As I began to write this, news about the Titan emerged yet again, days after it was confirmed that no survivors had survived the disaster. The headlines noted that “presumed human remains” and debris had finally been brought up to the surface. In photographs and brief videos, workers are shown transferring bits and pieces, some of them resembling the torn fuselage of an aeroplane, still others bearing the shreds of ripped out wires and hardware.
Presumed human remains. The phrase had the same starkness as “catastrophic implosion,” forming a metallic cover around the messy, bloody reality of flesh and bone crushed and then swirled around to unknown distances on the ocean floor. Like everyone else, I looked for signs of bits of bone and blood perhaps embedded in the pieces brought into view. I write, “like everyone else” with absolute confidence that my impulse, perhaps seen as a ghoulish one, was shared by many others looking at the photos. Why doubt that? For five days, the world watched agog as we waited to see if anyone had survived the disaster and for nearly a week, our responses ranged from sadness and shock to outright, unshielded laughter — mostly, it seemed, the latter. As the hosts of the podcast ICYMI pointed out, social media and the news were abuzz with memes, tweets, and videos on Instagrams and TikTok mocking the five, even as they were presumed dead.
The responses to the news about the Titan have raised questions about how and if we should mourn the very wealthy, and how we fail to mourn others. Only four days prior to the Titan’s voyage, a fishing boat with 750 migrant refugees from countries like Pakistan, Libya, Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria and Palestine capsized off the coast of Greece, killing at least 700. The Greek coast guard failed to enact a rescue mission and may even have contributed to the disaster by trying to tow the ship in a way that destabilised it, as this report indicates. Yet, despite the enormity of the tragedy, the event barely registered as news: Democracy Now rightly pointed to the “titanic discrepancy” between the news coverage of the two disasters.
The mockery of those lost on the Titan had ensued, and has persisted, because so many elements of the news story were ripe for it, but that there was so much laughter around this disaster did not mean that the same people mourned those lost near Greece. In the case of the Titan, the supposed surplus of laughter (described in various critiques as cruel, thoughtless, and tasteless) may well have been responses to the many ludicrous facts that came to light (the submersible was, in essence, a tin can operated by a video game controller). In the case of the fishing boat, the absence of a recorded public response — the almost eerie silence even at such a high number of actual corpses on the surface of the sea — was just as shocking. Should we even mourn very, very rich and, frankly, very stupid people who go to their deaths in a cloud of arrogance, convinced that nothing can harm them because they are so very, very rich? At the same time, does mourning the utterly impoverished and desperate people who literally have nowhere to go and are forced into dangerous voyages make us somehow better people, better at mourning, at understanding their situation?
When the Titan was first reported missing, media outlets also had to disclose the crucial details about what and who were involved in its journey. The submersible was not attached to any scientific expedition, but part of the kind of adventure tourism mostly indulged in by very wealthy people, in this case organised by OceanGate Expeditions, a firm that specialises in these kinds of forays. Among their popular offerings are trips to see the wreck of the Titanic up close — OceanGate’s website, even now, lists tickets priced as high as $250,000. (A billionaire named Jay Bloom has just revealed that he was offered a discount price by the firm’s CEO Stockton Rush, who is among the dead, down to a piffling $150,000 per person). Among the passengers were Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, father and son, both British of Pakistani descent and from a prominent and wealthy family in Pakistan. According to the Dawood family, the 19-year-old Suleman had been reluctant, even terrified, to take the trip but only assented to please his father. Others inside the Titan were a well-known maritime explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, who had been to the Titanic many times, and Hamish Harding, a British billionaire.
OceanGate has been criticised by industry insiders for cutting corners and moving too fast in its “research” — but then Rush was typical of the kind of entrepreneur who believes that you have to “move fast and break things” in order to be truly “innovative.” He had been warned countless times that his way ahead could only result in death and disaster but he ploughed on. As Nathan J. Robinson points out,
Rush heard “you are going to kill someone” as just blah blah blah, probably from “industry players” trying to stop “new entrants from entering their small existing market.” Smithsonian magazine reported in 2019 that Rush felt regulations “needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation.” His own submersible had not been inspected or approved by any regulatory body. Rules are for fools.
