by Mark Morford

Created on: January 20, 2009

Everybody get bloody

Why do we so love images of brutal misery and pain?

I do not know you. I do not know your temperament or your cosmic calibration or what angle of disposition governs your very being. Not yet, anyway.

I do not know, therefore, whether or not your heart allows or enjoys or for some ungodly reason really, really loves to wallow in relentless images of human beings either bloody, exploded, weeping, dead, limbless, drowned, terrified, on fire, butchered or malnourished or maimed or otherwise suffering in searing, tragic pain in every corner of the world at all times everywhere.

Is that you? Are you salivating at the prospect of such a cruel pageant? Do you wish at all times to be surrounded by images of woe and distress and heartwarming defenestration? Because if so - and there must be quite a lot of you, really - have I got a photo montage for you. A few, actually.

I stumbled on such a pageant recently. It was, if I recall, about 800 photographs taken by assorted shooters from the Reuters new agency, all gathered into a little online flipbook of incredible, relentless agony and posted somewhere on Yahoo for your viewing and cringing pleasure. Do you want to see it? No? Good.

It was, they say, a photographic overview of 2008, one of a myriad of year-in-review galleries posted all over the Net this time of year from every news agency and blog and newspaper you can name, ostensibly the best and most striking pictures taken of this thing we call the human experiment.

I find that, while sometimes these media scrapbooks can indeed be touching and profound, more often than not they seem most interested in exploring what it means to have large portions of your flesh ripped from your body. Charming.

Here, apparently, is the endless reminder offered by such media yearbooks: Bleakness rules the world, with occasional relief provided by cute polar bears or dew-dripped flowers or people making out during some sort of holiday or festival or enormous party to which you weren't invited.

But mostly, it is disaster. Pain. Death. Corruption and landmines and torture, bloody stumps waving in the air like high-fives from the devil. It is mangled face after war-torn body after wailing widow and did I mention the blood and the blood and the blood? I used to think browsing those noxious "What do they look like now?" scrapbooks of aging celebs and former teen idols on lowbrow tabloid sites like TMZ or Gawker was depressing. Ha.

I know what you're thinking: This sounds exactly

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