Joanna Schroeder wonders if horrific, macabre humor is the only way we can deal with the things that terrify us most.
I didn’t write about this case on The Good Feed Blog because I assumed you were all reading about it elsewhere, and it was just too horrific for me to want to share with all of you.
But, yes, a man in Florida actually attacked a homeless man and bit and swallowed most of his face. I don’t want to go into details, because it’s just too awful. You can read about it here, at NPR.org. As far as we know now, the man was high on “Bath Salts” which is in and of itself sort of fucking mind-blowing to me. Yet another thing to not keep in the house as kids get older… But something they can buy legally (for now).*
Anyway. I refused to write about this because what’s the point? To horrify you? To get us all talking about how horrific it was?
But last night and today I started seeing an American Zombies theme pop up surrounding the case. Now, I love me some Walking Dead, but the reason I love it is because of the fact that it is fictional. Sure, it reflects upon society as a whole and dives into that whole “Post Apocalyptic” thing, but it isn’t real. It’s escapist horror.
This man? Rudy Eugene? He’s not a Zombie, he’s a real man who was most likely high on a drug that many of you with kids have in your home. I was disgusted by these Zombie jokes, but figured I was just being overly sensitive and expressly humorless.
Until Lindy West at Jezebel came out with today’s piece which sums up precisely how I feel about this Zombie bullshit:
I don’t mean that the people who latched on to this particular meme are bad people (though I would say they’re a bit thoughtless), or that it’s never appropriate to respond to unthinkable tragedy with macabre humor. But I’m not feeling particularly charitable toward wacky zombie jokes today. There’s no such thing as undead people, only dead people. And sad people. No one deserves to be publicly ridiculed for their identity — gay people, fat people, black people, poor people — but when we ridicule and marginalize mentally ill people, actual innocent people get killed.
And there’s the rub. There are a few populations of people in the United States who are so marginalized that they become invisible to us, including undocumented immigrants, people with mental illness, and homeless people. And sure, there is some intersectionality to these three groups, but not exclusively. There are obviously very wealthy mentally ill folks, as well as healthy and prospering undocumented immigrants.
Regardless of their status, we mustn’t allow these people to become invisible to us. Does Ronald Poppo’s life matter less because he was homeless?
The root of the problem here is that we don’t prioritize mental health in this country. We don’t want to pay for it, we see it as an individual’s responsibility to take care of their own mental health. And certainly it is on us as individuals to keep ourselves healthy.
But in the cases of people who are attacked or murdered by mentally ill people, it is no longer just an issue of one individual taking care of him or herself. A mother who murders her children, a man who walks into a cafe and shoots bystanders, a teen who enters his school and takes the lives of kids just trying to get an education in a place where their parents thought they were safe… These are cases of mental illness gone unchecked and untended and becoming everyone else’s problem.
And worse, and this is for the media, how the F is the photo of Poppo’s destroyed face possibly public? Or the photo of a naked and dead Rudy Eugene lying next to a bloody Ronald Poppo? Are these people not human beings? I weep for the families of both of these men who were or are both, after all, somebody’s loved ones.
And folks, it’s not fucking funny. I get it that you need to deal with your horror somehow. But grow the fuck up and show some respect to those who are in pain.
As Lindy West said it:
maybe I should make a hilarious meme about the time your mom died! She’s probably a ghost now! Ha ha, you and your stupid ghoul mom. 75 dickheads “liked” this.
How would that meme work for you?
What do you guys think? Is making jokes about Zombies in reference to a man being brutally attacked okay?
Is there a way to make light of something so horrible that doesn’t disrespect the victims and the survivors?
*Author’s note: as mentioned in the comments, “bath salts” refers to something different than household bath products, and is now temporarily banned from being sold legally.
Photo, high school year book/ booking photo
About Joanna Schroeder
“Bath Salts” are not literally bath salts. The reason they’re called that is that they can ship them legally that way.
What I find troubling and fascinating about all this is that we are dealing with an incredibly violent time around the world. There are hundreds of people being murdered by the Syrian government, and the shock of that is so hard to process that instead we are attracted to more sensational stories like this.
