Le BONHEUR comme indice d'épanouissement social et économique.

Recently I started rereading Susan Sontag’s book of essays Regarding the Pain of Othersto the accompaniment of shrieking feral cats, lightning striking tower cranes and biblical downpours (it’s rainy season here). This coincided with the Miami ‘zombie’ attack in which a man’s face was eaten off by a deranged assailant, an event which was used by the media as the cue for one of their semi-regular anti-drugs moral panics and emerged online as a throwaway, trivialised but virulent internet meme (‘Is this the start of the zombie apocalypse?’ etc). A few questions sprung to mind (besides the obvious ‘what would possess a man to find another living human being’s face palatable?’), mostly about the collective reaction. Has the internet as a medium changed us and made us less compassionate and more willing to fictionalise terrible events? Or have we always been creatures enthused by schadenfreude and a need to find gallows humour in the most catastrophic of circumstances? And, if so, what purpose do these serve? What would Sontag have made of it? Or Goya? Or any number of the figures she referenced in her work?

Via Zet Avril