I posted this on X, but I don’t want it to get lost in the worldwide whirlpool.
People keep using the word “tragedy” to describe Charlie Kirk’s murder. It’s not.
Technically, in a literary sense, a tragedy is a sad but cathartic story in which the protagonist’s actions and/or character flaw lead directly to his fate. Think of OEDIPUS REX, or any of the Shakespearean tragedies. The story doesn’t stop suddenly just because the protagonist dies; everything leads to that death, largely because of who the protagonist is — there’s no other way the story could end.
When most people use the word “tragedy,” the best word for what they actually mean is “calamity” (the giveaway is using the adjective “senseless,” which is the exact opposite of the character of a literary tragedy). This can be something personal (the death of a young mother in a random traffic accident), or something huge (the tsunami of 2004, or Hurricane Katrina). There can be human malfeasance magnifying the disaster (I’m looking at you, L.A. fires), but the essential character of this misuse of the word “tragedy” is an amplification of “shit happens.” Sadness is the appropriate reaction — that, and the common human drive to mitigate the injury.
Kirk’s assassination was not a tragedy in either the technical or the commonly misused sense.
It was a deliberate act of monstrous evil.
October 7th. 9/11. The Holocaust. The Holodomor. We still have no word in English to describe this kind of evil action, no word that clearly conveys the perversion of the spark of divinity inside each human soul into the diabolical agency which willingly, eagerly inflicts pain and degradation on the objects of its hatred. That savors in anticipation the planning of the act, and rejoices in the hellishness unleashed.
And make no mistake. Although the enactors of each of these monstrous evils are a relatively small cadre of discrete individuals, there are hundreds and thousands who adopt that same anti-human monstrousness by reflecting the event, reveling and rejoicing in it.
This is not a tragedy. It leads not to either catharsis or human empathy. It instead engenders, in those of us who have not willfully perverted that spark of divinity in our cores, a disbelieving anger against those would gleefully twist themselves into vessels of wrath. Many of us are confronted with an awareness of the reality of evil for the first time, beyond all previous euphemisms and excuses of misguided upbringings and socioeconomic status.
This is evil, as only a sentient being can enact. It is deliberate, it is intentional, and the only words that come to hand — “monstrous,” “diabolical,” “perverse” — pale beside the reality.
That spark within us recognizes the twisted nature of those who have consciously transformed their own spark into something antithetical to all goodness, all humanity, all life and existence.
Don’t let your spark be cowed, dulled, muted in the coming days by exposure and familiarity.
Do not compromise with evil. Do not seek to placate it, or “understand” it away.
Stand against it. Defy it. Defeat it.
Indeed, to the ancient Greeks who pioneered these forms of storytelling, the opposite of a tragedy was not a comedy, but rather an epic. In an epic such as Homer’s Iliad, the story begins small (e.g. with the private wrath of Achilles in that story’s case) and opens out into a broader and broader world to be explored. In a tragedy, such as that of Oedipus, the story begins large (e.g. for Oedipus, it begins with him on his throne and dealing with the mystery of why the Olympian deities have cursed his entire kingdom to suffer under a plague) and then gradually closes off the protagonist’s options until at the climax, he (and in ancient Greek plays, it was always he) is forced to make one big decision that ultimately determines his fate and that of everyone else involved.
The reason tragedies came to be associated with tales of woe with sad endings in later audiences’ eyes is that the all-important big decision at the end was almost never a happy one. (One exception of which I know? Sophocles’ tragedy of Philoctetes ends with the titular bowman being reconciled to his comrades and commander who’d abandoned him and returning with them to the Trojan War where we’re told he goes on to win fame and glory and—most importantly to him personally—full healing for the painful snakebite on his foot.) In many ways, this original definition of a “tragedy” is how the vile vermin currently expressing their admiration for Charlie Kirk’s assassin online and in corporate and government halls of power are trying to spin their narrative of this capital criminal being some kind of “tragic” hero: “He had to do it! Kirk had it coming for being on the wrong side of history!” (i.e. “How dare he win debates against us and our narratives!”)
Something long forgotten by those who use “tragedy” in the currently popular manner to mean “calamity” as you describe in your article is that epics can be calamitous tales of woe with sad endings too. For instance, Homer’s epic Iliad and Odyssey stories were pretty calamitous for the Trojans, as particularly detailed in Euripides’ The Trojan Women. More recently (albeit still well over a century ago now), the real-life epic that came to be known as World War I followed this formula to perfection, beginning small with a hotblooded petty partisan’s assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and opening out into a gargantuan tale of misery and woe for an entire generation of young men in Europe’s nations and their many allies and client nations all around the globe as particularly detailed in Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.
Where this current real-life story of Charlie Kirk’s assassination will take us, neither you nor I nor anyone else can know for certain. As with the attempt(s) on President Donald Trump’s life, the current fury may pass as the demonically hateful far-left partisans currently celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder are deservedly isolated and marginalized: dismissed from employment, drummed out of polite society, and thoroughly discredited in the eyes of all civilized peoples as we dismantle the corrupt and evil institutions that spawned them. Alternatively, as with the far-less-admirable (yet still undeserving of assassination) Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s murder, the fury may spread and grow into a worldwide conflagration if the perpetrator and his admirers are not properly punished for the murders they’ve attempted and committed and—most importantly—are still inciting others to commit.
Either way, your assessment is accurate: Charlie Kirk’s assassination is no tragedy. It is an audience-participatory morality tale with no shades of gray in which Kirk’s family and friends and admirers are the good guys (though not the heroes; those would be Charlie Kirk himself, and whoever ultimately avenges his murder) while the assassin and his admirers are the bad guys—the villains who do evil deeds for evil purposes because they are evil. Whether or not this tale of woe turns epic, for those of us out here in the audience, our tolerance for these villains and their victim-playing sophistry is at an end.
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This seems relevant: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/violence-hatred-americans-warped-beliefs-values-polls
Given that your source is the Bulwark, no, it isn’t.