A Tragedy for All

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. It is too late. --Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

THE EXPLOSION OF the space shuttle was the single most horrifying image I had ever seen on network television.

Up it went. Challenger. NASA's Old Faithful. 74 seconds and a fantail of fire. Smoke-chain etched in a stratospheric crucifix. Death in living color in the age of the rocket.

Later, when I spoke about the event with my parents, they compared it to the Kennedy assassination of 1963.

"You should've seen the students," I told them, describing the pall which hung over the campus after the news of the catastrophe had spread, the manner in which an Oriental girl burst out crying when a picture of Christa McAuliffe flashed on the screen, the lounges filled with teachers and students and members of the staff: Attentive. Hypnotized. Heartbroken. Spellbound.

In the Dudley House Common Room, where I watched the network television coverage, people speculated about the appearance of CBS newscasters.

"Dan Rather looks exhausted," someone said. "His hands are shaking," another added fatuously.

While reporters interviewed the surviving families, some viewers tensed-up and turned their heads away, as if witnessing animals off to the slaughter, as if impulsively averting some vicarious blow. When the families cried out, or held their heads in their hands, or put their arms around one another, or stared in mute terror, the same people who'd noticed how nervous Rather looked, how worn-out, how disgusted, how much his hands shook, the same people cursed him, and called him an S.O.B., and said that the networks were heartless, and vicious, and lacking in ethics, and wanting of propriety.

During Reagan's speech a couple in the Dudley Common Room left the lounge sofa to play a game of pingpong.

"P. I. N. G.," they spelled out, audibly, deciding who should serve, deciding who should start. "P. O. N. G.," they said to one another.

I tried to tune them out while listening to Reagan. His speech was beautiful. Really. And very smooth. He talked about Francis Drake. And the American spirit. He acted disturbed and uniquely wounded, pronounced all the names of the astronauts perfectly, as if he had practiced them, as if he had never heard them, as if they were a list of items to be noted and crossed off, casually perhaps, with a soft-lead pencil.

But when he spoke about the space program his eyes looked lit and positively excited. The camera inched a little closer to his face, and he seemed for a moment to stop reading the cue cards. Hinting at the secrecy of the Soviet space program, he was wide-eyed, ruddy-cheeked, virtually light-hearted. He had the cocky, cagey look of a reverend who has suddenly resurrected humor from a grim funeral party, the irreproachable charm of a boy who has insouciantly wiped his nose on his mother's burial shroud.

But to all this gravity there is a rainbow: that sympathetic unity arising from grief.

Disregarding the issues raised by the shuttle's explosion-the future of the space program, the discretion of the press, the culpability of NASA, the role of common error--the tragedy of 11:39 a.m., January 28, allowed our nation to join together in mutual sorrow over a desperate loss.

All tragedy has its root, after all, and usually the root is of a loving origin. America did not grieve over the destruction of a $1.2 billion tinkertoy, nor did it deign to inappropriately question the uncontested brilliance of the men and women of NASA. America found agony in the immolation of seven remarkable individuals. Who had families just like ours. And dreams every bit as heroic. And the fatal duty of playing pioneer to a frontier no more or less forgiving than the ones we face every day of our lives.