The political use of victims: The shaping of the challenger disaster

This essay applies Kenneth Burke's concept of victimage to analyze Ronald Reagan's handling of the space shuttle Challenger explosion. The deaths of the Challenger seven could have served as powerful symbols of failed policy and flawed leadership. Yet Reagan reconciled the failure of the shuttle and renewed U.S. commitment to the space program by sanctifying the crew and offering Americans consolation and purgation through sacrifice of the seven in victimage.

Through interpretive textual analysis, the essay makes clear the process by which Reagan enacted the drama. Implications are drawn for the U.S. space program and for understanding the political use of victimage.

The essay suggests that political victimage now must be a reflexive process, enacted after the death, after the fact. Often in our times, ordinary people are slaughtered by forces as random as they are terrible. In order for the drama to give meaning and purpose to their passing, victims must be transformed in and by the drama. Purified and perfected, victims are sanctified and sacrificed after the fact in the dramas created about them.