The Titanic Sub Saga and Jim Jordan's Remark Backfires
DeSantis' Street Poop, Dan Crenshaw Wants Biden to Dive for Debris, Lawyers Use AI Fake Cases, Fox News Alters Quotes, "Fiddler on the Roof" Sings
The Titanic Sub: What Does It Really Tell Us about Ourselves
A year after six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey was murdered in Colorado in 1996, a nine-year-old Black girl was raped, choked, poisoned with a gasoline-like substance and left for dead in the stairwell of a Chicago housing complex. Ramsey, who was White and a regular at beauty pageants, received international attention and endless investigations that lasted decades. Girl X, as she was dubbed, was largely ignored. Everyone remembers the dozens of photos of blonde JonBenet in her many gaudy pageant outfits. Not so much Girl X. Those two news items are related in that they reflect a larger social issue concerning whose lives our culture values more and why.
But, despite efforts on both sides of the political spectrum, that’s not the case with the loss of the Titan, the submarine that imploded killing five.
Let’s start with the efforts to blame their deaths on “wokeness.” The conservative New York Post reported that OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush had once proclaimed that he wasn’t interested in hiring from the pool of “50-year-old white guys” with military experience to pilot his subs. “I wanted our team to be younger, to be inspirational and I’m not going to inspire a 16-year-old to go pursue marine technology, but a 25-year-old, uh, you know, who’s a sub pilot or a platform operator or one of our techs can be inspirational.” As a result, a gaggle of right-wing pundits have gathered to claim the deaths were because of his “woke” attitude.
Conservative Charlie Kirk concluded, “If it is true, this person tragically passes away, the CEO of OceanGate and he says that he was choosing and selecting his personnel based on not wanting to have fifty-year-old white guys, then you could make the argument, albeit rather cruel and blunt, he killed himself and his customers with wokeness.” Then he made the jump to: “Let this be a warning when we say that, we want to hire more Black pilots. Hold on, slow down. People could die if you embrace the poison of wokeness.”
Except for this inconvenient fact: It was 61-year-old Rush who actually piloted the doomed sub. No wokeness was present. Plus, he equated inexperience (25 years old versus 50) with race. How does being Black in any effect the ability or exerience of the person?
On the other hand, many journalists and politicians have tried to use the deaths of the wealthy people aboard the Titanic-viewing submersible as a similar mirror to reflect the shortcomings of society, the government, or people’s character in general. I also disagree with these efforts, however well-meaning.
On June 14, a fishing trawler sank off the coast of Greece along with 700 asylum seekers. More than 500 are thought to have drowned. Many in the media were angered by the disproportionate coverage of the missing sub that killed all five on board. We—meaning the news media and those of us who followed the story of the missing sub—were being scolded for not caring enough about the plight of the refugees. The implication was that we valued the rich five more than the poor 500. That’s more a case of virtue signaling by those doing the shaming than a true measurement of the public’s caring. Everyone’s moral outrage was measured and put on display. Social conscience points were awarded.
The harsh reality is that the horrible tragedy of the Greek ship was indeed covered extensively by the media. It was front page news everywhere. As the descendent of immigrants, I’m particularly sensitive to the plight of refugees desperate for a better life. The enormous loss hit me hard. But like most of us in the face of overwhelming tragedy, I felt helpless sitting in my living room grieving. I take some comfort in knowing that my government and others that are suddenly under the glare of public scrutiny, will now have to do something more to address the situation.
One major difference between the two shipwrecks is that the facts of the Greek disaster were reported, with all the political and social nuance, within a day or two. Nothing more to see here so we moved along. We await the inevitable investigative reports that will appear in a few months. Then we will grieve again—but with more purpose.
But the saga of the Titan sub was ongoing. Like the twelve boys and their coach from an underwater cave in Thailand, the one Ron Howard made a movie about. Our dedication to the news stories about the search wasn’t about ghoulish curiosity or about worrying for their lives because they were rich, it was a story about faith.
With the sinking of the Greek ship, we get the news after it happened, so we can only react to the tragedy. But in the case of the sub, there was still hope and we had time to process how hope relates to faith. For some, it was about faith in a merciful god that would surely save these people from the torturous death they faced. (The fact that the passengers died is not an indictment of their faith because they also accept the inscrutability of their god’s plan.)
For others, the story was about faith in science and technology. Many believe that no matter the impending disaster, we can noodle our way out of it with good old-fashioned eggheads and massive equipment. We can MacGyver anything. If we can Armageddon an astroid hurtling at Earth, we can do anything. Climate change can be ignored right up to the wire of oblivion because science will find a way. But it ain’t necessarily so. When tech fails, it’s a shocking wake-up call to our vulnerability and limitations. Our faith is shaken.
And the tragedies keep rolling in. Over the Juneteenth weekend, dozens of people were shot and at least 10 were killed by guns in Milwaukee, Chicago, Idaho, Missouri, North Carolina, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. In one weekend. Is any one of those deaths more tragic than the other? I don’t know because I mourn them all.
In John Donne’s 1624 poem, “No Man Is an Island,” he warns us that we are all interconnected, all pieces of the same continent. And so he ends the poem with this meditation on death:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.