Body Count is a heavy metal band fronted by Ice-T. Twenty-one years after their founding they received a Grammy Award for the song “Bum Rush” which features lyrics such as “It’s all twisted, the game is bent / Still no clean water in Flint.”
Between 1986-98 there were four Hollywood movies named Body Count. The highest audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is the 1998 version at 41%. Ving Rhames played Pike.
Lead exposure in children can slow growth and damage the brain and nervous system. It has been linked to lung, stomach, and breast cancer. The body stores lead in bones, and releases this into the bloodstream. If calcium or iron are lacking, the body absorbs lead in their place, making lead poisoning particularly prevalent in malnourished children.
The Flint water crisis garnered national attention after the City of Detroit switched the community from city water to heavily contaminated Flint River water. There was an immediate outbreak of skin rashes, hair loss, Legionnaires’ disease, and elevated lead levels in children’s blood. The switch saved the city money. In 2019, Detroit spent $294 million on police and $9 million on public health.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Bodycount is a 1996 comic by Kevin Eastman and Simon Bisley. Fans of the televised series are often surprised that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is based on a comic with more adult themes. Even so, the 4-issue Bodycount storyline is a particularly violent example. A 1* review at Amazon.com notes “the art sucks and there bearly any plot just skip this one.” A 5* review states “great idea, bad writing. Eastman is supposed to be some Turtles comic legend…” Eastman was born in Portland, Maine, which gets its water from Sebago Lake and maintains a legal exemption from the filtration requirement of the Safe Drinking Water Act due to the purity of water.
The website moviebodycounts.com reports that 300 had a body count of 600. The movie was based on a comic series of the same name by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley. Varley was born in Livonia, Michigan, which is 66 miles south of Flint. Livonia draws water from the Detroit River.
The Lamellar Body Count is used to predict fetal lung maturity and assess the risk of developing neonatal respiratory distress syndrome.
The Detroit River served as a final stop on the Underground Railroad and was the most active entry point along the United States–Canada border for fugitive slaves.
During the Holocaust the Einsatzgruppen measured their progress by each unit’s body count. They are best known for their systematic murder of Jews in the Russian territories, following the German army as it advanced. The Einsatzgruppen utilized firing squads which were determined to be too resource intensive, leading to many advances in the technology of mass murder.
Body count can also mean the number of individuals a person has had sex with.
Three founding members of Body Count have passed away. Lloyd “Mooseman” Roberts III was killed in a drive by shooting in which he was not the target. D-Roc (Dennis Miles) died from lymphoma and Beatmaster V (Victor Ray Wilson) died from Leukemia.
In the United States war against North Vietnam, the U.S. measured their progress by each unit’s body count. It is estimated that these figures were exaggerated by 100%, and they also included approximately 220,000 unarmed civilians.
At the time of his murder, Lloyd “Moosman” Roberts III was recording an album with Iggy Pop. Pop was born in Muskegon, Michigan, which is 155 miles west of Flint. Muskegon county commissioner Zach Lahring has several inflammatory social media posts, including one which reads “BAM (Bowling alleys matter) Using coloured ball’s to knock over redneck white pins.” Another references the chair of the County Board of Commissioners as “a little queer with a shoe fetish.” His website makemuskegongreatagain.com highlights his campaign to drive Planned Parenthood out of the community, and to remove subsidies for inner city mass transit. The City of Muskegon gets its water from Lake Michigan.
The poet Patricia Smith wrote Blood Dazzler about the victims of Hurricane Katrina. In discussing the poetic forms she said, “You can’t look directly at death unless you can contain it. It’s horrific in its undefined edges, and the idea of it unleashes a fear that blurs both its reality and inevitability . . . . Concentrating on the syllable count gave me a way to confront the body count.” Smith was born in Chicago, Illinois, which gets its water from Lake Michigan.
Victor Ray Wilson (Beatmaster V) learned music at his local church and would go on to play drums with Lou Rawls at age 11. Guion Bluford, the first black astronaut, brought the Lou Rawls album When the Night Comes into space. Rawls died of lung cancer.
Iggy Pop grew up in a trailer park in Ypsilanti, Michigan. He said of his parents, “I got a lot of care. They helped me explore anything I was interested in. This culminated in their evacuation from the master bedroom in the trailer, because that was the only room big enough for my drum kit. They gave me their
bedroom.” Ypsilanti is 65 miles south of Flint and gets water from the Detroit River. The water is considered hard to very hard.
During the United States 2003 invasion of Iraq, U.S. general Tommy Franks said “we don’t do body counts.” Two years later it was revealed that the U.S. did do body counts. Franks graduated from Robert E. Lee High School in Midland, Texas, one year ahead of former first lady Laura Bush. In 2008 Franks charged a wounded veteran charity $100,000 to use his name. It was later discovered that the charity – Coalition to Salute America’s Heroes – was spending approximately 25% on its mission while providing lavish salaries, perks, and retirement payments to its executives. Roger Chapin, the founder, lives in a mansion in San Diego. San Diego gets half its water from the Colorado River 171 miles to the east, and half from Lake Oroville, 577 miles to the north.
Robert E. Lee was buried in bare feet because his coffin was too small.
On the January 24, 2020 “Body Count” episode of Radiolab, the reporters attempt to visualize a pile of everyone who has ever died, and a pile of everyone alive, and ask, which one is bigger? No spoilers. In Annie Dillard’s book For the Time Being she notes if you stacked four bodies in every car at the Los Angeles Airport you could fit “all the corpses from the firestorm bombing of Tokyo in March, 1945.”
The website 411mania gave the 2011 first-person shooter video game Operation Body Count a rating of 3/10, stating that the game should have focused on “fun, over the top kills.”
Iraqbodycount.com reports that the U.S. military was responsible for 37% of violent civilian deaths in Iraq from 2003-05, and that “children were disproportionately affected by all explosive devices (including cluster bombs).”
General Motors was one of the primary polluters to the Flint River. They razed their factories and sold the land to Flint for $1. Now taxpayers are paying to clean up the sites. The Flint Journal reported 81 dumps and landfills in various stages of cleanup in the Flint area.
Jennymccarthybodycount.com lists 9,028 deaths from June, 2007 – July, 2015, that are attributable to unvaccinated people dying of common diseases such as measles and mumps. McCarthy, an anti- vaccination advocate, is married to Donnie Wahlberg who played Booker in the 1998 movie Body Count.
During World War II, General Motors retooled key foreign subsidiaries in order to provide trucks and airplanes for the Nazi army. Albert Speer, a close ally to Adolph Hitler, told the author Bradford Snell that Hitler “would never have considered invading Poland” without synthetic fuel technology provided to them by General Motors. The U.S. government paid GM $32 million for damaging their facilities while bombing Germany. The per capita water use in Germany is less than half that of the United States.
Beneath the Planet of the Apes star and National Rifle Association President Charlton Heston recited the lyrics to Body Count’s Cop Killer routinely during speeches and other public appearances. In 1997 he said “I don’t think rock music has any positive function.” He was later diagnosed with prostate cancer.
Criminal cases have been sought against 15 local and state officials for their role in the Flint crisis. Only state epidemiologist Corinne Miller has been found guilty. She purposely withheld information that Legionnaires’ disease was spreading through the community, and that Flint River water was the likely source. Twelve people died. Miller was sentenced to one year probation.
