[Note: Updated David Carradine pix at Celebrity Corpse of the Week: David Carradine]

I see dead people. No, really. With Google and a little spare time, anyone can track down photographs of dead celebrities. WARNING: the teeny tiny thumbnails you see in this blog are actual photos of the dead celebrities in question, but hopefully in a resolution that would not offend. (Far be it for us to offend anyone!)

Personally, I never got the appeal of looking at dead celebrities. It’s bad enough they laid out Uncle Al in an open casket. Sure, it’s just an “empty shell” that the “soul” once inhabited, which in my book makes it dead meat. Let’s show some real respect and keep the lid down.

Uncle Al never wore makeup like that, never had a pressed shirt like that, and certainly never smiled like that. And what’s with the glasses? Are they putting a reading light in the coffin with his favorite book?

But at least we knew Uncle Al. We have no business gawking at the corpses of popes and presidents and movie stars and other notables. Such as …

This week’s fare, poor David Carradine, hangs in his Bangkok closet like a pressed pair of pants. Fans are appalled! And downloading this picture in droves.

Who in the world needs a lasting last image of Marilyn Monroe as a middle-aged drug o.d.?

Saddam Hussein was hung up and cut down, all captured with a cell phone camera. Or was it his infamous double?

Elvis Presley had looked worse than he did in his final photo shoot. Or was it his infamous twin-brother-who-was-given-away-at-birth-by-the-poor-Mississippi-family-during-the-Great-Depression?

Benito Mussolini was last seen hanging upside like a bat from the rafters, but I don’t think pictures of it made the world a better place.

Eva Peron’s body was kept in a glass-topped coffin in her husband’s dining room. The new wife must have been thrilled.

The coroner’s sheet covered up John Dillinger’s most notorious feature, so what’s the point of looking?

Pope John Paul II looks so natural in his globally-circulated funeral pictures that it makes me wonder if he was maybe dead for several years before that.

The Bolshevik party leader Vladimir Lenin died decades before his party did, but they’re both dead now.

The only known picture of the dead Abraham Lincoln is actually rather respectful, as these things go. Still, dead meat is dead meat.

Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-Tung to us older folks) failed to die before contributing to the deaths of tens of millions, but you can’t make a Communist omlette without breaking a few eggs, right?

At least if the gruesome autopsy photos of JFK were released back in the namby-pamby 60s, it would have negated any rumors of his survival or the idiotic one-bullet theory.

Hmm … maybe there is a good reason to see some of these pix, after all.

Jim Lawter

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