The Four Stages of Post-election Cruelty
Much post-mortem election caterwauling is less analysis and more flagellation of the electorate that didn’t vote the way it was supposed to
In modern times, an autopsy is the go-to post-mortem procedure to get answers to why a life ended. Highly trained medical examiners, often a pathologist, meticulously find the clues a body still holds once life has left it. Legal procedural shows and the true crime push for more and more real-life content have made the autopsies a staple of our collective consciousness. The medical examiner dropping some plot-turning nugget of knowledge is a narrative staple now, portrayed as an expert expertly expertizing on the elements of the enigma at hand.
It wasn’t always that way. In not-so-merry olde England, criminals executed for crimes were publicly dissected for the dual purpose of the primitive medical science of the day and also as one last temporal indignity to the criminal who has already been dispatched to eternity. This was portrayed infamously by William Hogarth in his The Four Stages of Cruelty, a print series of morality finger wagging that was sort of a combo social commentary tract as graphic novel. In them, the fictional Tom Nero starts out mistreating a dog as a child, then a horse as a young man, then graduates…