I’m not suggesting that war causes this violence, but it changes our perception of it. The original zombie apocalypse movie (yes, zombies existed before but they were very different) Night Of The Living Dead had stark black and white visuals that, intentionally or not, resembled the filmed footage coming out of Vietnam and the violence towards the civil rights movement. Tom Savini, the makeup genius behind Dawn Of The Dead, served in Vietnam and even used some of his early skills to impress his army buddies.
When I heard about the Miami attack, combined with the Canadian killer (it’s not sure if he’s a serial murderer just yet), I started to feel an uneasy apocalyptic dread. Then I realized that this is very familiar: during this season of Mad Men, there has been a constant drumbeat of violence just offscreen – the Chicago nurse killings, the Texas sniper, riots and of course Vietnam. With the war, uprisings in the Middle East and even US politics becoming so confrontational we’re being immersed in a culture of violence moreso than any time since the late 60s (and we don’t even have cool musicians dealing with it in song). In that climate, making gags about zombies seem oddly more palatable.
Hey Wookiee,
I agree with you almost 100%, and I think your comparison to classic zombie films is dead-on (pun intended), going back even further to Invasion of the Body Snatchers as Cold War propaganda… But even deeper, people embraced it because they were so afraid of that looming Red menace.
If we were talking about fiction, if we were trying to figure out why Walking Dead or even something dark and depressing like The Killing were having success right now, it would be a more apt comparison, but people are talking about the very real attacks here and raising fear—and worse, dehumanizing both the victims and the attackers. And dehumanizing the attackers is dangerous because we forget there’s a reason for the Miami attack and that’s drugs and/or mental illness as well as the invisible personhood of one man, Ronald Poppo (which is why I put his HS Yearbook photo up here, when he looks “Crazy and homeless” people seem to care less).
But I see your point and it’s excellent and I think you’re probably right.
Also, yes, Syria is devastating, as is the news out of Afghanistan. We’re overwhelmed by the 24 hour news cycle and what feels like an increase of violence, when in fact I think it’s more like a increase in human insensitivity.
Top be honest, I don’t understand “bath salts” either. It does not sound like my idea of a good time.
The thing about zombie movies it that they are very apt for metaphors. I’ve seen the original Night Of Living Dead many times, and I saw it right after Katrina, when people were being shot in the streets being mistaken for looters. The idea that you can’t trust anyone is at the core of the zombie scenario, and I think we live it these days.
I agree with Wookie, too. All of the old and new violence you each mention are real and terrifying, and thanks to the TV and now the internet, streamed into our homes. We come up with ever more psychological defenses against a real war of terror.
PS I cannot tell you hard I laughed at myself about Bath Salts. I have this peppermint bath salt thing for sore muscles and I was staring at it wondering how people could snort it and why it works. I also am one of those hippie freaks that sprays pH balanced saltwater up my nose every day for my sinuses, so I was trying to connect the two somehow.
That’s so classic that I’m now the mom that has no idea what drugs are actually drugs and what people are talking about.
I was having a good day (it’s the end of a 4-day work week, Friday, payday) until I came upon this story.
Yeah — I’d heard about it, but had avoided the details. The very specific and gory details. But you know how it is — one story leads to another, news feed style, which led to the story of the guy in Maryland who ate his roomate’s heart & brain, which led to the recent story about the guy who stabbed himself & threw his instestines at the cops (?!?!) and, finally, the story about Luka Magnotta, the kitten-killing gay porn actor and (alleged) ice-pick killer cannibal.
There is a video associated with that final story, available for viewing on the internets and, much like 2 Girls, 1 Cup, it can’t be unseen, no matter how much you want it to go away. Two words of advice: Just don’t.
I’m reminded of the “good old days”, nearly 25 years ago, when Jane’s Addiction had a song (“Ted, Just Admit It…”) from their “Nothing’s Shocking” album. The album cover is a picture of a sculpture of a pair of nude female conjoined twins sitting on a sideways rocking chair with their heads on fire. Yeah. Anyway, some of the lyrics in this song go like this –
“Every half an hour
Someone’s captured and
The cop moves them along…
It’s just like the show before
The news is
Just another show
With sex and violence”
And now I wonder, almost EVERY day, What the fuck is wrong with people??
Nothing’s shocking, indeed.
