The Ungrateful Dead and the Human Resource Recovery and Refineries Act

First reports were buried deep in coroners' notes alongside those on the usual
drug overdoses, stabbed prostitutes, and the homeless baited and beaten to death by frat boys for You Tube videos. But then the boney corpses, one here, two there, violated public soccer fields and little league baseball diamonds. Suburban sanitation crews had to collect them and counties dispose of them, along with the other unclaimed bodies, in indigent graveyards, unidentified but numbered.

Incidents intensified. The Dead appeared in twos and threes at shopping mall and Wal-Mart parking lots. Pet crematoriums had to be deployed. Budgets strained. Blue skies grayed with the smoke of incinerated gaunt remains. Legislatures met in special sessions across America. They wrestled with the fiscal menace. Fees were imposed upon the next of kin but they were off the grid and hard to find. When an emaciated trio- red, white, and black- appeared at Augusta on the thirteenth green the morning of the Master's final round, Congress had to act. Members were outraged by spectacles of the ungrateful dead (too lazy to work, too proud to beg) defiling American institutions. The T Party majority rushed the Human Resource Recovery and Refineries Act through both houses
for the President's promised signature.

The HRRRA created thousands of jobs in corpse collection and preparation, in commodity recovery research and development, and in bio-fuel and agricultural product manufacturing. It is now so fiscally self-sustaining that lobbyists call for it to be privatized. Halliburton is said to be interested though anonymous company officials complain that someone needs to figure out a way to fatten the bodies up a bit and thus enhance the yield of fuel and fertilizer.