All that, and my first thought was: Well, they got the full tour. As awful as the lost submarine is, it is also funny. To some of us, anyway. There is, of course, the sheer narrative irony of the Titanic — our society’s most well-known story about hubris, rich people, and blind faith in technological progress, with a very obvious moral of “wealth cannot protect you from death” — becoming a tourist attraction for the super-rich, who then get shipwrecked due to their blind faith in technological progress, thus learning that wealth cannot protect them from death. But when you add in the fact that the ship in question appears to have been a modified trash can designed specifically to kill rich people, well… “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce,” said Karl Marx, and I have no proof he wasn’t talking specifically about taking a $250,000 unregulated tourist submarine to see the wreckage of the Titanic.
Jude Ellison S. Doyle
