the wrong font

I HAVE A FOLDER ON MY COMPUTER NAMED “THE TRAGEDY FILES.” It contains examples of “tragedy” as it appears in reports of violent actions by police. The earliest is from September of 2018, but I stopped the collection the following year, as it was getting tiresome and rather pointless.

That doesn’t mean that use of the word has stopped, though. Just after deputy Sean Grayson killed Sonya Massey in her Springfield, IL, home on July 6, the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office released a statement that used it more than once.

So, what the hell—let’s dive in.

Here’s how the statement begins, with emphasis added:

First and foremost, my heart breaks for the family and friends of Sonya Massey. This is a tragic incident, and we mourn with them and the community. Immediately upon notification of the shooting, I contacted the Illinois State Police and asked them to conduct the investigation. This tragic incident deserved an independent, swift, and thorough review.

That’s two uses of “tragic” in the first four sentences, acting as an adjective for “incident.” (We’ll get to that word next time).

What does the word mean, exactly? “Tragedy” was defined by Aristotle, in his Poetics:

Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.

Notice that it’s an imitation of an action—a reflection on a mirror—and not the description of an actual one. In other words, it’s a theatrical term: the universe gets disjointed—”Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold“—and, despite the actions of a flawed protagonist (or perhaps because of them) it remains that way. (The opposite, of course, is comedy, which, we are told, always ends in a marriage.)

Granted, the meaning of the word has changed in general usage, and it now means something along the lines of, “A very sad occurrence.” Fair enough. Plus there is a certain world view that sees things as generally out of our control and that we’re basically just sinners in the hands of an angry God. Hey, at least that’s an ethos.

But it’s not what’s happening here. Instead, “tragedy” is deliberately wielded by interested parties who contrive to transform violent actions—sometimes their own—into random acts of the universe, outside of human agency and therefore outside the realm of redress. It’s the same move that gets made after mass shootings.

Beware the false comfort of managed abstraction. Know who’s calling something a “tragedy,” and why.