Titan(ic)

I didn’t expect to hear humility from James Cameron, of all people, following the implosion of the Titan. He said this avoidable disaster showed that not everybody had learned the lesson of the Titanic: not to be so arrogant with nature.

 

My thoughts on the Titan are these: it was a horrible way to die that I hope was mercifully quick, and that it was a phenomenally stupid thing for everyone to do. They paid a quarter of a million dollars to take a tiny submarine, made of materials that had never been successfully used at the crushing depths of the bottom of the North Atlantic, made by a company that wasn’t bound by regulations and had previous safety questions, for which they signed a lengthy waiver that mentioned “death” as a possibility several times on the first page, and that was controlled by an X-Box joystick. You put your lives in the hands of a man who once said “At some point, safety is just pure waste.” They saw you comin’.

 

The people onboard were adventurer types and their families will probably say they “died doing what they loved” and I won’t criticize it if that’s your way of coping. Personally, I would rather just fall asleep in an easy chair in my old age while reading a book and not wake up, like a normal person. To be fair, reading is my favorite thing, so I guess I’d also die doing what I loved.

 

What struck me is an interview on the news with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who described himself as a “maverick.” He said he had broken the rules to make Titan. “The carbon fiber and titanium—there’s a rule you don’t do that. Well, I did.” The rule this maverick broke wasn’t like some red tape from the bureaucrats in Washington; it was a rule of physics. The ocean doesn’t care that you have a gleam in your eye and smug smile. Rush quoted Gen. Douglas MacArthur as saying you’re “remembered for the rules you break.” At the risk of being insensitive on a blog only three people will ever read, I’d suggest that they might remember you if you break a rule and die needlessly, but that remembrance might not be positive.

 

One lesson we can take from this is to stop signing away our lives—metaphorically and literally—to someone just because he has a lot of money and a square jaw.

Did you know Prince Harry's mother died in a car accident when he was young?

Were you aware of that? It’s an obscure little corner of history that Prince Harry’s mother, a woman known as Princess Diana, died in a car accident in 1997, when he was 12. This would explain to any confused layman why everyone keeps bringing it up again and again and again whenever society’s collective treatment of the Duke of Sussex is at issue, or he faces any adversity. Which is always.

 

Here's a primer for those who are not scholars of esoteric ‘90s trivia. Princess Diana died in a car accident in Paris in 1997. Her car had been pursued by the paparazzi and crashed at a high speed into a pillar in a tunnel, killing the Princess of Wales and her partner. The driver of Diana’s car was very drunk and high, and nobody was wearing a seatbelt, but the public could not romanticize these accident factors as hysterically as they could romanticize “the paparazzi hounded her and killed her,” so the paparazzi angle is what we as a society decided to focus on. It’s much more emotionally satisfying to have a decades-long cri de coeur over “the goddess of the hunt becoming the hunted” than to get into the less glamorous details of a fatal DUI.

 

So you can see why everyone was freaked out at the paparazzi’s high-speed, French Connection–esque chase of Harry and Meghan in New York City a few weeks ago. I shudder picturing the hours the couple spent evading the horde of reporters who relentlessly pursued them at speedometer-pinning speeds through the wide-open Autobahns of Manhattan.

 

Nobody got killed or hurt, but they sure could have! This is what Harry’s team pointed out, and what I think whenever I pass a car accident: That could have been me if the situation had been completely different, and that’s functionally the same as me having been in that accident. And sure, the vicious car chase resulted in only some harrowing inconvenience for Harry and Meghan—they actually had to change cars and take a scenic route back to where they were staying—but when you put all this into context of his mother’s seldom-discussed fatal car accident, it makes sense. Aside from the incidental fact that nobody died, the two car chases are eerily similar. This is why the media must take every opportunity to remind us all how a woman none of us knew died in a car accident 26 years ago. The sun shall never set on “Candle in the Wind 1997.”

 

This is also why Prince Harry has no choice but to work out all his long-suppressed grief and issues in an unending series of documentaries, interviews, musicals, and public appearances, and why we all must bear constant witness to that, because something something paparazzi something Diana something something our collective responsibility at her death. There’s simply no way to do all this out of the public eye.

 

In conclusion, leave Harry and Meghan alone! All they want is to live their lives in peace while simultaneously running around waving frantically and saying “Look at me!” while also working out their issues in the healthiest way possible—by earning a nine-figure paycheck.