suit men and discovered he was an embalmer. He and his friend were en route to stuff and preserve the so recently departed President.
Kenyatta was the father of today’s candidate for President, Uhuru Kenyatta. But it is not of him or his father that I want to blog. It is of the matter of embalming itself.
The most famous still surviving embalmed politician has to be Lenin – still on display beneath the walls of the Kremlin in Moscow. He’s alone these days. His political death-bed-mate Stalin had to be removed in 1961 due to the need to generally de-Stalinise Russia.
Of course, in the UK the 19th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham remains in a glass case at London University near the top of Gower Street. Although many question whether it IS him. He’s complete, but looks extraordinarily unwell.
Lenin has suffered considerably down the years. An ear fell off some time ago and had to be re-attached. Nasty black splodges appear on his skin from time to time and have to be removed with hydrogen peroxide.
Kenyatta had to be embalmed and, how shall I put it – “stuffed” during the night hours so that the crowds could file past during the day. I went in every day, and each day his shape had changed. His tummy was down, the bungs in his nose suggested “work”. At any event, despite the efforts of the black clad men on the BA 747, the old boy had to be removed from public view within a year. He had been laid beneath glass at pavement level and in some way had got too hot. He sort of fell to pieces.
As the Venezuelans commit to embalming Hugo Chavez, they should perhaps take note of what has happened to these once great men. Stuffing a President doesn’t do him any good in the long run. A glass case in a military building on public display may not prove the kindest ending for Hugo.
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There are 14 comments on this post
Don’t forget Mao! I saw him in 1998 in that little mausoleum on Tiananmen Square, when we went we were the last through (Dorrs only open between 8am – 12am and over 35,000 people had gone pasty the counter in just that one morning! He’s quite popular!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mao_mausoleum_queue.jpg
Regarding Bentham at UCL, he’s not completely complete at the moment and his head is kept under lock and key. Embalming didn’t go to his head so it’s been separated from the body for a while, recently more securely so after some KCL students made off with it as a prank.
An otherwise rather lacklustre tour of Kylemore Abbey in Connemara was enlivened by the tale of its builder Henry Mitchell’s devotion to his late wife Margaret. After she died on a tour of Egypt, he had her body embalmed and returned to Ireland, where it was kept in a glass box under the staircase and wheeled out to join the family each Christmas. Sadly he later had it interred in a purpose-built mausoleum. There are plenty of interesting things in glass boxes at Kylemore, but I’d quite like to have seen Margaret.
What about ‘Uncle Ho’? I think he is still ‘on display’ in Hanoi!
Maybe the Egyptians got it right, embalm then use a huge tonnage of stone to hide them
Stuffing people all sounds a bit ‘Psycho’ for you Jon. It reminds me of 2 rather morbid people who were in to it. One a local female photographer friendly with a prominent writer and the other a ‘Brand Specialist’ for Saatchi in Australia. Wasn’t a great housemate https://twitter.com/JohnKerswell . Used to play the Smashing Pumpkins in his bedroom. Funny enough an x girlfriend of mine dressed up as a pumpkin on Halloween. The other, a teacher, never drank red wine, used to wear sunglasses on the top of her head. Such an angel! Do you remember ‘Dan Dare’ or ‘The Eagle’? Better in a glass case. Why not an Urn and Madame Tussauds wax work for posterity? I would have liked to see a JFK wax work. A lecturer once lent me The Last Temptation of Christ and when I was studying. At the final exhibition there were two of us in the room prepared for the final exhibition and he walked in, looked at my work and said ‘Jesus!’ in a loud voice. Years later I was looking through our Learning Logs and I noticed one correction there was nothing else changed in the book. It read ‘I might be a genius’ but I was quoting someone else so he changed it to ‘He might be a genius’. It was on a brief to sell a pencil. I put it in a Jewelry Box put airplane caution graphics on them & razor motifs around the lid. ‘Cut from the toughest graphite this pencil can a cause devastating effect to the competition’s market’. Then the following year I was sucked in to a Vortex of corrupt psychiatry only to battle with it for years. Still fighting it.
Brand name ‘Dangerous Pencils’.
Another one just for fun was ‘Invincible Coffee – Instant Success’ . Rant over!
Enjoyed! Thanks. Hope Venezuelans heed your experience-based advice.
I am with you there, Jon. It is hardly a kindness : to be shown as one was at death , perhaps bearing the ravages of disease or long illness and to be forever disintegrating under the public gaze. How awful!
Who would want it? Has it been requested by the person embalmed?
We may have done away with the canopic jars but it’s surely an outmoded practice?
Sic transit gloria, but the most ardent fans are gratified.
I do wish you’d stop calling it “stuffing”, Jon. You make the embalmee sound like a turkey. Look,what’s your hurry? If he lasts for a year before falling apart or going blotchy you can bury him then. At least this way you can be around on view for a year or so: that’s extra.
Yes , I agree the term stuffed is disrespectful. Embalming is gruesome.There are many ways the Venezualans can remember Chavez without this belittling outer case of his person, but that is my taste..we are all different. I thought Matt Frei reporting from Venezuala was excellent . We learn to love our news presenters gradually taking into account the way they interview , the tweets they make , how many times they interrupt, whether they try and make people look stupid, whether they acknowledge different opinions, whether they fake sadness when reporting disasters etc.. Matt has gone up a notch in being welcomed into many peoples homes at 7.0pm.
I enjoyed the article. I sincerely hope Our Dear Leader in Zimbabwe does not get any ideas from his late friend Chavez to preserve himself for posterity at Heroes Acre or at least that there is a taboo shrouded in Shona primitive belief that prevents him from doing so.