Aweek ago today, one of two things happened.
A terrible tragedy occurred, plain and simple.
Or, a terrible tragedy occurred, which served as yet more confirmation that life, the world order and the onward march of progress are disintegrating.
Call this the Uh-Oh Decade. The television, like a unlucky friend, seems to bring only bad news. The superstitious wonder what tyrannical force has it in for us. Those of a certain religious ilk hear the rumblings of Armageddon. Yesterday, the national terror alert was raised from yellow to orange, but perhaps it's more fitting that Congress has declared this the Year of the Blues (music, of course, but music of tragedy). Anxiety has become fatalism.
Even though the Columbia shuttle disaster has nothing to do with 9/11, the anthrax scare, the poor economy, the accounting scandals, the sniper killings or the impending war with Iraq, it seems of a piece.
Context is all. A tragedy in the shadows of other tragedies can't help but seem like proof of a trend. One person's negativism can reinforce another's. Northwest stay-at-home mother Laura Trivers, saw the Columbia explode last Saturday, went to a yoga class and told someone, "I don't think I can take anything else." Then she commiserated over lunch with her friend Andy Solomon, a normally optimistic guy, who said, "Nothing good has happened in the last two years."
In that instant, a story was being told. It's the story of America under a bad sign. And even though a manned shuttle mission can go awry during other periods, and has, the Columbia explosion feels appropriate to our time, like something that belongs in our dangerous, fragile new reality. The event is interpreted to fit the moment.
"When we have a new narrative introduced into our lives, what we do is take everything and conform it to the narrative," says Neal Gabler, an entertainment and cultural critic in Amagansett, N.Y.
Andy Solomon is a case in point. On the morning of the explosion, he assumed the worst when the words "Breaking News" flashed across his television screen. "That's kind of the mind frame that many Americans have been in since 9/11," he says, "that there's almost an expectation that major news, that major happenings in the world are bad things." Very bad. Naturally, the explosion reinforced his expectations.
Solomon, a nonprofit public affairs director, thinks now about what's reality and what's perspective. He wonders if he's selectively edited out whatever good news there's been in the last two years. He wonders if a really positive story -- "a small potential tragedy turning into a heroic piece of good news" -- could shake him out of his funk.
Like, perhaps, the nine coal miners saved from a flooded shaft in Pennsylvania last summer?
Solomon is flummoxed. "Was that during this period, since 9/11?" he asks.
The answer is only technically yes. Good news doesn't fit the paradigm of our darker America.
Consider negativity like the mythic snake eating its tail. When you're depressed, "you have a depressed filter," says Alexander Rich, a psychologist at the University of South Florida. "It primes your memory so you remember your feelings and things that have gone wrong and your regrets and things you're ashamed of."
You're more likely to feel helpless and give up on things. You have more difficulty solving problems. And even those who aren't depressed, Rich says, become more vigilant when a series of bad things happens, to prepare for the next bad thing. The metaphorical shoe dangles precariously.
"One thing goes wrong, most of us don't say, 'Ah, jeez.' " Gabler says. "Most of us wait for the next thing to go wrong because it somehow gives us shape to our bad luck."
We may continue to pay attention to the news or we may tune it out altogether. Charles Figley, a psychologist with Florida State University, says that in one of his classes he recently tried to get a conversation going about local and world events. He realized his students weren't reading the newspapers. One of them explained: "It's kind of like, I already know the headlines, and by reading the newspaper I just learn how bad it is," Figley recalls. Classic student apathy here seems like a sign of the times.
Gabler and cultural historian Steven Stark both believe that the media have focused on certain kinds of stories over the past two years, stories like last years' kidnappings and killings of children, which seemed to emphasize the prevalence and randomness of evil in our country. (Robert Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs doesn't buy this. "It's in the nature of the news media to focus on negatives," he says.)
In any case, mind-set is powerful. Paul Saffo, a director of the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Menlo Park, Calif., uses the phrase "unharmonic convergence" to describe how an event can fit into unrelated circumstances. "Did you ever wonder how Cortes and his band of 400 men conquered Mexico?" he asks. Cortes' arrival was interpreted by some as the coming of Quetzalcoatl, an Aztec god who was predicted to return at that time, and this made the Aztecs less prone to resisting the conqueror. They thought he was destiny.
