Potlatch is an archaic form of economic exchange, based on the notion of giving a gift of such value that the receiver is thereby humiliated and at the same time obligated. This can include the gift of life.
For it is not only possible to shame and to challenge an enemy via a spectacular display of wealth, but also by a senseless and violent act of sacrifice, including self-sacrifice or suicide.
And so we come to the case of Jacintha Saldanha: the nurse who killed herself after falling victim to a prank telephone call made by two Australian DJs who thought it funny and inconsequential to make a fool of someone. Now they know better.
For what this proud and honourable woman has done is turn the tables on those who would make her look naive and gullible in the eyes of the entire world. She has effectively rendered them speechless and powerless by making of her own life a sacrificial offering that has to be accepted with deep sorrow and regret, but which can never be returned.
In refusing to be a figure of fun and by making exchange impossible, Jacintha Saldanha has extracted the object's revenge.
So who's laughing now? Certainly not Michael Christian or Mel Greig.
So who's laughing now? Certainly not Michael Christian or Mel Greig.
Always thought the ubiquity of humour thats based on victimisation - most humour - indicates that morality is absent from so much of actual living. Ideals dont count as real if they cannot be transported to life as they are. Enough misery, Id like to think she did a Reginald Perin and faked it all as an omni-solution to all that pisses her off ... but contrivances as this are besides the point when all I know is a stamp picture and something about a corpse.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of humour being policed by moralism is so tedious and itself unfunny we surely hardly need to bother thinking about it. The comedy of cruelty (or the cruelty in comedy) is amusingly familiar to us from Laurel and Hardy to Frankie Boyle - though even I might draw the line at the latter's infamous gag about the mentally disabled son of the model Jordan (which Boyle actually interestingly justified by reference to satirising his mother in the subsequent media shitstorm).
ReplyDeleteFor me, what these radio journalists were doing in effect was a kind of Baudrillardian skit, exposing the theatrical unreality of everyday life by parodying the simulation machine of power. (If I can convince you, Alice in Wonderland or Miranda Richardson-in-Blackadder style, by deploying a silly voice that 'I'm the Queen', than who is the 'real' Queen in the end?) Either way, it clearly wasn't anything personally directed at this unfortunate nurse.
Althougb the blogger's 'potlatch' reading is brilliantly observed, and without wishing to get in the way of a good story, for the record it subsequently turned out that Ms Saldanha had a history mf medication-controlled (or, it would sadly seem, ultimately uncontrolled) depression, and had actually attempted suicide on two occasions, before striking third time lucky - or, I guess, unlucky. Blaming these radio journalists for her death is a bit like trolling Ted Hughes for the suicide of Sylvia Plath.