The uses of tragedy:

...There were expressions of outrage, profound sorrow, and regret...

...The causes have been sanctified, the feeling is clean and bracing, and it presents an exciting alternative to our daily fog and boredom...

...A proper response is difficult enough without using tragedy as a means to partisan political ends...

...It will use this tragedy to beef up its MX and Pershing deployment plans, to push for increased defense spending and to make our own intrasigence on defense issues seem reasonable...

...The differences and similarities don't matter at all to the murdered parties, of course, whose opinions vanished in a ball of fire the moment someone took military orders and power-paranoia more seriously than the existence of other human beings...

...That scares me even more than the possibility that it is not...

...The holy quiver in Ronald Reagan's voice might really be heartfelt...

...JOHN GARVEY...

...The media never asked such questions, which is fine with the government: this whipped-up national sentimentality is just what the doctor ordered when you are worried, as governments always deserve to be, that people might be watching your hands a little too closely and too coolly...

...There is no argument to be made for Russia's action, which is every bit as dreadful as the Reagan administration says it is...

...It is true that in 1973 Time called the Israeli action indecent...

...survivors said no warning shots had been fired...

...Never mind the worst uses ego can make of both clean-feeling passions, further strengthening our most encysted forms of violence and projected self-hatred...

...The weirdly symbiotic relationship between the three is most apparent at times when rare dramatic crises call for instant responses...

...We are desperate not to be what we ordinarily are, and an incident at the personal, social, or international level can serve - until it collapses - as a distraction...

...Everyone's regrets were phrased in civil and measured tones...

...What part of us reacts this way...

...To feel clearly right, and to feel that they (the "they" changes, depending on our current state of mind, our predicament) are clearly wrong, is not only to feel that we are justified and righteous, inaccurate as that feeling may be all by itself...

...Israel did apologize, and eventually paid $3 million in compensation...

...And this appeals to something deep in the people who need to use incidents like this as a sort of moral dipstick to see how good and committed they are - and how cheaply they buy that feeling...

...silence about its own spy-plane flight in the vicinity of the Korean plane, for example - but the point I want to make here concerns the destructive use of public opinion and popular passion...

...Confess: you felt in some usually hidden part of yourself at least a slight leaping of the heart, an excitement, when you heard the news of the Korean tragedy...

...The most intriguing difference is in the way the incident was handled by the American government, the news media, and the populace...

...When the men of the Pueblo were imprisoned in North Korea, America, for all you saw about it on the media, remained at liberty...

...But Carter, perhaps worried about his own wimpy image and the sense that America was powerless, made hash of the already terrible Iranian situation by blundering in a crude military way, and a nation which had lost Vietnam and which had backed the fallen Shah felt that here, at least, it could vent all sorts of spleen and feel righteous...

...Well, the United States didn't encourage its allies to cancel all El Al flights, nor did it use the incident to underscore claims that Israel was a uniquely evil government or to shore up its own hawkish defense position...

...both magazines spoke of murder and atrocity...

...This incident, on the other hand, is played for all the Manichean thrills possible...

...Its main recommendation is its promise that things will be different...

...Outrage is an emotion which sweeps through us like a strong wind through a neglected and cluttered house - it contains a promise of cleansing...

...The return of the men of the Pueblo was greeted with relief...

...administration is after other fish...

...It plays no small part in our political lives, but we act as if it were nonexistent...

...Take the seizure of the Pueblo and the taking of American hostages in Iran...

...But America was held hostage in Iran...

...Nationalist anger feels the same way...

...All of us enjoy the feeling of being unambiguously in the right, and when someone insults your mother the anger is plainly the clean, wholesome sort...

...Israel said at first that the pilot of the downed plane had deliberately ignored radio queries and warning shots...

...but there was about our reaction to that incident nothing so breathless and apocalyptic - or, more important, so self-righteous - as our handling of this one...

...The principles involved in both incidents are the same: it is clearly not acceptable to shoot civilian planes out of the air, even where national paranoia is either a habit or is founded in reasonable assumptions about your enemies - and the argument could be made that this is true in varying degrees of both Israel and the USSR...

...And what is the proper response when the offending power first stalls, fails to tell the whole truth, and immediately reacts with what can best be described as an attitude which comes down to "We are sorry, but...

...The covers of Time and Newsweek both featured Korean flight 007...

...The pilot, it turned out, had not acted with the deliberation the first Israeli versions of the story suggested, but had been genuinely confused...

...The latest tragedy in the history of nation-states versus human beings occurs in a hair-triggered nuclear world which is still, as the USSR has shown so callously, founded on human passion, confusion, and ineptitude...

...Of several minds: John Garvey THE USES OF TRAGEDY POPULAR PASSION & SELF-DECEPTION WHAT SHOULD a government do when an unarmed civilian passenger plane is shot out of the sky for having committed no crime greater than having strayed into the airspace of an enemy power...

...When Israeli jets shot down a Libyan 727, killing 106 of its 113 passengers, we expressed our deep regret, but pledged to continue to work for peace between Israel and Egypt, a country which had expressed immediate outrage at the downing of a flight on its way from Tripoli to Cairo...

...There are other considerations - the initial U.S...

...But the reactions which followed, in Israel and internationally, are instructive...

...horrible them out to kill off innocent everybody else...

...There are important differences between the 1973 tragedy and the one which has most recently occupied our attention...

...The differences in the reactions to both incidents reveal less about the incidents than about the nation's current reading of itself...

...I was about to say that politicians and media take advantage of and pander to this hole in the self, and of course they do...

...and it will do this hoping that no one pays much attention to the similar action taken by an ally, and our own very dissimilar reaction...

...But the scarier fact is that there is no wisdom or canniness or even clearheaded manipulation anywhere here, since politicians and reporters are as caught up in self-deception as the rest of us...

...it is to set one's present dull, muted, unfocused existence aside in favor of one which promises to be clean and different...

...Time's cover story in the 1973 issue which covered the Israeli action was about Carlos Castaneda, author of a series of books for the Oh Wow set, and Newsweek's cover dealt with the high cost of eating...

...They dump Russian vodka down the toilet and feel good about it...

...But the U.S...

...We do not like to face this fact in a democracy, but something very ugly can be close beneath the surface of many public passions...

...The government goes into a moral swivet, Reagan and Kirkpatrick and Shultz all taking what is obviously the side of the angels, while the press pants after The Story...

...When the Pueblo was captured by the North Koreans our government, after dithering awhile, admitted that it was a spy ship, lied an apology, and got the men back alive...

...The return of the hostages from Iran led us into an orgy of national self-congratulation (it wasn't at all clear for what), and there were countless smarmy editorials about how we could at last feel good about ourselves...

...There are other interesting cases of similar incidents and dissimilar reactions...

...People who are trained from an early age to identify themselves with the nation can react even more stupidly, since a reaction to a national slight can be made to seem noble and self-sacrificing, even where it is based on extreme wrong-headedness...

...But the difference is one of degree, not of kind...