Nate Dogg, Horkheimer and Adorno

"The liquidation of tragedy confirms the abolition of the individual." (63) I think this quote ties in with what we learned reading Zizek. Our own creations and obsession with entertainment has done away with the notion of tragedy, while at the same time alienating people from themselves. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami which claimed the lives of 230,000 people and continues to affect the populations of India and Thailand has been largely forgotten by the mass public of the United States. Why did it not receive more television coverage? How much more death and destruction was caused by this than the damage done by Hurricane Katrina? We do not view tragedy the same way people used to perceive tragedy. Horkheimer and Adorno discuss how "tragedy has been dissipated in the void of the false identity of society and subject", which is related to what we've been talking about with ideology in the past few classes. Our identity is entirely decided by the ideologies that surround us. Since ideology is not real, only a projection of what we believe, what does that say about our identities? The natural human response to a tragedy is sorrow, sadness or empathy, but we do not feel enough lasting sadness for the people who died in the tsunami to remember what date it happened. Without tragedy, we lose our individuality. If we only care about something because our brains have been taught to do so, then none of that sorrow or sadness is genuine, it's all made up. Media has de-sensitized people to the real world while promoting and pushing existence in a false world. That's the real tragedy.