I laughed at that, because it is funny/Bugs Bunny ironical

& then I thought of this here … & mass graves there …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpz102bDzH4

& pools of blood in slow moving water…& uniforms…

& dark-blue suits, red ties & lapel pins, & pipes  & drums

…& then I remembered why

we’re in :post-humorous America:

‘cause all the world’s a stage …

& just enough are happy to

keep us in a macabre playhouse

(theatre of war, attrition, cruelty; big bucks, big bucks, no whammies, …STOP…)

Almost everything we call “higher culture” is based on the spiritualization of cruelty, on its becoming more profound: this is my proposition. That “savage animal” has not really been “mortified”; it lives and flourishes, it has merely become—divine. What constitutes the painful voluptuousness of tragedy is cruelty; what seems agreeable in so-called tragic pity, and at bottom in everything sublime, up to the highest and most delicate shudders of metaphysics, receives its sweetness solely from the admixture of cruelty. What the Roman in the arena, the Christian in the ecstasies of the cross, the Spaniard at an auto-da-fe or bullfight, the Japanese of today when he flocks to tragedies, the laborer in a Parisian suburb who feels a nostalgia for bloody revolutions, the Wagnerienne who “submits to” Tristan and Isolde, her will suspended—what all of them enjoy and seek to drink in with mysterious ardor are the spicy potions of the great Circe, “cruelty.”