Mummies and their Republican kin
Stiff, rich folks at national convention bear more than a passing resemblance to ancient figures
The largest collection of mummies ever propped up in one location beckons Republicans who can’t get enough of the stiff, the rich and the embalmed. There are dozens of naturally and deliberately preserved corpses here at Tampa’s Museum of Science and Industry, among them a dog, a cat, a rat, a howler monkey in a feather necklace, a jackal, a fish, an ibis, a baby crocodile, and a 3,000- year- old gentleman from the Nile Valley who, with his sharp chin, narrow face and flakes of 24- karat makeup, looks an awful lot like a certain candidate for President of the United States.
“I like to think of him as being very well- fed,” a young guide named Janel Fontaine is telling me as we stare into the crystalline coffin in which this unwrapped scion of the Egyptian Late Period is lying with his mouth open, his eye sockets empty, his black curly hair cut short, his abdomen hollowed out, and his manicure dyed a vibrant Cleopatra crimson, either by some unknown fungal malady or by a stylist at the Luxor Hotel.
Traces of auric residue are still visible on the mummy’s cheeks and fingers; the staff at the museum call him, reverently, The Man With The Golden Hands.
“Typically,” Ms. Fontaine educates me, “Egyptian mummies from the noble classes would have had their arms crossed to indicate their status. But this man’s arms are at his side, so it could be that he was just a rich merchant or a businessman who made his own wealth.” “So it IS Mitt Romney!” I announce. “Are you pulling my leg?” jibes the erudite Ms. Fontaine, who will head for graduate school in England when the exhibition concludes here next week and all these busy bodies are bused to their next gig in San Antonio. ( Their previous stop, ironically, was Charlotte, N. C., where the Democrats will coagulate come Monday.)
“Of course I am,” I reply. “If we pulled HIS leg, it would come off.”
Janel Fontaine looks around the exhibit, which is virtually unpopulated by the living on a weekday morning, and surveys an astonishing and rather ghoulish collection of dead Andean, Oceanic, German and Hungarian women, babies, youths, and men, all of whom, an introductory video reminds us, “were real people with family and friends.”
“Is everyone here younger than they are at the convention?” the docent giggles.
It takes a stomach and bowels of a certain resilience to pass a pleasant day among Goldfinger and his fellow, callow dead.
“To protect the mummies, do not take photographs,” visitors are cautioned, as if the subjects might ruin the shot by blinking. Attending an exhibition of leather- skinned Loved Ones is a bit like going to an American college football game — you have to pay 20 bucks for admission, but the players don’t get a dime.
In addition to the self- made, stiffarmed magnate of Old Memphis, the Mummies of the World show offers an astonishing assortment of accidental and chemically tanned human hides. One sees a woman from the Atacama Desert of South America, 2,000 years OLDER than the oldest Egyptian pharaoh, her long, brown hair still braided; nearby, another woman cradles a gauze- wrapped infant to her bosom, united in eternity.
Further along, more recent mummies beckon. Three are of a single family named Orlovits: Mommy Veronica, Daddy Michael, and a dead toddler named Johannes, forgotten for centuries in a bricked- up Hungarian crypt, preserved by low humidity, and now exhibited like pottery for the morbid pleasure of mortals like me.
In another section, the 18th- century Baron von Holz and Baroness Schenck von Geiern greet us with silent screams and loincloths, their private parts deemed too fresh for public viewing, even though no fig leaf covers the fertile crescent of the Man With The Golden Hands.
“What do you think is he thinking?” I pose to Janel Fontaine, as we stare at paleo- Mitt.
“He may not be too pleased to be gawked at by foreigners,” she says. “But he’s happy to be remembered.” “May I take his picture?” I ask. “Do you take pictures at a funeral?” the guide chastens.
Late for a date downtown with the Grand Old Party, I pause to add my comments to a guest book at the exit.
“Cool but creepy,” someone before me has written.
“Poor night guards!”