The story that we tell ourselves about the Columbia disaster is a story about our times. In this interpretation, the shuttle turns out to be yet another dangerous phenomenon in a dangerous world, says Gabler. "Here is yet another event, yet another thing we can't control," he says.
We've had bad times before, of course, times when a series of major events seemed to pile onto our national psyche, creating a weighted feeling, a feeling like doom.
Consider the latter days of the Carter administration, as we stumbled through our so-called malaise. There was stagflation, and the growing sense that America was no longer King Midas but Midas's bad-luck cousin. Everything we touched turned to mud.
Cardigan-wearing, ineffectual-seeming Jimmy Carter became the explanation for our troubles, rightly or wrongly. Ronald Reagan became, as Stark puts it, our "good-luck charm." But those days were nothing compared with these, compared with the run of events that -- for now -- culminated in the shuttle disaster. We feel put upon. We feel singled out.
"I think it adds to this sense of . . . how much more can we collectively take?" says Trivers, Solomon's yoga-going friend.
"It does seem implausible when you begin to add it all up," says Peter Schwartz, a co-founder of California-based Global Business Network, which specializes in scenario planning for organizations. "If somebody had written it as thriller, you'd say, 'No.' "
How to explain the implausibility? As always, there is religion. Bush emphasized the spiritual side of the disaster in his remarks last Saturday and in his speech on Tuesday. He quoted four lines from Isaiah, he invoked "the Creator," and he told the astronauts' families they'd see their loved ones again "in God's own time."
Religion comforts because it explains. Hence what Saffo heard on the radio after the crash: "A Baptist guy, he was talking about this was God's message: 'Come back to earth, connect with me.' " Or the person who left this on an Internet message board: "I don't know if anyone has brought this up but the whole thing looks like an omen. There was an Israeli on board and the shuttle exploded over Palestine, Texas. Is God trying to tell us something?"
In considering interpretations, it helps to consider which God is being invoked. Some in the Middle East called the shuttle tragedy "divine retribution" for our country's stance against Iraq. God as a rhetorical device is like the sea -- owned by no one, claimed by everyone.
There are also the conspiracy theories. The desire to make sense of the inexplicable, combined with a generalized anxiety, is why some people immediately thought terrorists were at fault in the Columbia explosion.
Then there is the wholesale assigning of blame. Rena Gorlin, a copy writer at a Washington legal and business publishing company, says, "I'm one of those people who actually saw the end of the world when Bush was installed." Within that framework, everything fits: 9/11 (Bush didn't pay enough attention to bin Laden), the tension with Iraq (Bush's aggression), and the Columbia disaster (Bush could have anticipated it because of warnings about NASA's aging fleet). When Gorlin went into work last Monday, she spoke with a colleague of like mind.
Their thinking was, "Well, there goes another one," she says. "How can you cry anymore? . . . The world is going to [expletive] because of George Bush."
There are also superstitious explanations for why the shuttle tragedy happened now. "I think I'm aware on an intellectual level that it's just a bunch of coincidences, but now I think a part of me worries that it's karma," says Amy Keyishian, a freelance journalist in Brooklyn, N.Y. Perhaps, she speculates, "we've had it too easy . . . we don't deserve the blessings we've had."
As for Andy Solomon, he says that while he was upset by the news of the Columbia, he wonders if he would have been more emotional had the tragedy not come on the heels of the last two years.
"In some way, maybe that all girds you for additional bad news that comes along," he says.
This pessimism about the way the world is heading is out of keeping with his normally upbeat nature. He wonders and worries that this change in mind-set might be permanent. He thinks of older relatives who lived through the Depression, and the fact that no matter how financially secure they became in later years, they always live as if "the next depression is around the corner . . . wrapping up the two bites on their plate in the restaurant" to take home.
If the world suddenly went back to the way it was, Solomon wonders, would he, too?
? 2003 The Washington Post Company
Still think we're in a 3T
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