The Politics of Tragedy and Democratic Citizenship

Robert C. Pirro

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441125064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

This study of the political significance of theories of tragedy and ordinary language uses of "tragedy" offers a fresh perspective on democracy in contemporary times.

CHAPTER 1

The Politics of Tragedy: An Introduction
and Overview

For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times. My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” (Robert Kennedy, after receiving news of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.)

On April 4, 1968, Robert Kennedy was scheduled to address a campaign rally in a Black neighborhood at what his semi-official biographer would later describe as “the heart of the Indianapolis ghetto.”¹ Organized by civil rights leader John Lewis, the event was intended formally to kick off Kennedy’s campaign to win Indiana’s Democratic Party presidential primary. He had announced his candidacy two-and-a-half weeks earlier in the midst of a presidential election season roiled by contention over President Johnson’s war policy and rocked by antiwar candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy’s unexpectedly strong performance against the incumbent in the New Hampshire primary. Notified of King’s shooting as he boarded a plane in Muncie, Kennedy learned of King’s death upon his arrival in Indianapolis. Rejecting the advice of the city’s mayor and police officials to cancel the out-of-doors event, Kennedy proceeded to the rally.

Lacking the polish and rhetorical ease of his brother John, Robert Kennedy was a speaker capable of greater emotional self-exposure who was usually at his best in extemporaneous settings. Improvised at the last minute, Kennedy’s speech from the back of a flatbed truck to the predominantly Black crowd on that windswept Indianapolis lot was, by all accounts, one of his best. Ordinarily very reticent about his brother’s assassination, Kennedy chose this night to evoke that painful memory and establish a bond of shared suffering with his listeners, who had, only seconds earlier, let go cries of affliction upon hearing Kennedy’s report of King’s death. (Later, at his hotel, when Kennedy was confronted with weeping campaign staffers, it may have been that same memory that reportedly led him to say to one of his top aides, in an apparent tone of rebuke, “After all, it’s not the greatest tragedy in the history of the Republic.”²) Kennedy followed up his quotation of Aeschylus with a call for understanding and compassion across racial lines. Asking his listeners to return home and pray for King’s family and for the country, Kennedy concluded his speech: “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.”

To anyone who was not an intimate, Kennedy’s evocations of the tragic wisdom of ancient Greece might have seemed puzzling additions to a speech fashioned at the last minute and under the pressure of terrible events. In fact, Kennedy, whose achievements as a student in prep school and at college were far from illustrious, had made the Greek tragedies and, in particular, the verse from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, intellectual and emotional mainstays in the time since his brother’s assassination. (Aeschylus’s words would eventually serve as one of the two epitaphs on the marble slab positioned across from his grave at Arlington National Cemetery.³) His reliance on the Greeks for spiritual sustenance began during a stay at a Kennedy family friend’s Caribbean vacation home in the early part of 1964. Jackie Kennedy had brought along a copy of classicist Edith Hamilton’s, The Greek Way, a masterful survey of classical Greek literature, written for non-specialists, in which lessons about the dignity and tragic limits of human agency are powerfully evoked through the stories and words of Aeschylus, Thucydides, and other canonical Greek writers of tragedy and history. While his sister-in-law and her family and friends mustered what good cheer they could, Kennedy mostly remained in his room, poring over Hamilton’s narrative and underlining passages of special interest (including the Aeschylean verse from Agamemnon, which appears twice in her book).

The encounter with The Greek Way marked the beginning of a self-directed program of intense study of the classics, particularly the Greek tragedies, as well as other works by Hamilton. Deriving comfort from the tragic wisdom of the Greeks, Kennedy kept their works close at hand and transcribed many of their consoling passages into his daybook. Senate aides recalled how he would often recite tragic verse from memory.⁴ The effect of this intellectual immersion on his temperament was so marked that his sister, Jean, told Arthur Schlesinger that, “after 1963 he found consolation in Greek tragedy rather than religion; this was the expression of his character.”⁵ The depth of Kennedy’s engagement with Greek tragic wisdom was also clear to Maxwell Taylor Kennedy decades later when he compiled a book of passages from his father’s writings and from the words that his father chose to record in his daybook. Included in the work are many allusions to the Greek spirit and quotations from the works of the Greek tragedians. Especially significant are the Greek touches from Kennedy’s April 4 speech, which are the sources for the book’s title, Make Gentle the Life of This World,⁶ and for M. T. Kennedy’s characterization of his father as the kind of person who “would quote Aeschylus when he spoke to the poorest audiences that a presidential candidate had ever bothered with, and they cheered.”⁷

