Of course, the missing Titanic sub discourse devolved into a culture war shit show in under two minutes flat. Everything is part of the culture war now. Why should this be any exception?
In case you missed it, the media is currently obsessed with a missing submersible carrying five people who paid a quarter of a million dollars per person to view remnants of the Titanic.
But that’s not enough to keep us busy. This feeding frenzy has spawned a second story, which is the outrage over the media being more interested in the Titanic sub than the sinking of a boat carrying hundreds of migrants off the Greek coast.
ADVERTISEMENT
If you want to get meta, I am now proposing a third story: instead of tragedies being unifying events, as might be the case in a healthy society (the smartest brains in the world rallying to rescue Matt Damon in The Martian is pure fiction), they must now be filtered through the hierarchy of victimhood.
Rather than praying for the potentially lost souls aboard both vessels—or at least sending good vibes into the world that tragedy might be averted—our first instinct is to juxtapose these two potential tragedies, weighing which deserves our sympathy and attention, as viewed through the prism of our political ideology.
Determining the hierarchy of victims requires multiple political debates and considerations, including (from the left) white privilege, income inequality, donations to Republicans, affiliation with Elon Musk, and (from the right) the perils of affirmative action.
That’s right, apparently, the OceanGate Titanic CEO told an interviewer he didn’t want to hire a bunch of “50-year-old white guys” to operate his subs because they aren’t “inspirational.” It’s wildly premature to speculate on whether this had anything to do with the current predicament, but that hasn’t stopped the conjecture.
The last time I heard a similar allegation was when the Silicon Valley Bank collapsed (once again, rich people being bailed out, so to speak), and some alleged that their policies regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) were to blame.
This was another complex story that immediately degenerated into simplistic culture war finger-pointing. In both cases, one assumption seemed to be, “See, if they just hired 50-year-old white guys, they’d be OK.”
As someone who hopes to someday be a 50-year-old white guy, and is getting eerily close to that goal, I am open to the possibility that disqualifying employees based on immutable characteristics, rather than experience or merit, may result in some unintended consequences.
But absent any evidence, isn’t it ghoulish to speculate on such things at this point?
The answer, of course, is “yes!”
Likewise, the aforementioned left-wing observations regarding white privilege, political affiliation, income inequality, etc., are certainly legitimate topics to be discussed at an appropriate time and place (say, for example, on HBO’s White Lotus), but not when so many lives hang in the balance.
In most other circumstances, five human beings trapped in a watery grave would be either cause for sympathy or action. This is true irrespective of whether there are other, simultaneous, tragedies happening that might also demand our sympathy and attention.
Yet, today, the lives of the five are viewed by many as an opportunity to dunk and score partisan political points.
Some of the most repellant voices on Twitter are suggesting that a billionaire’s life is less valuable than someone else’s because, of course, rich people partaking in dangerous adventures are asking for it.
Many of us might view paying a ton of money to go on an outrageous adventure as excessive and unnecessarily risky. Then again, to someone living in abject poverty, boarding a private jet might seem just as decadent.
Twitter conjecture aside, considerable resources are being spent to find and rescue both the missing submersible tourists and the migrants. That’s good news for a virtuous society, even (especially) as hope dwindles.
And while the media’s selection bias is an ongoing commentary on ratings (and thus, a commentary on us), the modern habit of turning everything into a culture war is arguably a bigger—and more concerning—commentary on society.
Again, there is no denying that cable news has a “type.” Did the O.J. Simpson murder trial really deserve the attention it garnered? Weren’t there a million other tragedies that occurred during the many years of my youth that were consumed by that trial?
Was the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 really worthy of all the CNN coverage it garnered? How many people died of gunshot wounds during that same time, yet received zero cable news coverage?
It’s fair to say that our news media is screwed up and that certain types of stories (fair or not) receive a disproportionate share of coverage. It’s also fair to say that arguably more deserving stories receive less coverage. It’s fine to lament this media landscape.
What we should not do, however, is downplay one legitimate tragedy or malign the lives of people who do receive media coverage. To do so hardens your heart and embraces inhumanity. Sadly, that seems to be the state of affairs.
