The week’s Twitter & TV moment was a submersible imploding in the Atlantic. As with most TV moments, nobody cared up until everyone seemingly did. Since TV is all trivia &, what’s worse, anyone can become TV on social media, it’s difficult to pretend that we’re serious people doing serious things. But it’s not impossible; & the difficulty itself is a kind of reward if you just have the will to believe. You can tell when people shift gears from the oddity of the trivia, the perplexity induced by modern means of communications which seem to disconnect entirely what we’re supposed to be thinking about & what we can ever do, because events suddenly take on a moralistic interpretation.
Some reckless dude had a submersible built to dive to see the Titanic wreck. It seems to have worked a good dozen times in the last couple of years, but it failed last week, apparently, it imploded & the five men onboard died faster than you can blink. But for four days—their oxygen was supposed to last four days & we didn’t know they were apparently dead—speculation on all sides made everyone hopeful, on the basis of the despair in face of death in the ocean. By the way, it doesn’t always seem so on TV, but the ocean is deadly. On the Romantic right (Romanticism is very much a rightwing opinion, though not a respectable one), people talked about the heroic men struggling within a deadly world, taking risks with their lives to achieve something no one else can achieve.1 What this seems to mean is that ordinary life is unbearable, better to take chances dying in the deep. The result is that now you can find a simple explanation of how dying in the deep works. It’s not a poem. It’s Enlightenment. People react to the Titan sinking next to the Titanic with a smile. Meanwhile, on the revolutionary left, the nastiest rationalism possible shows itself in anger, in a desire for retribution: Very rich people deserve to die, they are oppressors of the people, & the proof of the madness of capitalism is that they’re suicidal, too; meanwhile, poor people suffer & no one cares. Revolutionaries-in-speech are as much in revolt against the modern world as the Romantics, but not in the name of heroes—in the name of the most unpolished mediocrity you could possibly get sentimental about.
After that, of course, there came the Christian sentimentalists praying for the people in the sub & saying in the name of humanity no one should be thought of callously; & there were libertarian utilitarians saying that some of these things are wastes of resources or that people should be allowed to waste their resources or lives, since it’s consenting adults involved.
I’m sure other factions were also represented, but nothing ever comes of these things. You can’t do anything about things you see on TV, except watch more TV. Same with Twitter, which is perhaps the best TV can offer. Ideologies are pretty much useless, but they do give people this much moral comfort, the will to believe that their ideology surmounts technological problems or real concerns… What comes of it is the same curiosity—a fairly innocuous vice, but really lacking in all dignity—& the same humanitarian moralism. Everyone got to fantasize for a while, what if they took exceptional risks?, what if they were in a terrifying situation?, which would be exciting rather than, as TV invariably proves, boring.
The story goes on: Somehow, the military got in on the TV game & advertised that they detected the sub imploding early, the four days of speculation were perhaps for nothing. Does this show military omnicompetence & discretion or the military-industrial complex using TV shows to distract from political scandals in a conspiracy against the public? But at this point, only a few people care. The people who pretend to be intelligent for money or fame have moved on to speculating about a coup or civil war in Russia. We’ll find out whether grand politics is any different from small curiosities, or whether we treat them as alternative movie genres useful in a TV-obsessed society to tease boredom with novelty. Evil Russian military coups were a recurrent fantasy throughout the ‘90s in Hollywood…
You can see director James Cameron talk about the catastrophe. He’s a remarkable competent deep sea explorer, has been for decades. He’s almost the picture-perfect hero of the manly or Romantic right. But he’s also really all about “professionalism,” an ideology inimical to heroism, & a committed liberal, so opposed to manliness on principle. He’s all about safety, redundancy, & engineering. Notice the supreme moment of liberalism, when the loser on CNN says he can’t remember the name of the deep place where Cameron dove in his sub; by the way, he can remember it, but it just doesn’t matter, because nothing heroic matters… On ABC, Cameron did a lot more bragging than on CNN; if there were room for good taste in our world, these losers who interview impressive men would show a proper deference & Cameron wouldn’t have to do the bragging…
I think I'd rather break my arm or, even, read twenty more academics telling me How Important the Integralism of Adrian Vermule Really Really Is, than to click on those videos.
Thanks for reporting from the wasteland, though.