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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;1312456 wrote: 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.


That's an entirely inaccurate description, wherever it came from.

Poetic justice is where a consequence - not even necessarily a just consequence - can be seen as singularly appropriate given the initial act. Poetic justice is tied to hubris, you need the initial oblivious pride to come before the fall and the fall has to reflect the folly of the behavior. Nothing in it relates to morality or moral standards. The OED defines it as "the fact of experiencing a fitting or deserved retribution for one's actions" - nothing to do with morality, only the fitting nature of the punishment. It gives an example usage:1991 G. ABBOTT Lords of Scaffold: Many people still believe that..Doctor Guillotin died beneath the blade of his brainchild, the National Razor... Would it not be poetic justice if he who had devised it, eventually died by it?I have a great sympathy for the American People. Poetic justice should only overtake the perpetrators, not their victims, and the People are surely the latter.

coberst;1312456 wrote: 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.


a) That's a horribly complicated statement, and:

b) If I read it rightly, those words are wrong.

spot;1312462 wrote: American People. Poetic justice should only overtake the perpetrators, not their victims, and the People are surely the latter.


In a democracy such as we have in the United States the people are sovereign and thus responsible for the situation that exists. The lack of intellectual sophistication of the citizens is the fault of those citizens.

Bill Sikes;1312464 wrote: a) That's a horribly complicated statement, and:

b) If I read it rightly, those words are wrong.


Do a Google of poetic justice and then rewrite my statement so as to make my statement clearer and less complicated. I would appreciate your help.

coberst;1312502 wrote: In a democracy such as we have in the United States the people are sovereign and thus responsible for the situation that exists. The lack of intellectual sophistication of the citizens is the fault of those citizens.


That's the propaganda, certainly. The truth is divided from the statement by, firstly, the representative rather than direct nature of the "democracy" you lay claim to; and secondly by the two-party system (which, you'll correct me if I'm wrong, even has legal recognition) severely limiting the practical choice of representative candidate. The responsibility of which you speak is so dilute as to be undetectable, to the same extent as the difficulty of overthrowing the existing two-party system with a more desired alternative. At the moment, all any independent movement can achieve is to bias election results toward one or other of the entrenched power brokers.

The American People are the victims of events in their own country, not the perpetrators.

spot;1312525 wrote:

The American People are the victims of events in their own country, not the perpetrators.


The American people are too naive to comprehend the problem and too frightened of reality to accept their responsibility.

The basic problem began when the people allowed them self to be convinced that government was the problem and that the free market was the solution. These problems developed because the American citizen let Corporate America free and unregulated.

Corporate America obviously isn't unregulated. That's one reason there are Corporation Lawyers.

If the two entrenched parties had clear blue sea between their policies regarding the tax burden, or social care, or overwhelmingly US interference in the internal affairs of other countries, you might have a point about responsibility in that voting would change society. Your parties don't have such a wide distinction, hence my point that responsibility can't lie with the voters.

You're both right.

Royd Fissure;1312596 wrote: You're both right.


Perhaps you could synthesize our positions, since none of us seem capable of the task.

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!

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 "just doin what comes naturally" without ever analyzing our actions in a critical and sophisticated manner.