Mulling over the answer made me think about the couple dozen or so desperate or simply fed up folks who succeed in tossing themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge each year, making for a splashy exit. Filmmaker Eric Steel has recently created a brouhaha, having tricked the Golden Gate National Recreation Area into allowing him to film the jumpers under the guise of making a movie about the "the grandeur" of the bridge. In response to Steel's real intentions, San Francisco City Supervisor Tom Ammiano said, "It's creepy. Whatever the intention of the film, you can't help but think of a snuff film." Yet Steel considers it, "a movie about the human spirit in crisis." Is it one, the other, or both?

In 1993, Jerry Herron published a book called Afterculture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History, which is an accurately catchy title for a postmodernist theory book. I keep coming back to "the humiliation of," and I don't quite know what to do with it. It enters my mind in each of the above anecdotes, and I realize that in instances where it should be seemingly obvious, I don't always know for whom to feel sorry, yet perhaps more importantly, I am certain that I wanna feel sorry for someone.

For instance, should we have any amount of sympathy for the man who caused the commuter wreck, or is that misplaced energy? The unauthorized filming of would be and successful suicides is indeed creepy. But is it truly wrong? I'm asking, 'cause I really don't know.

Now here's a leap. I know the original Moral Majority was dissolved in 1989, but 14 years later we're witnessing a resurrection: The Moral Majority Coalition with Jerry Falwell at the helm again. I don't think they've made much of a splash just yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if this turns out to be a sleeper movement. As a friend recently opined in comments posted on this blob, "We now live in a contemporary puritan society where the only acceptable viewpoint is a Christian one." To which I add, the question "What Would Jesus Do?®" is both registered and a fashion statement.The more morality is used as an acceptable excuse or mission statement these days, the more I realize I have no idea what it is. Sure I have my own personal morality; but the morality of the collective? In addition to being subjective (eye of the beholder), morality is as much a matter of context. We can easily mourn the victims, but can we as easily define them?