The claim about the audience’s cheering response to Kennedy’s recitation of Aeschylean verse raises questions about the meaning and impact of his engagement with Greek tragedy. Without a doubt, this engagement was highly meaningful for him as he confronted the devastating loss of his brother and the premature end of the Kennedy Administration. Aside from the terrible shock and sadness that follows upon the violent death of a close family member, Kennedy had to deal with a shattering blow to his sense of purpose. Having devoted himself as campaign manager to winning the White House for his brother and then becoming a mainstay in his brother’s administration as attorney general and White House confidante and factotum, Robert Kennedy felt especially adrift in the wake of the assassination. Burdening Kennedy as well may have been a sense that the murder of his brother was payback for Kennedy Administration policies, including the assassination efforts against Castro that Robert Kennedy had been urging on the CIA, as well as his investigation and prosecution of Mafia bosses, some of whom were connected to the anti-Castro CIA campaign. Edith Hamilton’s encomium to the classical Greek spirit of striving in the face of life’s harsh and sometimes self-inflicted blows—“All arrogance will reap a rich harvest of tears,” was a phrase from Aeschylus he had underlined. “God calls men to a heavy reckoning for overweening pride”⁸—introduced him to a literature of redemptive poetry in which the ironies of action and the devastation of loss is fully acknowledged, that acknowledgment then becoming a spur to renewed, if also chastened, effort.

For the people gathered before Kennedy on that cold April evening, unwilling recipients of the news of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination, what meaning might Aeschylus’s words have held? One cannot know for sure, although Kennedy’s biographers almost universally credit his six-and-half minute speech with helping to maintain peace in Indianapolis on a night that saw rioting break out in most American cities. Baring his most terrible pain, Kennedy can be seen as offering to his audience what, years earlier, his first reading of The Greek Way had so compellingly promised him—a form of solace grounded in a belief that great suffering could bring forth a larger wisdom. That this sort of offering, articulated as it was in the language of tragedy, could find receptive ears at a campaign rally in “the heart of the Indianapolis ghetto” may not be as farfetched as it might sound. For, according to a line of thought pursued by public intellectual and critic Cornel West, it would precisely be in an audience composed of underprivileged African Americans that one ought to expect to find the most heightened American receptivity to an appeal based on tragic wisdom.

A rare figure in American intellectual life for his longstanding engagement with notions of the tragic and for his linking of the prospects for advances in social justice to the wider diffusion of a tragic sensibility throughout American society, West has counted tragic wisdom as one of African Americans’ most valuable spiritual resources. As he describes it, exposure to the physical terrors, psychological traumas, and material deprivations of slavery, recurrent mob violence, and pervasive discrimination led New World Africans and their descendants to develop forms of cultural resistance and resilience, among which he includes a “black sense of the tragic.” To be sure, this sensibility was primarily grounded not in any encounter with Greek tragedy but in New World Africans’ engagement with American Christianity and their transformation of it into “a kind of `Good Friday’ state of existence in which one is seemingly forever on the cross . . . yet sustained by a hope for a potential and possible triumphant state of affairs.”⁹ In fact, West has gone so far as completely to dismiss the relevance of Greek tragedy to democratic aspirations: “The Greeks had no notion of tragedy as it applied to ordinary people . . . Tragedy was reserved for the highbrow and upper class.”¹⁰ Attentive reading of the texts of Greek tragedy and a familiarity with the large scholarly literature arguing for the central role of Greek tragedy in educating the citizens of Athens’ fledgling democracy cautions against any offhanded judgments of Greek tragedy’s irrelevance to democratic struggles and achievements. (Also worth considering is Lee Breuer and Bob Telson’s artistic marriage of the idioms of Black Pentecostalism and Greek tragedy in The Gospel at Colonus [1985], the artistic success of which at least suggests a significant degree of affinity between the two cultural forms of tragic expression based on, among other things, their shared reliance on choral singing.)

To the extent that the moment of connection achieved by Kennedy and his Black audience on a vacant Indianapolis lot the night of April 4 can be attributed to a shared tragic sensibility, that sensibility runs counter to a conventional view of Americans as altogether lacking any serious cultural engagement with the tragic nature of life. Typically, European literati have lamented the American “distaste for tragedy” and connected it to American deficiencies in intellectual or emotional depth and complexity as compared with Europeans.¹¹ This spirit of complaint has been articulated as well by American literati, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, who once wrote of the United States as, “a country where there was no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight.” Of course, a degree of artistic license must be conceded to Hawthorne, whose pronouncement on the untragic nature of the American past occurs in the preface to a romance, The Marble Faun (1859). As a Massachusetts native not too many generations removed from the first arrival of English settlers, he was fully aware of the colony’s early campaigns of religious persecution and the judicial killings resulting from the Salem “witch” trials (in both of which processes his family forbears took leading roles) as well as the campaigns of slaughter conducted during the so-called King Philip’s War.

