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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Legal Affairs: The Case Against the Attacks on Bush's Case for War (February 12, 2003) Some ordinarily astute Bush critics have lapsed into arguments that seem neither astute nor logically tenable. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: Still Asking, 'Why Now?' (February 12, 2003) Less than one-third of the American public says it considers Iraq an immediate threat. By William Schneider. Wealth of Nations: Anerica Is An Empire, It Had Better Start Acting As One (February 12, 2003) America's challenge is to run the empire well, but that means first acknowledging its existence. By Clive Crook. Media: The War Glut (February 3, 2003) When the question is war, the news trade's most essential job, after reporting facts, is making sense of them. By William Powers. Social Studies: Stop Whining, America, and Get Serious About Smallpox (February 3, 2003) America's strategic vulnerability to smallpox is clear and present, even if the virus itself is not. By Jonathan Rauch. Legal Affairs: Do We Want Another 100 Years of Racial Preferences? (February 3, 2003) The hard question is whether the justices should ban all racial preferences in university admissions. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: Writing a How-To Textbook on Losing (February 3, 2003) Israel's venerable Labor Party went out of its way to do everything wrong. By William Schneider. More from National Journal. |
Media 
Tragedy Becomes UsWe don't just report the horror of tragedy anymore, we wallow in it by William Powers ..... News stories far and wide have noted the eerie familiarity of the space shuttle story. The obvious parallel was the Challenger catastrophe: "Not Again," rues Newsweek on its current cover. Some compared the story, and the feelings it aroused, to 9/11. Others went further afield. "There are the real tragedies of the 20th century that come to mind immediately," a worker at Edwards Air Force Base told the Los Angeles Daily News. "The Titanic, World War I and II, Kennedy's assassination, and the Challenger. Now in the 21st century we have September 11 and the Columbia—and we're just beginning." So we are. And if anything has become clear lately, it's that the spectacularly fatal events we call tragedies are no longer what they used to be: isolated incidents that came along every once in a while, briefly shocking us out of our normal routine. Today, thanks to the media, tragedy is the normal routine. It's the central reference point of modern culture, the cynosure around which all significant public conversation and mass storytelling revolves. If you have any doubt, take a look at the news of the last week. Many commentators observed that when the Columbia story broke, it had a strange, out-of-the-blue quality. Unlike 17 years ago, when the Challenger was lost during its widely followed launch, much of the public wasn't even aware this shuttle had gone up. But they were aware it came down. Why? If these astronauts were great heroes just for going into space, as the president and countless others have said over the last few days, then why wasn't it a big deal when they launched? Because the only heroism that matters anymore is tragic heroism, acts of derring-do that end not in happiness and victory, but in sadness and violent death. The public can't get enough of this kind of tragedy, and when it happens, the media meet the demand with coverage that is not just overwhelming but obsessive, often verging on the fetishistic. Think of those endless TV shots of the bits of debris roped off with yellow emergency tape, the modern equivalent of black funeral crape. Of those morbid images of the astronauts in their final days, mugging, waving, turning somersaults in what would become their death vault. Of The New York Times reporting on its front page about Texans finding "a person's charred and badly disfigured upper body," "a torso in the road," "a charred leg." If that wasn't enough for you, the story noted that "even small children stumbled across human remains in backyards, in hayfields, and on roadsides," and one of these kids was "really devastated" by it. Other outlets reported on school kids who felt connected to the tragedy because they had studied the astronauts, and now were studying their deaths. We don't just report the horror of tragedy anymore, we wallow in it. At one point this week, every time you signed on to America Online you got a chance to read the last e-mail of Columbia astronaut Laurel Clark, which, if you clicked to it, appeared beneath a radiant photo of the doomed woman. Clark's final line: "I hope you could feel the positive energy that beamed to the whole planet as we glided over our shared planet. Love to all, Laurel." Read in retrospect, it was at once ironic and macabre—the hybrid tone that is the chord of this age. Time ran a huge photo, spread across two pages, of a dozen residents of Nacogdoches, Texas, gathered around a mysterious metal sphere, identified as perhaps "a tank of liquid propellant from Columbia." It's an unforgettable photo, partly because it has a sacred quality. The people appear to be in some kind of trance as, from a safe distance, they pay homage to this orb of tragedy. What is it about violent tragedy that's made it the centerpiece of the communal life we share through the media? There are a few obvious factors. One is simple overload. The news universe has become so huge and chaotic that only the most stunning stories—the ones that, like a car accident on the highway, you can't not watch—have the power to break out of the pack and bring everything to a halt. Another factor is that, thanks to terrorism, violence is now all around us. Not long ago, it would have seemed inappropriate and even offensive for a president to graphically discuss torture, rape, and murder in a State of the Union speech. Today, it's entirely on point. One other factor is entertainment. We are so used to seeing simulated violence in movies and on television that when the real thing comes along it feels familiar, like a rerun of events we've already lived, last weekend at the cineplex. Hollywood has turned us into violence aficionados, a society that not only doesn't flinch from gruesome death, but seeks it out. And we keep upping the ante. The most telling post-Columbia news may have been a small story, reported in the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere. Paramount Pictures has decided, in the wake of the shuttle disaster, to change the trailer for a new action movie, The Core, to delete an image of a shuttle-like vehicle. According to the Times, this movie "includes such scenes as the Golden Gate Bridge collapsing amid mass environmental chaos that erupts when the Earth's core stops rotating, threatening to destroy the planet." The studio said it would change only the trailer, not the catastrophic film itself, and it will not delay the scheduled March 28 release. And really, why delay it? By then, we'll be ready for more.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. He recently spent three months in Japan as a Japan Society Fellow, studying the role of reading in Japanese life. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2002 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. | [an error occurred while processing this directive] | ||
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