Like “Shotshow,” but with one less “o”and an added “i”

Netflix has recently added the documentary “Fyre: the Greatest Party That Never Happened.” If you are unaware, it’s about the disastrous “Fyre Festival” in April/May 2017.

On one hand, this is a cautionary tale about the twin evils of over-promising and outright fraud. It’s a serious lesson that anyone who wants to put on some sort of conference, festival, party, whatever needs to understand, that you *have* to have your stuff figured out in advance.

On the other hand… the schadenfreude in this tale is overpowering. People getting ripped off and treated poorly is the sort of thing that, on the face of it, causes most people to feel sympathetic. But when the victims are  overwhelmingly young, attractive, rich enough to blow ten grand to go see a music festival… well, for whatever reason that sympathy flutters away and is replaced with evil laughter. *Especially* when those people are self-important status-oriented “influencers” whose lives revolve around the most trivial of trivialities. It’s also instructive to look at what happened with the festival goers who were blameless of fraud, but perhaps not blameless of being gullible: within *hours* many of them had devolved into theft and barbarism. It seems that being civilized – especially when that civilization has provided a nerf-like protection against any sort of unpleasantness – does not prepare one for chaos.