Crude Poetic Justice?

[coberst]

Crude Poetic Justice?

 

Wikipedia informs me that “poetic justice” is a notion that fictional literature takes on as a cultural demand whereby literary outcomes must support moral standards by justifying in the end the virtuous behavior of the good guy and punishing the bad behavior of the bad guy. Furthermore logic is also maintained.

 

How can our (American) present troubles be considered as poetic justice?

 

Let us just examine the great human manufactured catastrophes visited upon us in the last few years; the Great Crude Oil Smear, the deadliest mine disaster in three decades, the greatest financial catastrophe since the Great Depression, and the looming global climate change induced by human activity.

 

The common element in all of these catastrophes is our three decade guiding premise that Government is the problem while Free Market forces are the solution.

 

Poetic Justice results because the American people are punished, with a great crude oil smear, by the logic of their commitment to the free market and their dark suspicion of government regulation.

 

Perhaps God is a practical joker!

[coberst]

The United States with 5% of the global population, which consumes 25% of the global production of petroleum, becomes tarred with petroleum; that is poetic justice!

[coberst]

Wiki says: “Poetic justice is a literary device in which virtue is ultimately rewarded or vice punished, often in modern literature by an ironic twist of fate intimately related to the character's own conduct."

 

To call this situation poetic justice is not to say that it is justice that this should happen to the United States. It is to say that if this was a literary novel and this happened to a country in the same manner then we could evaluate it to be poetic justice.

 

To say that this is poetic justice is to point this out so that we all might learn something very important about human actions in the real world. We Americans go blindly along "jus doin what comes naturally" without ever analyzing our actions in a critical and sophisticated manner.