"those most responsible for war, financial meltdown and moral corruption in the false name of public interest seem to lose something, but too late and not enough to redeem the damage they have done"

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2012/09/tragedys-decline-and-fall

Tragedy's decline and fall

How tragedy evolved from Oedipus to Kim Kardashian’s cellulite and Amy Winehouse’s struggles.

"What the Greek protagonists all have in common is social status: they are kings, queens and heroes. Tragedy requires a fall, and a fall from a high elevation and great fortune makes the tragedy all the more pronounced and delectable to onlookers. This was another of Aristotle’s requirements for tragic drama, that its suffering subject be a person of worldly importance. The truth about the crime Oedipus committed can be revealed by the Theban herdsmen, but the fall has to be taken by the king. As far as I know, until modern times there were no tragic stage dramas involving the equivalent of rural English virgins, bourgeois Scandinavian housewives or American travelling salesmen.

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The analogy between the falling darlings of a modern public and the old Greek dramas does not go very deep, however. Both Aristotle and more contemporary literary critics are inclined to think that an essential part of tragedy is that it deals with the weightiest of matters and eschews triviality. It is the human condition on show, but acted out on a high moral plain that equates, in antiquity, to the highest social plain. This does look as if it rules out much of modern gossip as a contemporary version of tragedy, such as the Daily Mail’s revelations that Christina Aguilera and Kim Kardashian have cellulite, on the grounds that cellulite, when you stop and think about it, doesn’t measure up well against a plague in Thebes, the suicide of Jocasta and the self-blinding of Oedipus, however god-given and inescapable cellulite might be in all our lives.

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I think what we have in the parade of witnesses at Leveson, and in the parliamentary inquiries into the Iraq war and bankers’ behaviour, is not tragedy but a grim parody of it, in which the only universal truth on show is that, somehow, those most responsible for war, financial meltdown and moral corruption in the false name of public interest seem to lose something, but too late and not enough to redeem the damage they have done. IfOedipus Rex portrays the quintessential tragic hero, both responsible for and responsive to the disaster that was unknowingly of his making, the likes of Blair, Diamond and Murdoch, so much more responsible for disasters, and so much less prepared to take responsibility for it, offer us at best an unsatisfactory Schadenfreude, and no sense of humane dramatic closure at all."