I don’t want to play anymore.
The zombie genre feeds (no pun intended) on many people’s unconscious stereotypes about “the masses” or “the great unwashed” and the implied contrast with individualism.
Notice how zombies tend to be shown in brainless, stupid, undifferentiated mobs, which is frankly the way many people today think about the audience for modern-day advertising. No one ever thinks advertising really works on a person with brains, like me, only on those really stupid masses of people out there. I would never fall for such simple-minded commercials, “but you know there are people out there who do.”
I suspect in some cases the zombie meme is an indirect critique of brainless mass-media consumer culture. Then again, I’m an overthinking lefty sort.
You could also see it as a sign of anxiety that Americans have about their diet. The way we eat today is pretty mindless and disgusting in a lot of ways.
What could be clearer as a sign that society today has an unmet desire to be more mindful about life? These are stories where people are actually calling out for more brains!
P.S. Bath salts, eh? I drank Mr. Bubble one time, and nothing remotely like this happened to me. At least, not that I remember. Am I doing it wrong?….
But see, I don’t mind the zombie thing being brought up about our society as a whole, but I don’t like that people are doing creepy shit relating to this attack, which was between two human beings.
And it’s a bigger social issue: a Black man whose life is destroyed (and ultimately ended) because of drugs. A man who was someone’s son, had friends and people who cared about him. And he’s just one of such a huge number of Black men that no one gives a shit about because he’s part of a population that is rapidly becoming less and less visible.
And it happened to one of the most invisible and dehumanized populations: Homeless men. We see Ronald Poppo on the street and he’s barely more than an animal.
That’s why this story matters and why dehumanizing (zombifying) them is not funny. Because it’s a giant neon arrow pointing saying, “LOOK HERE! THIS IS WHAT’S HAPPENING TO THESE POPULATIONS OF MEN IN OUR SOCIETY!”
Will we pay attention?
What a gruesome story!….I must admit I was curious but wincing when I read about it and saw one of the pictures….
Even more shocking is that the victim was a graduate of Stuyvesant HS “64 (the same class that graduated Dick Morris and Len Berman)….I have worked with the homeless and the mentally ill; it’s so sad to see people reduced to such depths…I don’t much more about Ronald Poppo’s history but that maybe that would make an interesting article of how such a bright young teenager could descend into the vortex of mental illness and homelessness…[Weren't many mentally ill patients de-institutionalized during the 80's?]
Oh, and thank you for showing the yearbook photo. Poppo was a very handsome man, and that humanizes him so much.
The drug “bath salts” are not the same as the scented bath salts sold at CVS and WalMart. The drug kind are sold at liquor stores and mini marts. the DEA instituted a temporary ban on the chemicals used to make “bath salts” last year.
Yeah, I was just laughing at myself up above (as was someone else) for thinking they were the same. I knew they were over-the-counter, but I didn’t realize that they were something different. I assumed some kids had found a certain kind with a certain chemical could get them high.
PS People DO still get high from “huffing” which happens with products many of us DO have at home, so it wasn’t that much of a stretch!
Yeah I was confused too the first time I heard about it. I wonder if anyone has ever bought the drug “bath salts” accidentally and used them in the bath? That would be bad!
Interesting and weird little primer on “Bath Salts” (did you know they’re also called “Meow Meow”?) including a bunch of people who’ve taken it talking about how much it f’ing sucks to come down from, and not worth the high.
http://jezebel.com/5914694/this-is-your-brain-on-bath-salts-what-its-like-to-do-the-scary-drug-du-jour?utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
Very well said, I agree 100%. I’ve noticed a few others taking a stand on it too.
I’d heard of Meow meow, but not bath salts. Generally speaking I don’t take powders from strange people and put them in my body.
Regarding the interpretation of zombie movies: I think it’s interesting to look at the psychological implications of horror movies, but zombies are a bit of a wild card for me. They have a general popularity that has lasted several decades now, so it’s unlikely to be specific to a particular political atmosphere. They’re one of those things that you can tag onto any political theory and they’ll probably fit in somewhere, like modern day Templars.
