When Tony Abbott referred to the death of a soldier serving in Afghanistan as 'shit happens', it became a manufactured news event. Offence was taken, explanations given and accepted, and the news cycle rolled on.
But the colloquial phrase itself is of broader interest because it embodies an attitude to individual events that politicians would not normally take. 'Shit happens' suggests a randomness, lack of meaning and lack of significant agency in events like car accidents, assaults on railway stations and drownings. It refuses to attribute responsibility or to accept it when involved in such incidents.
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We rarely meet this kind of attitude and language in connection with military deaths. Military language normally emphasises meaning, responsibility and the virtues that go with personal agency. Tombstones and speeches for dead soldiers are replete with phrases like 'for country and for king', 'he died that we may be free', 'brave to the last', 'made the supreme sacrifice'.
During wars, too, the enemy is usually represented as a malign force whose representatives habitually act in cruel ways to reach sinister ends.
This kind of rhetoric, often heightened by religious reference, provides a framework in which the life of the dead soldier has meaning. His death is dignified by the rightness of his cause, by the massive evil that he resisted, by his nation's indebtedness, by the soldier's intention and by the bravery and endurance that he showed.
Descriptions of military deaths brush out the randomness of war, in which a soldier may well have been killed by 'friendly fire', by malfunctioning equipment or by inattention. In this account shit does not happen. Instead bad people act violently, good people resist them, and may die while resisting.
That kind of sentiment is consoling to relatives of the dead, but it loses credibility when people understand the waste and randomness of war. Wars are never a straightforward struggle between good and evil, and people who represent a cause seen as justified often behave wickedly in war.
And many military actions, like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, are undertaken without sufficiently serious reflection and maintained without moral justification.
But even if that is so, the deaths of those killed in wars that are lightly undertaken and prosecuted without due attention are not rightly described by the phrase, 'shit happens'. Nor does the phrase do justice to car accidents or random violence. It denies the human context of such events.
Car accidents involve drivers who