February 26, 2002
From listening to George Carlin and reading his book Brain Droppings, I've picked up a tendency to over-analyze people's use of English. Straight from the pages of Carlin's book comes the word "tragedy."
As everyone who went to a private school knows, Shakespeare wrote (among other things) tragedies. For my fellow public school students, Shakespeare lived in England a long time ago and wrote plays. Anyway, what makes a tragedy a tragedy is when an otherwise good person suffers a downfall as a result of his own personality flaws. Macbeth, King Lear, Richard II and (to go back to the Greek tragedies) Oedipus Rex all lead normal lives and were happy people and had it all slip away.
But now everything is a tragedy. The terrorist attacks last September were horrific, but they weren't tragedies. I'd pretty much given up, but then I saw a special on (of all places) ESPN. They were talking about Daryll Strawberry and Dwight Gooden. A pair of athletes who were at the tops of their games, and lost their careers (or at least large parts of them) to drugs.
And not just once. Every time Daryll got a second chance he blew it because he couldn't get off coke. Dwight lied to his friends about how good he felt to be clean while his urine tests were coming back positive.
They weren't horrible things (unless you know the guys) but they were true tragedies.
Class dismissed.
