Eubulides wrote:
>
>
> What irony? The fear of thinking in terms of tragedy -not fatalism- is
> palpable in the USA.
>
Indeed. One gets the impression that every other 3rd grader in the u.s. is a practiced ironist; but one risks being excluded from all respectable company (left or right) if one dares suggest that defeat can other than personal failure . . . . Witness the disgraceful way in which a number of people on this list presumed to instruct Ms. Cobb on how defective her choices were. All she needed to do was to have the ironic bystander's perspective on what was _truly_ worth spending one's money on. That she was responding rather well to overwhelming conditions simply would not be acceptable to the ironic gaze. The critics preferred to abstract from her full history and see her only as The Consumer -- and not a very wise one. ["The story is not how he brings tragedy on himself but how he bears up under tragedy imposed on him by the nature of things." From my post on the Iliad; substitute "the nature of contemporary capitalism" and one can begin to see Ms. Cobb as a tragic heroine, not a figure of scorn.]
Or consider those on this list who insist that there must somehow be "A Solution" for the horror of the Occupation of Iraq -- which of course there is not.
Carrol