A massive operation is under way to find and save a stricken vessel and its passengers. As time passes, anxious families and friends wait with growing fear. The US coastguard, Canadian armed forces and commercial vessels are all hunting for the Titan submersible, which has gone missing with five aboard on a dive to the wreck of the Titanic in the north Atlantic. The UK’s Ministry of Defence is also monitoring the situation.
It is hard to think of a starker contrast with the response to a fishing boat which sank in the Mediterranean last week with an estimated 750 people, including children, packed onboard. Only about 100 survived, making this one of the deadliest disasters in the Mediterranean. Greece and the EU blame people smugglers, who overcrowd boats and abuse those aboard them. But both have profound questions to answer about their own role in such disasters. Activists say authorities were repeatedly warned of the danger this boat faced, hours before it went down, but failed to act.
Capitalist media only cares about sexy tragedies and expensive dangers. Focusing on 500 poors gasping their last breaths far from view only serves to remind viewers of how unfair things are on a basic level - and that threatens power.
The thing is, I’ve never seen such an overwhelmingly bored response from the general public to a Sexy Tragedy like this before. The only person in my life who expressed any iota of distress over the Titan is my dear mother, but she cried when we dropped off our old TV at Goodwill, so.
People are, I think, getting a little bit harder to trick with the song-and-dance of the hyper-rich dying in outstanding ways.
“When the rich are too rich there are ways, and when the poor are too poor there are ways… This is one of the ways when the poor are too poor. When the rich are too rich there is a way, and if I am not mistaken, that way will come soon.” - Pearl S. Buck