Truth in Tragedy

LAST WEEK, Courtney Steel, the 17-year-old student body president of the Spence School in New York, was killed by a drunk driver.

While both politicians and the press have been quick to remind New Yorkers that substance abuse was the tragedy's principal cause, they have chosen to focus on Ms. Steel's ostensible abuse of alcohol instead of the behavior of the driver who struck her down. After all, she used a fake i.d. to buy drinks at Dorian's Red Hand, the same bar that Jennifer Dawn Levin visited on the night of her gruesome murder two months ago.

What makes this response so astounding is that the cause of the accident couldn't be more patent. The suspect, Brian Confoy, alledgedly got rip-roaring drunk, seated himself behind the wheel of his car, and drove with reckless abandon, mowing down Ms. Steel in the process.

What Ms. Steel was doing earlier that evening, an hour before, or even 10 minutes before, had absolutely no bearing on the tragedy. Perhaps she had a drink or two, and maybe she obtained them with fake i.d. It doesn't matter one bit; she was not jumping in front of vehicles. Confoy's car wouldn't have bounced off her body had she been behaving "properly" that night, had she been helping a blind man cross the street instead of exiting from a bar with her underaged friends.

THE CITY'S REACTION is an all too frightening example of a superstitious response to a complex social problem. To say that drunk driving caused the death is to admit that the tragedy is inexplicable. To blame the victim, on the other hand, is to reassure ourselves that we live in a just and harmonious world, a world in which no one who follows the proper path is victimized. Therefore, New Yorkers must believe that the real enemy is not the drunk driver, but the teenage drinker, the proverbial sinner upon whom God wreaks vengeance.

Of course, no one admits engaging in such superstitious thought, at least not in these crude terms. But it is hard to deny that New Yorkers have a fascination with the supernatural. How else can one explain the press' fixation on the coincidence that Ms. Steel visited the same bar as Ms. Levin. Perhaps that lurid den of iniquity was the root of the problem.

Unfortunately, the supernatural has been creeping into political discourse all too often these days. We see it in the claims from fundamentalists that AIDS is a form of divine retribution, and we see it in the general eschatology propounded by the religious right--the idea that all of the world's problems are part of a divine plan that will eventually lead to the Second Coming.

NEW YORKERS, too, feel compelled to explain the inexplicable, even if they don't espouse so allencompassing a theology. Politicians are doing it, the press is doing it, and, unfortunately, the parents of Ms. Steel's friends are probably doing it. After all, they will sleep better at night if they believe that they have some control over their children's fate, that they can protect their loved ones from every imaginable evil if they convince them not to use fake i.d.'s, not to take drugs, not to have sex.

And yet, this supernatural world view is nothing less than tragic. On a personal level, it is tragic for the Steel's to have their sorrow compounded by insinuations that their daughter got what she deserved. And on the political level, it is tragic because it encourages politicians to speak of divine evils instead of working to combat serious problems such as drunk driving.

Government is designed to cope with what isn't always a very comprehensible or just world. By capitulating to our need for understanding we prevent ourselves from engaging in constructive governmental efforts. Unless we are willing to accept the tragedy as exactly that, superstition, not common sense, will reign in politics.