The modern GOP/MAGA party is the Titanic party

The lessons from Titanic are enduring 111 years and two months after her sinking 350 miles off the Newfoundland coast on April 14, 1912. The story is an epic tale of hubris, cowardice, recklessness, heroism, greed and extraordinary stupidity. More than 1,500 human beings were killed in the icy waters of the North Atlantic. Some were carried to the bottom 13,000 feet down. Others were recovered in the months after the tragedy, floating, frozen in evening attire and life jackets. The cable ships hauled them out of the water by the hundreds, and brought the bodies to Halifax in the following months for burial.

The dead were overwhelmingly made up from the third class or steerage passengers who were chained below to face death in some circumstances. Many were Irish. Bruce Ismay, the chairman of the White Star Line, was smeared in the media as having escaped his fate in a life boat dressed like a woman. Conversely, Captain John Smith, who steered his ship into an ice field on a moonless night at full speed, was celebrated as a British hero. It was widely and ludicrously reported that his last words from the bridge were “Be British.” Soon after the disaster the slogan was commercialized and emblazoned on scores of commercial products. 

The sinking of the Titanic ended the Edwardian age and straddled the end and beginnings of new eras. Two years after Titanic came to rest at the bottom of the Atlantic, the First World War came. It decimated the British aristocracy that filled Titanic’s first class registrar in a simpler, grander, richer, decadent time that disappeared in an instant. Here is how George Bernard Shaw wrote about the media coverage of the Titanic’s sinking. He focuses on the inclination for sensationalized and romanticized lying. It is interesting to ponder in this moment 111 years later when Titanic has likely claimed more lives.

Why is it that the effect of a sensational catastrophe on a modern nation is to cast it into transports, not of weeping, not of prayer, not of sympathy with the bereaved nor congratulation of the rescued, not of poetic expression of the soul purified by pity and terror, but of a wild defiance of inexorable Fate and undeniable Fact by an explosion of outrageous romantic lying?

What is the first demand of romance in a shipwreck? It is the cry of Women and Children First. No male creature is to step into a boat as long as there is a woman or child on the doomed ship. How the boat is to be navigated and rowed by babies and women occupied in holding the babies is not mentioned.…

Women and Children First: that is the romantic formula. And never did the chorus of solemn delight at the strict observance of this formula by the British heroes on board the Titanic rise to more sublime strains than in the papers containing the first account of the wreck by a surviving eye-witness, Lady Duff Gordon. She described how she escaped in the captain's boat. There was one other woman in it, and ten men: twelve all told. One woman for every five men. Chorus: "Not once or twice in our rough island history," etc. etc.

Second romantic demand. Though all the men must be heroes (except the foreigners, who must all be shot by stern British officers in attempting to rush the boats over the bodies of the women and children), the Captain must be a superhero, a magnificent seaman, cool, brave, delighting in death and danger, and a living guarantee that the wreck was nobody's fault, but, on the contrary, a triumph of British navigation.

Such a man Captain Smith was enthusiastically proclaimed on the day when it was reported (and actually believed, apparently) that he had shot himself on the bridge, or shot the first officer, or been shot by the first officer, or shot anyhow, to bring the curtain down effectively. Writers who had never heard of Captain Smith to that hour wrote of him as they would hardly write of Nelson. The one thing positively known was that Captain Smith had lost his ship by deliberately and knowingly steaming into an icefield at the highest speed he had coal for. He paid the penalty; so did most of those for whose lives he was responsible. Had he brought them and the ship safely to land, nobody would have taken the smallest notice of him.

Third romantic demand. The officers must be calm, proud, steady, unmoved in the intervals of shooting the terrified foreigners. The verdict that they had surpassed all expectations was unanimous. The actual evidence was that Mr. Ismay was told by the officer of his boat to go to hell. Boats which were not full refused to go to the rescue of those who were struggling in the water in cork jackets. Reason frankly given: they were afraid. That fear was as natural as the officer's language to Mr. Ismay: who of us at home dare blame them or feel sure that we should have been any cooler or braver?

But is it necessary to assure the world that only Englishmen could have behaved so heroically, and to compare their conduct with the hypothetical dastardliness which lascars or Italians or foreigners generally - say Nansen or Amundsen or the Duke of Abruzzi - would have shown in the same circumstances?

Fourth romantic demand. Everybody must face death without a tremor; and the band, according to the Birkenhead precedent, must play "Nearer, my God, to Thee" as an accompaniment to the invitation to Mr. Ismay to go to hell. It was duly proclaimed that it fell out exactly thus. Actual evidence: the Captain and officers were so afraid of a panic, that, although they knew the ship was sinking, they did not dare to tell the passengers so - especially the third class passengers - and the band played Rag Times to reassure the passengers, who therefore, did not get into the boats and did not realize their situation until all the boats were gone and the ship was standing on her head before plunging to the bottom. What happened then Lady Duff Gordon has related, and the witnesses of the American inquiry could hardly bear to relate.

I ask, what is the use of all this ghastly, blasphemous, inhuman, braggartly lying? Here is a calamity which might well make the proudest man humble, and the wildest joker serious. It makes us vainglorious, insolent and mendacious. At all events, that is what our journalists assumed. Were they right or wrong? Did the press represent the public? I am afraid it did. Churchmen and statesmen took much the same tone. The effect on me was one of profound disgust, almost of national dishonor. Am I mad? Possibly. At all events, that is how I felt and how I feel about it. It seems to me that when deeply moved, men should speak the truth. The English nation appears to take precisely the contrary view. Again I am in the minority. What will be the end of it? for England, I mean. Suppose we came into conflict with a race that had the courage to look facts in the face and the wisdom to know itself for what it was. Fortunately for us, no such race is in sight. Our wretched consolation must be that any other nation would have behaved just as absurdly.

The cost of passage on the deep sea submersible that has gone missing at the Titanic wreck was over $250,000. The visit was a trip to the world’s most exclusive and elusive grave in an inhospitable and alien environment that is as merciless and deadly as outer space. It has likely ended in tragedy, and now there are more dead entombed forever in the depths of the North Atlantic. 

The modern GOP/MAGA party is the Titanic party. It is similarly reckless, arrogant, deluded and headed for the ice in a fog of denial.  The news is lately filled with stories about the new religion found by the likes of Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Bill Barr, and all of the greater and lesser sycophants, whores and opportunists of the MAGA era.  Now they are against Trump, but what is it that they thought would happen when nothing could happen that could conceivably break their slavish devotion to him?

The Republican Party, its leaders, activists and donors are the same people as those on the Titanic a century earlier.  They never imagined the tragedy at hand that became so obvious in retrospect. They were the Titanic’s hapless and helpless passengers, clueless, doomed and desperate. Yet, their memories endure. They are myth, mystery and legend. 

Titanic has claimed more lives this past weekend. Let us pray that it will be the last. The Titanic endures because it is reality that cannot be evaded or escaped. It happened. The ship is there. Perhaps it should be left alone. The ocean doesn’t like her graves disturbed. 

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