The news of Titan's discoverd demise clogged up my newsfeed, mostly with memes about billionaires and the stupid things they do and orcas attacking yachts. Some chimed in to say that it was horrible to poke fun at people who really did experience a tragedy, though others would argue it was a tragedy that they needlessly created by joyriding to a mass grave. Some compared it to the climbers who die regularly on Mt. Everest, though this seemed so much bigger and newsworthy and perhaps a sign of the times when the rich do terrible things and continue to break the backs of the rest of the world. While I feel bad, especially for the teenager whose father was the reason he was there, I also laughed at the meme-age, mostly because it's all so ridiculous and wasteful and so much an allegory of the age in which we live (and oh, the hubris.)
It's especially interesting that it was the Titanic and not some other unreachable sea depth or disaster site (Chenoble tours, anyone?) since I have a poem in COLLAPSOLOGIES about the class disparities on the Titanic (okay it's about the tabloid story of underwater babies and their maids) but like much of that manuscript, it's as much about politics and economics as much as it is about the pandemic. The whole book is. The things we do for money as women and our value. The role of the caretaker and the artist in The Shining. Capitalism and its rot. I think it's been on everyone's mind since the pandemic began..how it affected some people more than others. Those who could not stay home and paid with their lives in the early days. Those who did not have the luxury of holing up vs. the ones who did. I was lucky, even though I was coming out of my own economic struggles of the fall at that point that had me abandoning the studio to be able to pay my apartment rent fully each month. The campus closed temporarily with everything else education-related for a couple months. I do remember panicking over groceries in the earliest days and waiting to get paid amid the frenzy of empty shelves and binge buying. Worrying with like $7 in my account til mid-month.
In the early days of the pandemic I could stay home, though in the mid-summer, we went back. It felt dangerous to be out there, not so much at work where the campus was kind of deserted and lots of protocols had been put in place, but to be on the bus and out in the world. In the pre-vaccination days, everything seemed terrifying and fraught with infection. I also felt gross inequities in the treatment of staff where I worked, and even though my job was not long-term doable from home, I also noticed that the people who would have been safer by far (having, ya know, their own offices and little public contact) were allowed to work from home while those of us, paid the lowest incidentally, at service desks in cubicle land were expected to be on site. On one hand, it was necessary, On the other it made us feel expendable when we already traditionally shouldered more work in an environment of vast understaffing and under-compensation. The "We're in this together." sentiment quickly vanished by autumn.
This is to say, even I recognize my good fortune and whatever privilege gleaned by being able-bodied and employed, housed and not trying to survive genocide or a war-torn country. There is always someone less fortunate than you to be punching up and poking fun, but billionaires, who control 99.9 % of the world's wealth, fuck over their workers and the earth itself, are, to me, ripe picking for pointing out their ridiculousness and finding humor in grave situations (particularly ones they get themselves into entirely.) I really feel it's why shows like White Lotus and movies like The Menu and Infinity Pool are doing so well with audiences recently. And ultimately, why we are having these conversations now more than ever.
