A Titanic Media Frenzy

If there was anything epic, dare I say Titanic, about the story of the loss and search for the Titan submersible in the Atlantic Ocean, it was the media frenzy and the stories that they were feeding to the world.

We were told that the sub had enough emergency oxygen to last 96 hours. And as the days wore on and the supply of oxygen was rapidly diminishing, we were told that experts had said that 96 hours could be stretched by the efforts of the occupants to be conservative with their breathing.

We were also fed the story that one possible reason the sub could not be found was that it had dropped its weights on the seabed and floated up to the surface. It could have been happily bobbing about anywhere on the surface of the Atlantic, just waiting to be rescued. However, had that been the case, there would have still been a problem as the hatch of the sub could only be opened from the outside. So, theoretically, the occupants could still have died from oxygen starvation, if they were not found in a timely manner.

Yet another story was that the sub had possibly actually entered the wreck of the Titanic and had become trapped. It could have simply floated up to the ceiling of the Grand Ballroom and stuck there like a big carbon fiber balloon.

Then the news media told us that underwater noises had been heard. An anomaly was detected by more than one of the rescue ships, or aircraft, which seemed to suggest that somebody inside the sub was banging on the hull every thirty minutes.

All manner of rescue ships and aircraft had been mobilized to scour the area above and below the Atlantic. Thousands of square miles were flown and sailed over looking for clues as to the whereabouts of the Titan. Apart from the banging noises, not a single clue was found. It was as if the sub had simply vanished into thin air.

As we all now know, the real reason the Titan was never found was that there was precious little of it left to find. After a catastrophic implosion, almost as soon as it arrived at the bottom of the Atlantic, all that was left was a field of debris, not too far from the wreck of the Titanic. Ironically, the location of that debris told us that the Titan was right where it was meant to be all along.

What is curious to me at least is how the authorities have allegedly said that they had detected a loud bang underwater about the time the Titan disappeared. And movie Director James Cameron has come out claiming that he knew that on the Sunday the Titan vanished, it had imploded and was in bits and pieces on the seabed of the Atlantic Ocean. Cameron said that he was informed by friends in certain circles, friends in the know.

If those people really did know the truth all along, why the vast search over many thousands of square miles? Or are those people who knew what had really happened, simply trying to appear smarter than the rest of the world? The truth of the matter is that we can all be clever and all-knowing after the fact. Or perhaps I am being too harsh and judgemental here. Maybe the authorities had good reason to hold back the news of an anomaly detected by acoustic seabed equipment. I suppose they wanted to be sure of what had happened before making any rash judgments. Hope springs eternal.

I do not recall a single mention in the news of the highly likely possibility that an explosive implosion had occurred, causing the loss of the Titan, and all lives onboard. Maybe all everybody was guilty of was wishful thinking. Nobody wanted to entertain the harsh reality of there having been a total loss. And maybe we willingly consumed the stories of possible survival because we so wanted one of those stories to be true. We desperately wanted a fairytale ending to this tragedy.

Denial is very much an enormous part of this story, denial on a global scale. We utilize denial to protect ourselves from the awful reality, the pain, and the suffering, of any given situation we find ourselves in. It is a part of us, as fallible humans, to deny what is in fact, undeniable. On a daily basis, we go about our business distracting ourselves from the inevitability of our own mortality. We all think that we are going to live forever, dying is for other people, even though we know full well, that one day, we too will die. It is the human condition, it is what it is to be human.

And now that it is all over, bar the recriminations, we have to seek what solace we can to ease the pain. The passing of the occupants was, they say, instantaneous. No pain, no suffering, nothing. The pain and the suffering are for the friends and relatives of the deceased.

Meanwhile, as I mentioned in my previous piece on this story (A Tragedy of Titanic Proportions) there was another tragic story involving a massive loss of life on a boat full of migrants, off the Greek coast. I observed, as indeed have many others, that this story did not get anything like the attention of the Titan.

Fellow writer, Judey Kalchik, commented on my other story on the subject of the Titan, that the Greek tragedy is one of many, almost daily stories we are fed, to the point that we become fatigued by it. I agree with Judey, but I also think that we are anesthetized by the daily diet of those kinds of stories. We become immune to them. I suppose it's all the same, fatigued, anesthetized, immunized, whichever way you slice it, we simply switch off. We shouldn't, but we do.

In contrast, the loss of the Titan is a one-off involving a vastly smaller loss of life. Five we can manage, it's more personal. Three hundred is too many and very much impersonal. Many lives lost is a statistic, one life lost is a personal tragedy.

Another condition at play is what I call the 'Not One Of Us' syndrome. We are more interested, and more emotionally affected if the people involved are of our own culture and race. That is the reason Hollywood always goes for a multi-national cast in a movie, to appeal to as broad a market as possible. If there is a fatal crash of an aircraft involving the loss of say three hundred lives, we tend only to be interested if one of the deceased is English, or American, if that is our nationality. We tend not to care about the other two hundred and ninety nine lost souls. They are 'Not One Of Us'.