"The Pain Merchants" is, I believe, a short story I read in the sixties or seventies but I'm coming up dry on searching for it. There are two books with the same name but one was published in 2011 and the other in 2014, the former by Jack McDonald and the latter by Janice Hardy.
Note: McDonald uses quite a bit of relatively hard-core black slang. It didn't sound so convincing so I'm not sure what he thought he was doing. Maybe he's not black and was just guessing but D.H. Lawrence, he ain't. Lawrence's use of the dialect of the lower working class in England is stunning and I've referred to that multiple times.
The premise was television or some futuristic alternative was used to present pain, much like today but more honestly. There's a huge business in vicarious pain and the leader of the outfit was making the big bucks on the suffering.
There was some kind of reversal and the leader ended up as the one feeling the pain ... to the thunderous applause of the audience. Someone else was running the show now and it must go on.
It's possible I imagined that and it never happened but I don't think so. My memory of such things is usually excellent so it's puzzling.
Maybe I should write the story myself as CNN's lust for plane crashes is a case study.
Note: McDonald uses quite a bit of relatively hard-core black slang. It didn't sound so convincing so I'm not sure what he thought he was doing. Maybe he's not black and was just guessing but D.H. Lawrence, he ain't. Lawrence's use of the dialect of the lower working class in England is stunning and I've referred to that multiple times.
The premise was television or some futuristic alternative was used to present pain, much like today but more honestly. There's a huge business in vicarious pain and the leader of the outfit was making the big bucks on the suffering.
There was some kind of reversal and the leader ended up as the one feeling the pain ... to the thunderous applause of the audience. Someone else was running the show now and it must go on.
It's possible I imagined that and it never happened but I don't think so. My memory of such things is usually excellent so it's puzzling.
Maybe I should write the story myself as CNN's lust for plane crashes is a case study.
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