Notes on Tragedy

Contrary to the common use of the term in our degraded times, where every stubbed toe is a "tragedy," the essence of tragedy lies in its inevitability. It may be that the inherent tragedy in representative government is that the representatives must lie repeatedly to their constituencies, making promises they cannot keep in order to be elected and re-elected.

The real damage is that the false promises comprise a secular Slough of Despond, in which any common regard for society is lost.......

"He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions."

- Thomas Jefferson

Talking About Things

We need to talk about things, make lists of things. Adjectives were a useful device for describing those things, back when our word-hoard of the most extreme of those parts of speech were not loosed within 30 seconds of talking about anything.

Tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, end of days, zombie apocalypse -to name a few, but not to exclude wrecks, collisions, collapses, (multiple) shootings all now instantly provoke a list of all extant adjectives that can possibly pertain to (X).

Exciting, terrifying, horrifying, devastating, amazing......as with most types of words, English provides an abundant, but not unlimited, array of synonyms. Now they are immediately gone, employed as a compulsory litany whenever a qualifying event occurs. And the bar is set very, very low.

Thus, an F1 tornado that disassembles a trailer in an Oklahoma mobile home park is placed at the same level as a Chilean earthquake that kills 800 and moves a city ten feet, or an Indonesian tsunami that kills as many people as Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

It is as if some thoughtless egalitarian impulse is at work here, that in the end denies us what adjectives are supposed to provide- a sense of degree.

I propose a ten year moratorium on adjectives, a prescription which I will doubtless violate....with extreme prejudice.

Vital Data and Postscript

VITAL DATA

"There are two restaurants here and a tearoom, two bars, one bank, three barbers, one with a green shade with which he blinds his window, two groceries, a dealer in Fords, one drug, one hardware, and one appliance store. several that sell feed, grain, and farm equipment. an antique shop. a poolroom. a laundromat. three doctors. a dentist, a plumber. a vet. a funeral home in elegant repair the color of a buttercup. numerous beauty parlors which open and shut like night-blooming plants. a tiny dime and department store of no width but several floors. a hutch, homemade, where you can order, after lying down or squirming in, furniture that's been fashioned from bent lengths of stainless steel tubing, glowing plastic, metallic thread, and clear shellac. an American Legion Post and a root beer stand. little agencies for this and that: cosmetics, brushes, insurance, greeting cards and garden produce -anything - sample shoes - which do their business out of hats and satchels, over coffee cups and dissolving sugar. a factory for making paper sacks and pasteboard boxes that's lodged in an old brick building bearing the legend OPERA HOUSE, still faintly golden, on its roof. a library given by Carnegie. a post office. a school. a railroad station. fire station. lumberyard. telephone company. welding shop...and spotted through the town from one end to the other in a line along the highway, gas stations to the number five."

- William H. Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968)

.....and from the same author, in only a slightly different place: "Things have changed since then, but in none of the respects mentioned."

....and I would add: "Except- less of everything described, none of some, and the only addition, which is of questionable merit, of two meth labs."