Poetic acts of solace or sorrow
A hunter crushed by an elephant he has shot feels like justice, but other similarly uncanny outcomes are tragic
Recently, it was reported that a hunter who had shot an elephant was crushed when the dead animal fell on top of him. A friend e-mailed me the story with one word in the subject line: "Justice!". Additional (and somewhat less contentious) examples of poetic justice include a terrorist maimed by his own bomb before he is able to injure others, a moralising preacher getting caught for cheating on his wife with a prostitute and an antiblack racist who discovers through DNA testing that he is partially of African descent. In my life, I recount a black woman who had been hostile towards me for being a white guy romantically involved with a black woman, but who ended up marrying a white guy herself. I smile when I think about her. Poetic justice is often defined as an outcome in which vice is punished in a peculiarly appropriate or especially apt manner. But it’s not clear that punishment is really what is happening in the above cases. People are undergoing harm or discomfort, but these b...
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