Down With The Old Canoe

There's something evocative about the story of the Titanic sub. It probably owes a lot to the Titanic myth itself, which is reflected in the title of the book Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster by Steven Biel (1997), which according to this review,

". . . seared itself into American memory not because it was timeless but because it was timely". . . . Groups on all sides of the volatile issues of gender, class, religion, and race all found in the Titanic lessons and judgements to bolster their causes.

The much smaller Titanic sub disaster is having the same effect. Biel's title, by the way, is taken from a 1938 country song by the Dixon Brothers:

The lyrics conclude,

Your Titanic sails today, on Life's Sea you're far away
For Jesus Christ can take you safely through
Just obey his great command, over there you'll safely land
You'll never go down with that old canoe

Sailing out out to win her fame, the Titanic was her name
When she had sailed five hundred mile from shore
Many passengers and her crew went down with that old canoe
They all went down to never ride no more

The image of going down and never rising is powerful indeed. That it is now and was then a group of wealthy people reinforces the association. The YouTube psychologist Dr Todd Grande had this to say about Stockton Rush, the CEO of Ocean Gate:

He clearly desired to have extreme, high-risk adventures. Among the wealthy, this appears to be a common sentiment. Several companies are offering trips to orbital and sub-orbital space for price tags ranging from hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars. Some wealthy people have climbed Mount Everest. For $100,000, a person can visit the South Pole, and, with OceanGate, at least until the Titan disaster, $250,000 would buy a front-row seat to Titanic. What drives wealthy people toward extreme tourism? I think it really comes down to how people find and fulfil purpose in life.

Some people are quite content engaging in safe activities like spending time with family, going to the movies, workng, and reading, but for others, life needs to contain a series of adventures in order to be interesting. The people tend to accomplish one challenging goal, only to move on to another. The purpose isn't found by achieving the goal, the purpose is the never-ending pattern of adventure. It's always having another goal in the crosshairs. When they complete one, they're looking toward another.

When people become wealthy, they may not be satisfied by simply earning more money. There's a point where a person has so much money, they can essentially have anything they want. There is no longer a chance of losing the game. There is no more risk of gettng harmed. It's like playing a video game with an invincibility cheat code. It may be novel at first, but it quickly gets boring. A large quantity of money permits a person to seek an even greater source of stimulation. Just like using drugs, they have developed a tolerance for everything that can give them a rush, so they need a stronger drug.

. . . These wealthy adventurers rationalize the trips by saying they promote science or technology, but in reality, they're just looking for the next high.

This goes some way toward answering my favorite question, "What problem are people like Stockton Rush, Victor Vescovo, and Alissa Heinerscheid trying to solve?" It certainly goes to the issue that their money has, just for starters, bought them admission not just to elite Ivy-level universities, but also to the exclusive prep schools that are recognized as an even more accurate class indicator than an Ivy degree. But that, again, was just the start of an ongoing set of "challenges" for which they already had an invincibility cheat code.

After all, they had degrees from Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford whose prestige comes from a presumably "selective" admissions process, but from the start, they were in separate baskets from the plebes taking SATs and such, they were legacies or the offspring of major donors. The same, we must assume, applied to their corporate careers. All this led to a deep insecurity that they didn't measure up -- and in fact, they didn't. Thus the need to undertake steadily more "challenging" adventures to prove themselves, but these "challenges" were just like all the others, something prestigious that could be bought.

There's something deeply evocative about the meme at the top of this post, a Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light can superimposed on the image of the Titan sub. It goes to the phoniness behind the official culture of our time, and that goes even as far as the legacy media narrative of a "desperate search" for the Titan sub as "time runs out" -- when we now learn that the Navy's sonic detectors told them the sub had imploded within moments of the event, and for whatever reason, it was deemed appropriate to withhold this news for the better part of a week.

The things money will buy.