Welcome to the Golden Age of Grotesque. Friday evening Joseph Martin Luther Gardner was administered the lethal pinprick and sent off on his Farewell Ride for a murder he committed 16 years ago. He was the (un)lucky 40th recipient of the Injection in South Carolina since their reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976.

The case involved the rape and murder of a white woman after Gardner and two friends picked her up by offering her drugs in exchange for sex, defying for once and all the golden rule of not accepting candy from strangers. At some point things turned ugly, with some very feeble association to 400 years of white oppression and Gardner’s New Year’s resolution to kill a white person as retribution. The remaining details of the story can be filled in easily enough, and the Sugar Mob needn’t tarnish its pure pages with the filth of this or any homicide…

Yet Gardner, to whom many media outlets refer as Joseph M.L. Gardner for the sake of not tarnishing his middle initials’ namesake, stands in as a sad statement of the bizarre and misplaced sense of justice fostered by television and movies. Well, the whole media machine in general. The sort of HollywoodHostageTaking drama that titillates millions and regulates the flow of endorphins to the pleasure centres of viewers’ brains winds up having the unpleasant side effect of convincing backcountry vigilantes they can somehow right the wrongs of history by committing the exact same mistakes that led to the awful situation in the beginning.

The myopia spawned by Hollywood in this sort of retribution-murder is downright frightening, and earns its Grotesque christening by its precise lack of anything grotesque, soever. The simple fact of the case’s regularity and triviality points to the frightening fact that this entire Age has come to be characterized by the ‘playful homicide’ taught by video games, action movies, and war reporting that exploits euphemisms like Collateral Damage to describe the orphaning of helpless children and the widowing of loving wives.

And with regard to Gardner’s reasoning, “to kill a white woman as  retribution for slavery” is pushing hard on the ramparts of human understanding. Certainly, it’s not a stretch to comprehend how a person may foster general feelings of resentment toward the descendants of their ancestors’ oppressors, but going to the extreme measure of murdering a person on this account is alarming. Yet the alarm rings to show how regular such outrage has become in this world of ours.

And then, of course, the death penalty comes under fire by many who will argue that it condones the exact thing it punishes, by its very existence (this, I recognize, lies on the more philosophical end of the spectrum of a perpetual debate, which is heavily populated with zealots and pharisees of all stripes). In this instance, I will quietly sidestep the question of the acceptability of killing-for-killing, but will leave you off with a question to befuddle all, and flummoxthe mind to the point of malcontent:

If overdosing on heroin can kill a person, what happens when a person ODs on the lethal injection?