Rich Historian Connects Titanic Tragedy to Modern Day Class Warfare
April 15 will mark the 100th anniversary of the sinking of RMS Titanic, that giant, gilded, floating city that struck an iceberg and rapidly sank, taking with it more than 1,500 lives.
British historian Simon Schama wrote about that “Voyage of the Damned” for Newsweek’s April 8 edition. The article about “all walks of life” above Titanic is certainly worth the read, especially for those fascinated by the ship, its passengers and that fateful night in the North Atlantic when the unsinkable ship, in fact, sank. But in the final paragraph Schama strangely went out of the way to connect that century-old catastrophe to the 2008 financial crisis.
Schama melodramatically invoked class warfare saying, “Of course, the supposedly unsinkable liner that is global capitalism recently hit an iceberg, and its name was Lehman Brothers. And lo, in the twinkling of an eye there was much screaming, and the fanciest and most sumptuous vessel looked as though it would slide right into the deep.”
But Schama didn’t stop there. He lumped himself in with “steerage” saying: “Now, too, it is steerage that gets the short end of the stick, just as it did in 1912 … [A]s we sail on into the dark ocean of the future where who knows what perils lurk in the darkness, is it too much to ask that there be at least enough bloody lifeboats for everyone -- for us in third class as well as the ladies and gents living it up in the state rooms?”
Schama is no “third class” passenger of the global economy. The historian made history and headlines in 2002 when HarperCollins and BBC inked a deal worth 3 million British pounds. The HarperCollins portion was “thought to be the single biggest advance every paid for history titles,” according to The Telegraph (UK). The additional million was paid by the BBC.
The UK-born historian, who has said he feels “devoted to America”, has been a New York magazine critic and a professor at Columbia University (he previously taught at Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard). Newsweek editor Tina Brown recruited Schama to write for the magazine, and The Daily Beast in May 2011, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Correction: This post originally dated the sinking of the Titanic incorrectly. The Titanic struck an iceberg the night of April 14 and sunk in the middle of the night (technically on April 15).
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Comments
Unsinkable
Submitted by deadeyedan on Thu, 04/05/2012 - 3:46pm.
If it had happened recently it would have been chalked up to global warming/climate change/climate disruption/whatever-it-is. It's easy to picture all the glacial calving footage that would be saturating the airwaves to prove global warming.
But this was in 1912 - darn!
GLOBAL WARMING - authoritarian, rather than authoritative, science
Dan, you're actually closer
Submitted by Kenny Bunkport on Thu, 04/05/2012 - 10:46pm.
Dan, you're actually closer than you think. An abnormally warm Caribbean winter in 1912 caused the Gulf Stream to ramp up a few notches. This caused icebergs to pile up against the cold Labrador Current and form almost a wall in the Atlantic shipping lanes. So you are absolutely right, if the Titanic sank in 2012, it would definitely be due to Global Warming.
Thanks, Kenny
Submitted by deadeyedan on Sat, 04/07/2012 - 2:42pm.
I've always had a fascination for this story since my grandfather on my mother's side came within an eyelash of being on the Titanic. Several pieces of documentation seem to point to saturation with ice at the Lab Current/Gulf Stream interface causing havoc with shipping.
(It's amazing that the White Star Line wouldn't have thought to have more lifeboats just because of the impending threat of German U-boats.)
The "cold" in the Lab Current would have been because of global warming also!
Everything is caused by global warming these days. First it was the hurricanes and now the tornadoes and the "wild weather".
And it's not nature just balancing itself out? For eight years (1999-2007) including those when the Atlantic Basin was bursting with Tropical Storm activity, there were no tornadoes at all with a Fujita Force Scale rating of five. Now suddenly there is a spike in tornadic activity and it's global warming.
After the surge of hurricanes just a few years ago, there has been a very sudden spike downward in activity in the last two years, 2011 being near record low globally and 2010 in fact the record low. Was this reported by Wolf Blitzer, Ed Schultz or Brian Wiliams?
