{"id":15385,"date":"2014-09-25T14:23:21","date_gmt":"2014-09-25T14:23:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/the-high-salt-diet\/"},"modified":"2014-09-25T14:23:21","modified_gmt":"2014-09-25T14:23:21","slug":"the-high-salt-diet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/the-high-salt-diet\/","title":{"rendered":"The high-salt diet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/stilleatingoranges.tumblr.com\/post\/98373060814\/the-high-salt-diet\" class=\"tumblr_blog\">stilleatingoranges<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><a class=\"tumblr_blog\" href=\"http:\/\/stilleatingoranges.tumblr.com\/post\/98373060814\">stilleatingoranges<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I left the experience with a sense that familiarizing and desensitizing ourselves to violence like this can turn us into zombies. Our lack of empathy and unwillingness to engage with those involved in tragedy stems from our comfort with the trauma those people are experiencing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Ashley Gilbertson, a war photographer for <em>Time<\/em>, recently was <a href=\"http:\/\/lightbox.time.com\/2014\/09\/15\/war-photographer-video-game\/\" title=\"A War Photographer Embeds Himself Inside a Video Game\">asked<\/a> to play and document <em>The Last of Us Remastered<\/em>. Thrust into the role of a violent killer, Gilbertson quickly melted down: a brief session left his \u201cvision blurred\u201d and his stomach in knots; and finally his mind \u201ccrashed out.\u201d The protagonists\u2019 zombielike indifference to the butchery around them baffled him. Yet, his own revulsion began similarly to dry up, even after he delegated the combat sequences to his assistant. Gilbertson concluded that his typical war photography is \u201can antitode to the type of entertainment this game represents\u201d, a way to wake up people accustomed to atrocity.<\/p>\n<p>In 1990, director Alan J. Pakula <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ew.com\/ew\/article\/0,,317861,00.html\" title=\"Ultraviolence?\">said<\/a>, \u201cMovie violence is like eating salt: the more you eat, the more you need to eat to taste it at all.\u201d By then, increasingly callous audiences had \u201cdeveloped an insatiability for raw sensation\u201d; and filmmakers had responded with works of ever worsening savagery. The fatal shotgun blast that heralded <em>The Last of Us<\/em> at E3\u00a02012\u2014a blast at which journalists <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/183134\/The_5_events_that_shook_the_video_game_industry_in_2012.php\" title=\"The 5 events that shook the video game industry in 2012\">cheered<\/a> like spectators at the Colosseum\u2014told an old story: transgression is normalized by repetition. Even the \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/stilleatingoranges.tumblr.com\/post\/90339051489\/edward-pistolhands\" title=\"Edward Pistolhands\">Edward Pistolhands<\/a>&ldquo; apathy in <em>The Last of Us<\/em>, which so disturbed Gilbertson, was preceded and enabled by a loss of empathy in society at large. A person is changed by her surroundings\u2014and no witness to brutality is unscathed.<\/p>\n<p><em>Still Eating Oranges<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>stilleatingoranges: stilleatingoranges: I left the experience with a sense that familiarizing and desensitizing ourselves to violence like this can turn us into zombies. Our lack of empathy and unwillingness to engage with those involved in tragedy stems from our comfort with the trauma those people are experiencing. Ashley Gilbertson, a war photographer for Time, recently [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-409","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15385\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}