If the American past has included its share of suffering and brutality, prevailing social and ideological conditions, including the relatively broad diffusion of material prosperity to the descendants of some immigrant groups and the relentless promulgation by mainstream institutions of an ethos of individual achievement, have conspired to give wide credence to the view that, “Americans have always been unequivocally optimistic and bereft of a sense of the tragic.”¹² A highly conspicuous product of an upwardly mobile Irish-American clan and a firm believer in the ethos of individualist striving, Kennedy nevertheless did not suffer from a deficit of tragic sensibility. His intensive reading in the literature of tragedy left its imprint on his temperament, arguably helping to foster an emotional resilience that allowed him to expose himself so profoundly to the suffering of others and not be driven by this exposure either to a fatalistic retreat from a robust agenda for change or to a resentment-driven attack on the basic premises of the so-called American dream. In characterizing the contribution of a “Romantic” sensibility to Kennedy’s approach as policy maker, Jack Newfield placed emphasis on his unusually pronounced capacity to empathize with the people whose very difficult conditions of life were to be subject to decisions taken by politicians and bureaucrats. “What his romanticism did was provide emotional ballast for his pragmatism, to give it a humanist political thrust. It was what made him different from more detached and conservative friends, like Robert McNamara, Byron White, or Theodore Sorensen. Kennedy identified with people, not data, or institutions, or theories.”¹³ The contrast Newfield draws between the abstracted Olympian pragmatism of the men of the New Frontier and Kennedy’s particularistic and personalistic approach is noteworthy, especially in light of Robert McNamara’s later, unexpected public emergence (in several books and the 2004 Errol Morris documentary, The Fog Of War) as a foreign policy thinker for whom the notion of tragedy is of no small importance. Let us briefly consider his uses of tragedy and the extent to which they are continuous with Kennedy’s.

Appointed by John F. Kennedy to head the Department of Defense and retained by Lyndon Johnson, McNamara presided over, and became the main administrative defender of, the escalation of U.S. military commitments in Vietnam from a few tens of thousands of advisors in 1964 to over a half a million ground troops and a major bombing campaign against the North by the close of 1967. By the time he was moved out of his position as defense secretary in November 1967, the rising rate of U.S. casualties, the effective resistance of North Vietnam against all forms of U.S. military escalation, and growing domestic opposition to the war had made him highly skeptical about the viability of the Johnson Administration’s war policy. Since he kept his doubts mainly to himself and continued to act as a vocal advocate of the policy of escalation, McNamara left government service widely and passionately derided by antiwar activists as the callous bureaucratic draftsman of an immoral and catastrophic war policy. Many years after the end of his government service, McNamara returned to the public eye ready to express in public his earlier reservations about the war, analyze the mistakes he made, and draw some lessons from those mistakes.

In such publications as In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (1995) and Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy (2000), McNamara has made the case that the war was the outcome of mistakes, “an error not of values and intentions but of judgment and capabilities.” Offering an account of the processes of Vietnam-era decision-making in which he had had a significant role as Secretary of Defense, McNamara focuses in his 1995 book on his own and his colleagues’ mistakes. “We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. . . . Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong.”¹⁴ Far from being an antiquarian exercise, McNamara’s 1995 mea culpa is intended, he goes on to suggest, as a lesson for contemporary and future U.S. citizens and policy makers on how to avoid repeating the costly errors of the past:

I want Americans to understand why we made the mistakes we did, and to learn from them. I hope to say, “Here is something we can take away from Vietnam that is constructive and applicable to the world of today and tomorrow.” That is the only way our nation can ever hope to leave the past behind. The ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus wrote, “The reward of suffering is experience.” Let this be the lasting legacy of Vietnam.¹⁵

Among the errors or mistakes identified by McNamara as occurring under his watch were the failures of Washington policy makers to inform themselves adequately about the motives and aims of North Vietnam’s leaders, to free themselves of an ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1 The Politics of Tragedy: An Introduction and Overview
• Section I: Tragedy and Political Agency
• Chapter 2 Václav Havel: The Political Uses of Tragedy in the Aftermath of Communism
• Chapter 3 Italian Neorealism: Tragic Cinema in the Aftermath of Fascism
• Chapter 4 Cornel West: Tragedy and the Fulfillment of American Democracy
• Section II: Tragedy and Political Solidarity
• Chapter 5 Nelson Mandela: Tragedy in a Divided South Africa
• Chapter 6 9/11: Tragedy and Theodicy as American Responses to Suffering
• Section III: Tragedy and Political Identity
• Chapter 7 Botho Strauss: Goatsong in a Democratic Key?
• Chapter 8 Christa Wolf: Greek Tragedy and German Democracy
• Chapter 9 Michael Schorr’s Schultze Gets the Blues: German Borrowings from the New World African Tragic
• Chapter 10 Conclusion: Anticipating a Different Kind of Sixties Tragedy
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright