The trouble with cautionary tales

So Pedro Ruiz’s death is a distant amusement for the rest of the world.

The wannabe Youtube star from Minnesota – a state where you can travel farther and see less – persuaded his girlfriend to shoot a gun into his chest, convinced a book would stop the bullet.

More than that, he was hopeful that the attention online would bring a measure of fortune as well as fame.

It killed him. Fame achieved, in dark circumstances. Fortune, not so much.

And now, rather than reaping the rewards of the more successful Jackass-style entertainers he surely becomes a potential nominee for one of the Darwin Awards, dispensed posthumously each year to people who are deemed to have chlorinated the collective gene pool, so to speak, by taking themselves out of it through an act of stupidity.

Maybe the smirks on the faces of the far-flung observers might fade just a tad when faced with the discomforting reminder that this teenage father, and his reluctantly persuaded girlfriend, were expecting their second child.

She now faces a manslaughter charge, which means she is left bereft, possibly facing prison, having killed the boy she loved... all to the sound of distant laughter and scorn.

We might rationalise that the attention serves a social purpose after all – it sends out a cautionary lesson.

There’s some truth to that. But we’ve long been living in a time when people will sell their psyches, let alone their dignity, for attention.

Many an inglorious reality show has demonstrated as much, equally capable of drawing entertainment from things going wrong as going right. Television audiences are surely used to the reminder that if you catch a stunt on camera, you can win money.

The producers will even add funny sound effects. Even when the pain or the risk is very real, we sanctify entertainment value and minimise any sense of collective responsibility.

Of course they wouldn’t dream of showing a pregnant teen actually killing her boyfriend as TV entertainment, though there’s increasingly a moisten-lipped interest when deathclips appear online.

The stakes are getting higher, especially now that the advent of smartphones mean the inherent temptations of devilry might be amplified by the sense that fame and reward might follow.

Dunderheaded, dangerous play stunts are becoming increasingly common – and dangerous when the sense of consequence is dispatched way into the background.

And when they go wrong, well, that’s the trouble. Cautionary tales are so less entertaining.

There’s always the next big, ridiculous piece of tomfoolery to reclaim our attention.