Some rules are bureaucratic red tape that can be ignored with few consequences. Others, like the laws of physics, carry pretty strict penalties for attempts to defy them.
The Titan was sent down to a depth of 3,800m (12,467ft), to the location of the Titanic. On the New York Times’s podcast The Daily, science reporter and expert on marine expeditions William Broad provided some surprising details: the submersible was not certified for such a dive, it used a carbon-titanium alloy that was unlikely to withstand the intense pressure underwater after a few times (one report described the pressure as equivalent to three elephants standing on your fingernail), it had no backups — battery, electricity, lighting — at all, and it had no navigation system of its own: “So they can get messages from the mothership to tell them where they are in relation to the wreck, but they can’t figure that out themselves.”
That last fact alone should have been a set of giant red flares exploding upwards one after the other, to any intelligent would-be traveller. The Titan appears to have been little more than a metal coffin — even its shape, cigar-like, was antithetical to what decades of engineers have relied on as the one much more capable of withstanding pressure: the humble but reliable sphere. The fact that OceanGate’s CEO himself was part of the group may have convinced his paying customers that it would be a safe trip, but it’s not hard to imagine that the firm’s puffed up poppycock about their clients contributed to their sense of safety: they were, after all, not listed as people just paying money but as “Mission Specialists.” In its FAQ section, OceanGate’s response to the question, “What kind of training will I receive?” is this: “When you board the ship you will receive a vessel orientation and safety briefing – these are essential safety requirements for all crew living aboard a working vessel.” We can picture something very similar to the instructions that slightly bored-looking flight attendants are required to provide, pointing in all directions: “In the event of a catastrophe, no exits will be available and you will just die.” Tom Cruise goes through hours of intensive training before he hurls himself out of a helicopter for a movie (famously, he does nearly all his own stunts, presumably with massive amounts of insurance). OceanGate customers only get titles that let them pretend they’re all Tom Cruise: as newly anointed “Mission Specialists,” the five on the Titan probably felt like they were in one of his movies, steadily but surely clambering up and then rappelling down Burj Khalifa to make an appointment with an evil somebody.
This peculiar combination of arrogance and stupidity — I can never die because, look at me, I haven’t yet died — comes easily to the very, very rich who are so accustomed to their wealth opening every door that they eventually come to believe that it’s their unique and brilliant qualities — not their money — that create their opportunities. And they begin to think of death itself as a gamble that they can only win (consider how many are willing to have their corpses frozen in perpetuity, in the belief that the power grid will never go out and they will someday be resurrected and begin to walk the earth again). The question is not, “How can we possibly laugh at these deaths?” The question is really, “How do we not laugh at such hubris? Why should their deaths prevent us from pointing and giggling at them?”
At some point, young Suleman’s resistance to the trip began to circulate as a sign that, perhaps he should be spared the mockery. But why? My point here is not that he deserved to be un-mourned, to coin a term, but to ask: why calibrate either mourning or its opposite according to what kind of person might have died? Extending that: how and why do we mourn for those 700 capsized into the unwelcoming sea, and the many, many more who die in dangerous migrations, every day, out of the spotlight of international media attention?
Migrant deaths are taken seriously, especially on the left, because they are presented as a grave tragedy that speaks to the brutality of inequality everywhere: millions of people are driven to embark on life-threatening journeys — unglamorous voyages — herded like animals by rapacious smugglers, driven to hostile countries where they are rushed and swept into often filthy, inhumane conditions while they wait in eternity to be made “legal” again (if they’re lucky). We should demand more attention to their plight, as Democracy Now points out: that is the correct response. But migrant deaths aren’t just reflective of several, interlocking crises that involve a potent combination of wars and economic collapses: in many ways, we on the left have willed these deaths, spectacles of carnage that reassure us that we are needed.
