In part to assuage the "too soon" crowd that pops up when people talk about bad things, I waited 24 hours, but here goes:

When I heard about the Space Shuttle explosion yesterday afternoon, I had pretty much the same reaction I had when the Challenger blew up 17 years ago. This reaction was well expressed by a commenter at Eschaton going by candyboy; I don't agree with every word, but here's the key sentence:

"My feeling is that these astronauts should be mourned appropriately, which means neither more nor less than today's first seven auto accident victims."

Once I was in a class where a debate was going on about how the media deadens us to violence and tragedy, and my position on the topic suddenly crystallized in my head, and then out loud: That's true, and thank our lucky stars for it. What I meant was that, if you want to wait out the next 7 people in the world who you don't personally know dying, chances are you will have to wait about 7 seconds. Literally every second, someone somewhere in the world dies. Fortunately, our minds are such that we do not dwell on this fact, because if we did it would totally incapacitate us all the time. My totally untested hypothesis is that every once in a while a particular death or a particular group death catches our collective attention somehow--the Challenger, Princess Di, JFK (Sr. and, less explicably, Jr.), perhaps now the Columbia--and by engaging in a massive public outpouring of emotion, we colelctively wash away all that mourning that fails to go on for the countless hundreds, thousands, millions who go basically unmourned except by a handful oif people very close to them. Is this a good or a bad thing? I don't think so--I think it's just a thing. Ultimately, though, I personally cannot place any more (or less) value on the seven lives lost 200,000 feet above Nacogdoches than I can on the lives of seven poor people who died yesterday in Botswana, seven rich people who died yesterday somewhere in private hospitals, seven people listed in the obituary section of my local newpaper this morning who died within 30 miles of my house yesterday, seven people who died on the ground in Nacogdoches yesterday, etc. etc. etc. Maybe some people feel a little closer to them because six were Americans (2 dead Americans always seem to trump 1,000 dead foreigners on the news anyway), but I'm not wired that way.

The part of my brain ruined by grad school has some interesting questions, though, about comparative tragedy and how we deal with death as a culture. For instance, are seven deaths in one incident more tragic than seven scattered deaths? Is tragedy additive, geometric, or is there some other mechanism there? My favorite book on this subject (yes, I have a favorite book on comparative tragedy; I know, I should seek help) is Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life, which is a cultural history about the curious process by which events on European soil basically committed upon other Europeans has been incorporated into our national psyche as an American tragedy. He compares the DC Holocaust Museum to the notion of having a museum of the American slave trade in Berlin.

The most interesting bits to me are to watch how Novick traces a cultural change in which being a Holocaust victim in the late '40s through the mid '60s was seen as tragic but just one more obstacle to overcome like good Americans do (we don't dwell on tragedies, we move on), to a change whereby being a survivor literally becomes an identity that it is presumed cannot be put behind but will be carried through life and is ritually reenacted (the identity, not the Holocaust) by having the person speak and appear repeatedly as a "Holocaust survivor". But the most relevant bits to what I'm describing are efforts by America's Jewish community leaders to preserve the Holocaust as a unique tragedy; I'm not going to argue the merits of their point (OK, I am--if we're talking about all-time comparative tragedy, I give the title to Pol Pot's Cambodia, but the Holocaust is right up there of course), but what I found interesting was the attitude that Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, etc. could be horrifically awful, but not only could they not be AS awful as the Holocaust, but the comparison itself was insulting and possibly anti-Semitic.

What will be interesting to follow in the days to come is to see the effect the Columbia explosion has on our policy toward space. I am all in favor of continued space exploration if the case is made based on tangible benefits of scientific research and so forth, and if those benefits are placed in cost-benefit analysis with other federal funding decisions. But I don't like the idea of space exploration as adventure, competition, aspiration, etc.--at least not public funding of space exploration on that basis.

Tomorrow's entry should be more cheery, because frankly how could it not be?!?!