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[i]Broadcasters and reporters daily proclaim as tragic the fatalities that result when, say, a family car spins out of control on an icy street and crashes. Just as, every spring, drunken high school students die tragically when they drive off the road. It’s a staple of the prom season. ...These days, any event that causes suffering or distress earns tragedy’s mournful title. ... But if everything that is avoidable, stupid and simply untoward is tragic, then nothing really is — not if we insist on its description of a specific kind of human sorrow. In devaluing the word, we devalue what it is meant to express. We trivialize what we wish to make truly important. Since the Greeks first coined the word, tragedy has required not only a calamitous event but one that can be judged as meaningful. It has to matter in some greater manner that is, ideally, instructive. “Tragedy is, then, a representation of an action that is heroic and complete,” argued Aristotle in “Poetics,” “and of a certain magnitude.” It is never trivial. For an event to qualify as tragedy, its telling demands some kind of emotional catharsis, a resolution to the losses it details. This month’s Je Suis Charlie march in Paris qualifies. But more important, to be worthy of its name, tragedy must instruct."[/i]
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