NYT column: Many bloggers think Ken Lay still lives

RAW STORY
Published: Sunday July 9, 2006

"When Kenneth L. Lay, Enron's former chairman and chief executive, shuffled off this mortal coil last week (a heart attack as the family vacationed in Colorado, the coroner said), there was an immediate sense in the blogosphere that something was rotten in Aspen," writes Tom Zeller Jr. in a column slated for Monday's edition of The New York Times, RAW STORY has found.

Zeller claims that from "one corner of the Web to another," bloggers displayed "a wide lack of credulity at the idea that the man had died at all," and presents examples from a Live Journal diary, a couple comments left at Metafilter, and blogger Dave Roberts at Evil Bobby.

"From one corner of the Web to another, Lay was imagined skulking about the shadows or getting the party started at one island resort or another, with nearly every fugitive or famous person whose death remains, at least for some people, a matter of debate: from the rapper Tupac Shakur and the comedian Andy Kaufman to the mobster Whitey Bulger," Zeller writes.

"It was even suggested that the former executive had quietly assumed life as an alter ego, Dave Cummings, an aging but active star of pornographic films who is said by some to strongly resemble Lay," Zeller continues. "'This makes sense,' wrote Dave Roberts, the blogger who posited the theory, 'as surely even Bruce Wayne would become Batman full time if Wayne Industries were to go bankrupt in an accounting scandal," writes Zeller.

Excerpts from the Times article:

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The heavy, lonesome ring of a prison door was supposed to let the healing begin.

But as one blogger at lexicon.typepad.com put it, "I hate it when those jerks go off and die before they get their punishment. It's so unfair."

It's a sentiment that explains why there has been so little room for compassion in the wake of Lay's passing -- and why so many voices on the Web, only half jokingly, want to see a corpse.

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FULL TIMES COLUMN AT THIS LINK