In the days following last month’s shuttle disaster, there was much talk in the media about how the seven astronauts aboard the Columbia died doing what they loved most, how they died reaching for the stars, how they gave their lives to further, in the words of a teary President Bush, " the cause of discovery. " All over the US, reporters plumbed their imaginations for a poetic phrase to capture the magnitude of the event. " Their lives ended in fading streaks of light, " lamented a writer for Newsday, " against the blue forever of the stratosphere. "

The tone of the coverage of last week’s fire in Rhode Island, however, was markedly different. The 97 people who perished attending a Great White concert at the Station — a poky, gone-to-seed nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island — represented a " senseless tragedy, " as Rhode Island senator Jack Reed put it. The New York Times quoted a young man named Joey Anderson, who had lost a friend in the fire: " What a waste. What a waste of so much life. "

The day after the fire, I overheard a bartender discussing the incident with a customer. " What a way to go, " the bartender said. " Listening to Great White. " She spat out these words as if describing something she’d scraped from the bottom of her shoe. What she meant is, Great White, the group whose pyrotechnic display started the fatal fire, are a crappy band, a hair-metal throwback, cheesy in its heyday and now way past its prime — a real-life Spinal Tap. What a way to go.

There is, in this culture as in all others, a hierarchy of death. The cold fact is, some deaths are deemed better — or more meaningful — than others. The seven astronauts aboard the Columbia died a Good Death. Nobody thought to describe their passing as " senseless. " Certainly no journalist would have dared display a shred of insensitivity about their fate. Do the victims of the Rhode Island fire deserve any less consideration? An editorial in Tuesday’s Boston Globe would seem to suggest so.

" [T]he devastation in West Warwick, RI, " the editorial intoned, " is a warning that rock — and much of the rest of society — is going too far in a blind quest to be entertainment and to be entertained. " Huh? Whether consciously or not, this clumsy attempt to get to the root causes of the Rhode Island disaster — cultural analysis as practiced by grumpy dads — comes uncomfortably close to blaming the victims of the fire.

And it gets worse. " Not that rock music, which is all about being on the edge or going over it, " the editorial continued, " hasn’t long embraced the raucous spectacle by flashing the strobe lights, breaking eardrums, dripping fake blood, sometimes even swallowing live rodents, screaming obscenities, and generally whipping the audience into a frenzy. " Sorry, let’s back up here: swallowing live rodents?

The Great White show, as the Globe’s editorial writer clearly failed to grasp, was an exercise in nostalgia, a flashback to the dippy, tight-trousered, big-haired days of the 1980s. The people weren’t there to drink blood or scream obscenities — they were there to have fun. It’s likely that this writer didn’t mean to demonize the victims of the Rhode Island fire. Nonetheless, the finger-wagging tone of the editorial, with its hackneyed, puritanical take on the evils of rock music, was inappropriate in the extreme.

Oddly, the Globe editorial goes on to berate the organizers of this year’s Grammy Awards — which were aired a few days after the Rhode Island fire — for featuring a pyrotechnics show during a musical performance, and ends by asking, " Where is the sensitivity to the loss of human life? "

Good question.