“’Tragic,’ like ‘natural,’ is one of those rhetorical dead ends that stops the mind from reaching to the full awfulness and criminality of an event. The correct response to tragedy is tears, not rage. Tragedy offers catharsis, and transcendence; its spectators are ennobled by having witnessed it. Its victims, of course, are dead, but tragically dead, which is somehow more elegant than plain old dead. It has that classical ring. The presence of a malign kind of human agency is elided, uncomfortable questions not asked: what sorts of indifference to the lives of what sorts of people produces thirty-story buildings that have no adequate routes of escape, and why is it almost always black kids or Latino or Chicano kids, and children of the poor, falling down elevator shafts, out of unprotected windows, getting hit by stray bullets? Do stories such as these speak about the cruelty of life or about the cruelty of poverty and racism?”