I suspect the appeal is alot more basic: All the stories feature a fresh start, where the protaginist lives out a Robinson Crusoe style scenario with abundant resources and a convenient soft target to fend off. Even if we lived in a perfectly balanced society we’d probably still watch zombie movies and dream about our ultimate zombie shack.
I have to disagree. Zombies were not very big in the 80s or 90s, in which most horror movies centered around the mad slasher. The real upswing in zombie movies came with 28 Days Later, which can be read as a response to 9/11, not just in the idea that no one can be trusted but the disorientation that came in that initial time period after 9/11. The movies that followed have less political significance, but the amped up violence can be related to the endless war on terror.
I kept debating whether to comment, as Syria came up and thats a touchy subject (IMO).
Bath salts were popular here in Northeast PA last year and legislation was quickly passed in mine and surrounding counties to outlaw its sale. It was mostly sold at Convenience stores and users were almost always addictive and experienced violent paranoia. They are not actual bathing products and real bath salts do not contain the chemical that causes the high or the paranoia and violent behavior. Users were said to experience intense heat also and they would strip naked to deal with it.
The zombie craze has of course been a popular apocolyptic fantasy, increasing in popularity in recent years, I think. The people making the jokes are insensitive to the fact that these are real live humans, disengaged from society or not. I think the vast majority of the jokesters are immature youth who aren’t yet contemplating societal issues, or, as I agree with ‘wellokay’, they are part of the ‘mass/collective/thought’ following sheeple who follow trends and don’t exactly think freely the majority of the time. I think its true that black people are unbalancedly prejudiced against in our justice system. Non-violent crimes (drug possession or distribution, mainly) should not be punished with prison sentences, our system is over-inundated with these types of crimes and I think drug use should be legal anyway, though greatly regulated (like alchohol and tobacco).
Finally, since it was brought up, my note on Syria is this: We should stay the hell out, not police the world and don’t make decisions based on biased media coverage. The reasons we went into Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lybia were purely based on greed (follow the money trails) and not to “cure” those countries of social injustices. If the USA cared about social injustice that much, we would have more than a few special forces teams in South Africa and the many other countries that are ruled by warlords but do not have the resources that America values. We are merely ‘helping’ Syria because it creates a great deal of unrest in Iran’s final lasting partner in the middle east. The crimes are being committed by militia’s and are not directed by the government. Even the media is careful to say “pro-government militia’s” and not Assad’s forces. As far as I can tell, seeing as I’m not there and unwilling to accept biased mainstream media, Assad is battling an insurgency of rebels and not his law abiding citizens. By extending our reach and policing the world, the USA is creating more enemies than friends and weakening our country by stretching our security forces so thinly and against the wishes of its own populous. If we kept our military only for defense, as the Constitution had intended, the money we spend to support the military industrial complex could be better spend to fix our education system, dispel hunger, rebuild our infrastructure, and send us to mars, with plenty left over to buy everyone an icecream sundae!
I must be some sort of naïve civil liberties freakazoid, because I am very uneasy about the idea that an executive agency like the DEA or an Attorney General can just declare a substance illegal. That’s someone unelected and not part of a legislative body essentially making something against the law that had not been illegal before. Presumably, of course, this unilateral action is for our own good and we don’t need all that delay that comes from drafting an actual law. Allow me to raise the classic slippery slope argument here – where does this end?
Apparently the U.S. Attorney General has the legal power to temporarily place substances on the Schedule I Controlled Substances list when there is an imminent threat to public health or safety, but it can only be temporary. Eventually Congress has to act? Here’s more on the legal background
http://www.whitehouse.gov/ondcp/ondcp-fact-sheets/synthetic-drugs-k2-spice-bath-salts
Also
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/06/everything-you-ever-wanted-know-about-bath-salts-were-afraid-google/53052/
” I am very uneasy about the idea that an executive agency like the DEA or an Attorney General can just declare a substance illegal.”
You’re about 50 years too late. This is how the controlled substances act has worked since the 1960s. Congress wrote the law to say “We delegate to the holder of this office the power to determine which substances are legal and which are illegal.”
Congressional delegation of power is actually a pretty rich subject in constitutional law, but the short version of modern jurisprudence is “sometimes we just need things taken care of quickly, and that can only happen through delegation, so we’ll allow it.”
The delegation becomes impermissible if there’s overstep with respect to checks and balances (the Schechter Poultry case is still controlling law with respect to what happens when congress attempts to cede its power to the president, allowing him to rule by decree: it’s a no-no.) But so long as the law is written so that congress says “We are okay, in advance, with whatever this guy decides…” and there’s still separation of powers (and the President controls DEA appointments, so he has a “check”) then it’s accepted law, and has been for at least 5 decades.
” What do you guys think? Is making jokes about Zombies in reference to a man being brutally attacked okay?
Is there a way to make light of something so horrible that doesn’t disrespect the victims and the survivors?”
I’ve never bought into holier-than-thou style arguments, so it’s difficult for me to really believe that there’s anything morally wrong about these sorts of jokes.
I can’t help but wonder if it’s because of who I am. As a white-hetero-male who happens to be short, I get made fun of publicly every day. Ads make fun of me for being male. Sitcoms think its hilarious whenever the short guy is made uncomfortable (indeed there are comedians that have made entire careers out of this). Jezebel makes fun of me every day for being white, male, and/or hetero in their “hilarious” articles.
Is being white/male/hetero/short a tragedy? Definitely not. But it’s also difficult to care about anyone who complains “You shouldn’t make fun of this, it’s over the line!” when your very identity is made fun of every day by popular culture (I’m also in law school, so it’s hard to believe I’ve chosen a profession which will be free from insult).
More importantly, despite being regularly made fun of, I like to believe that I’m relatively well adjusted. I remember when a coworker told a particularly harsh joke about me a few years back, and it honestly didn’t phase me. I only remember the situation because I couldn’t understand why everyone else suddenly got so hushed: it was clear that they thought some line had been crossed. Yet as the butt of the joke, I didn’t really see a problem. Today I really don’t even remember the joke so much as not understanding why others felt there was a “line” in the first place.
Personally, I believe myself to be a better person for it: petty “behind the back” remarks just aren’t worth getting worked up over, so I just don’t get worked up over them. It’s incredibly liberating: I can remember getting worked up about this stuff in middle school, and it felt awful, with tons of negative emotions, and such. There’s no question that I’ve grown happier ever since I began to realize that getting upset over humor just isn’t worth it.
If my mother had passed away and you came up with a “Mike and his dead mom” meme, I most likely wouldn’t care. Maybe that makes me dead inside. Who knows? I know that my life has improved ever since these sorts of things stopped bothering me, and I’d highly recommend the improvement to anyone else who is interested.
I’m 23 years old and therefore at least one half of the “immature youth” Gordon referenced. Probably both halves. As such, thought I might throw in my two cents here. In some ways, Gordon’s stereotype does ring true: I’m not particularly bothered by these jokes.
Tonight, before I saw this piece, I was reminded of this story when I was tricked into viewing Ronald Poppo’s mauled face (not fucking cool, by the way) on Twitter. I turned to my younger sister and asked if she had heard about the guy who got his face eaten in Florida, and she hadn’t. I was blurry on many of the details when I told the story. I thought the feasting man was on cocaine. I thought, but was not sure, the mauled man was homeless. I did not include – nor did I know – the races of either party (the photo certainly did not shed any light to this end). I didn’t really care about the details as I told the story. I told it for the novelty of what had happened, and yeah, I think I chuckled a bit.
Truth is, I still don’t particularly care about these details since I’ve learned them. This will sound forced now, but I DO care about the homeless and find it tough not to give to them what cash or change I have as I pass. In fact, I find it hard to believe that the average person “sees Ronald Poppo on the street and he’s barely more than an animal,” as you’ve commented, Joanna. Right or wrong, I feel more compassion toward a homeless man I pass on the street than someone who’s cleaned up. I don’t think I’m alone here. The reason I don’t care to know Ronald Poppo was homeless was because, to me, this story doesn’t represent anything larger. Had Poppo been living in a one-bedroom, had he been clean shaven with smoothed hair, I think the blogosphere (meme-osphere?) would still crack jokes a-plenty.
This is a man eating a man. Which is fucking sick. But it’s one man eating one man. As some have gotten at in the comments before me, the country tends to latch on to these crazy stories. There are bigger fish to fry.
No, just no, zombie jokes promote zombie culture.