Is there a more potent symbol of migrant death than the three-year-old Syrian boy washed up on a Turkish beach? In 2015, images of the dead child (carefully and neatly dressed by loving adults in a red shirt and blue shorts before being sent off on a terrifying journey with a sibling, two years older, who also died) made their way across the world. The boy, later identified as Alan Kurdi, got millions more views than the more than 700 who drowned this month, but that virality did nothing to change the larger situation: if anything, things are even worse now, with larger influxes of migrant refugees everywhere as wars explode across the globe. The Guardian’s article on Kurdi was titled, “Shocking images of drowned Syrian boy show tragic plight of refugees.”
And that’s the problem: we mourn “shocking images” only when we can identify a “tragic plight of refugees.” If those refugees were, instead, bands of angry, militant migrants who flooded neighbouring countries and elsewhere not with their sad stories of being uprooted but with demands to be integrated into the prosperous economies that caused their own to break down, would we be so sympathetic, so willing to wring our hands and speak of their “tragic plight?” We are only sympathetic to the “plight” of migrants if we can easily identify them as sad creatures in need of our pitiful alms, and that’s because we have frozen the discourse of migration into one about individuals and families and people. We don’t think about migration as an economic problem that “we” — in Europe, Canada, the United States, hell, even India which treats its refugees like dirt — created in the first place because of our exploitative, capitalistic practices. When they die so inconveniently on or off our shores and wash up on our beaches (Kurdi was found near a resort), we sigh yet again and weep about all that “tragic plight.” If the migrants on that boat had been armed and about to invade Greece with a demand for integration and resources, even Democracy Now would have ignored their fate. But all the testimonies and stories about the migrants only confirm that, yes, they were sad, desperate, and needy: lesser than us, forever subhuman.
Public mourning turns into un-mourning and back again in a matter of seconds. Public death always carries the price of exceptionalism, even under the most brutal of circumstances: every victim of police brutality recorded on camera, including George Floyd, has suffered a horrific death that played out like a vicious, demonic play designed to bring out our most sadistic impulses. And yet, even then, even when a person’s life is being extinguished as they cry and cry and cry for breath, for life, for their mothers, even then we demand, implicitly and explicitly, that they have lived perfect lives. Was George Floyd good to his friends? Was Elijah McClain a sweet, shy boy who loved the violin? Was Eric Garner a peacemaker and a good father?
The answer to those questions is neither “Yes” nor “No.” Our response to these demands that people who are murdered must be shown to be exceptional people has to be to refuse to answer and to say, instead, over and over again, “No one should die like this.”
The men on the Titan are being mourned by their families and loved ones, but they also died publicly, doing a stunt that should never have been carried out — and it was little more than a stunt. These were not “true explorers” but foolhardy people whose wealth ensured that every available resource would be used to find and rescue them: the Canadian and U.S coast guards combined their forces, the U.S Navy lent its resources, and countless private individuals and groups banded to provide more. Their deaths have been and will be mourned in public, and there is doubtless an ocean of private grief in each of their circles. And we still have a right to laugh at them. We can also mourn for those un-mourned after they died at sea in horrific circumstances, but we can and should question not just their deaths but why we need to see them only in the shadow of a “tragic plight.”
I’ve written about death and exceptionalism often, over the last many years. Here are just a couple of my essays on the subject:
“On Death and Exceptionalism.”
“Hate Crimes, Exceptionalism, and the State’s Order to Kill.”
I’ve also written a lot on migrants and immigration — a quick search on this website will yield a lot of results. Here are just a few:
“Travel, Passports, and the Differences between Expats and Immigrants.”
“DACA Was Always DOA: Let’s End It Now.”
“’Undocumented’: How an Identity Ended a Movement.“
‘This piece represents many hours of original research and writing. Please make sure to cite it properly, using my name and a link, should its original insights (yes, they exist) be useful in your own work. I can and will use legal resources if I find you’ve plagiarised my work. If you’d like to support me in producing more of this kind of work, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list.
Image: The Shipwreck, by J. M. W. Turner, c. 1805.