The Four Stages of Post-election Cruelty

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 his debauchery to murdering his pregnant lover, and finally in the Fourth Stage of Cruelty finds his hanged corpse on the theatre table being publicly dissected.

We know he was hanged because — master of subtly that Hogarth was — there is still a tight noose around the elongated neck of Tom Nero as he is simultaneously disemboweled, has an eye gouged out, and something not quite explainable is done to his feet.

William Hogarth – The Fourth Stage of Cruelty- The Reward of Cruelty – Google Art Project.jpg via Wikimedia Commons

That imagery comes to mind as the chattering classes prattle on about election post-mortems and campaign autopsies. Far from forensic pathologists meticulously looking for clues, mostly these dissections of the politically deceased are unlearned hacks just dismembering a body for the public spectacle of it. Hogarth’s still-shocking imagery was meant as a morality cudgel, drawing a line through cruel children becoming cruel adults and abusing animals leading to abusing mankind as a whole, ending in state-sanctioned violence and humiliation even after death. Which makes the Four Stages of Cruelty a fitting comp to the political chattering of today.

There are stages to reverse-engineering a completed election to get out of it the meaning one needs to press on to the next one. Anger and frustration lead to finding some blame somewhere external to the self. Then there is a need for a scapegoat. If that doesn’t suffice, then a group of scapegoats. Perhaps even an entire demographic of scapegoats. Left unchecked, the politically ate-up mind finds themselves at perpetual war with the majority of the electorate because those awful, wicked, evil people just don’t understand how awesomely awesome their carefully curated and separated opinion really is. And darn that media for not covering it that way.

Much of the post-mortem election handwringing, finger pointing, and caterwauling is less analysis and more flagellation of the electorate that didn’t vote the way it was supposed to. If only Trump hadn’t wiped the primary floor with Jeb!, the artist formerly known as TrustTed Cruz, or now-nominated Secretary of State “Lil’ Marco” Rubio none of this would have happened. If only Bernie Sanders would have been given a chance to be president. If only the Republican Party had resisted the Great and Powerful Political Oz not-so-hidden up the golden escalator of 725 5th Ave, New York, NY 10022. If only Joe Biden hadn’t become the living opposite of Conjunction Junction verbally on live, national TV. If only Hillary had gone to Wisconsin. If only Mike Pence had the courage.

Ifs, buts, buttercups, whatsits. Mostly this is just hacking at the corpse of elections past so folks can ooh, ah, and gasp at the entrails.

But there is cruelty involved. Seeping into the corners of the discourse will be accusations that certain demographics did not vote as “they are supposed to” based on preconceived notions of what some think is best for that demographic. What that demographic themselves thinks is irrelevant, of course, because reasons and just win, baby. Such thinking is far from the opposite of a proper autopsy or postmortem search for truth; it is staring into the body cavity and finding only the reflection of presupposed prejudices lurking somewhere between the liver and spleen. The ancients thought the soul resided in the liver, before the poets figured out that made for bad verse and even worse imagery and thus moved the eternal parts of humans into the vague area of “the heart.” But with this much bile being slung across modern technology revealing more about humans than ever before, maybe the ancients were onto something.

For that matter, the very word autopsy reveals the problem with post-election postmortem posturing. Before the English and French got ahold of it, the word came through Latin and Greek as a sense of personal observation. Autos optos as in “self-revealed,” autoptos, autopsies (but say that one in a French accent). Those trained pathologists, even when dissecting another body, have a filter of remembering they are looking for things that can prove useful not only in determining the cause of death, but in continuing the process of life in the still-living through gained knowledge. Far from the spectacle in the 18th century theaters of not-so-merry olde England making sure a criminal is brutalized even in death, a proper postmortem concerns itself with an honest assessment of life, using death as a guidepost on the mortal road all must travel.

Honest assessments start with self and then work outwards. Post-election reviews that start with the failings of always popular villains They, Them, and Those are not good analysis but public spectacle morality finger waving at those who did not vote correctly and caused the failure of promised electoral glory. And then such finger wagging folks wonder why corpse they hanged in effigy, drew across news media, and quartered all over social media does not rise from the dead to return to the polls next election and elect they themselves god-emperors of the universe.

It is a mystery, alright.