In neither case, hurricanes or tornadoes, is there any discernible trend that would suggest artificial intervention. No pattern, no anthropological influence.
CLIMATEGATE (now I & II plus FAKEGATE) - the revelation that the pseudo-scientists at East Anglia University know just as much about the atmosphere as Harvard law professors know about the Constitution
"..for us in third-class".
Submitted by ant on Thu, 04/05/2012 - 3:50pm.
"..for us in third-class". Truth? Bah...........a thing of the past. The narrative is what's important, no matter how much you must lie to keep it alive. Reminds me of all those horrible struggles and sacrificin' that mooch and ears have suffered,all those 'poor', marginalized "Occupiers". The ones that get so upset during a blog discussion they must run off for $9 a piece sushi at Nobo's in NY, the ones that need other's to pay for their oh-so-necessary college education, poor kids. Well, guess what? I didn't go to college, I never asked the government to subsidize my sex-life, I don't run off to expensive restaurants when discussions get to 'heavy,man'. And I don't even call myself 'third-class'. I'm first-class all the way, let the left wallow in their fake 'gutter-snipe' victimhood. All the easier to loose their 'cry-baby' grip on our institutions.
Well said ant
Submitted by MacWell on Thu, 04/05/2012 - 8:06pm.
I too, am as you and didn't go to college. I likewise never received a dime from the government, (unless you count the paycheck I got from the Navy Dept. when I served). My dad tried, in his best way, to convince me to go to college but I was too smart for that stuff, so I had to work with my back for many years. Well, abuse can last only so long until the machine breaks. Now, after working for 48 years, I find myself collecting disability. I don't think any less of myself for taking the money as I've paid in more than I'll ever collect, unless I live till 120.
It 'twas.....
Submitted by rockyracoon on Thu, 04/05/2012 - 3:57pm.
Bush's fault!!
Facts are like kryptonite to the liberal.
First Class, Third Class,
Submitted by Kenny Bunkport on Thu, 04/05/2012 - 4:06pm.
First Class, Third Class, whatever. If you were a man, your odds were pretty slim.
For survival statistics
http://www.anesi.com/titanic.htm
First of all, if you were a man, you were outta luck. The overall survival rate for men was 20%. For women, it was 74%, and for children, 52%. Yes, it was indeed "women and children first."
The truth is that there were a lot of First Class men who died in the name of chivalry. You wouldn't see any of today's Occupiers or ghetto boyz giving up a seat in a lifeboat for women or children.
What politician advocates
Submitted by redfish on Thu, 04/05/2012 - 4:11pm.
What politician advocates getting rid of a safety net?
What a cheesy title for anything that isn't a pulp pirate novel.
Redfish, I believe there's a
Submitted by Kenny Bunkport on Thu, 04/05/2012 - 10:32pm.
Redfish,
I believe there's a part in it where all the children get blond hair and stare with glowing eyes.
A steer is a castrated bull. That sums up Schama nicely.
Submitted by drsamherman on Thu, 04/05/2012 - 5:13pm.
So let him be in steerage. He succumbed to the liberal idiocy of British academic historians. Surprised he didn't work in the missile defense shield or the "Arab Spring" into that pile of Schama.
The Typical Liberal Hypocrite
Submitted by Crumpets on Thu, 04/05/2012 - 6:14pm.
I would bet money that Schama had that 3 billion pounds deposited in a bank account in the US so he didn't have to give the British government his money. Most British writers, rock stars and actors protect their money by putting it in the US. Socialism is for other people to live with and pay for.
I tend to the opposite view
Submitted by jkwtrading on Thu, 04/05/2012 - 6:31pm.
I tend to the opposite view than this historian. Lehman Brothers was the beginning of the sinking of socialism.. the Titanic represented the beginning or the first salvo and sinking of individualism and then subsequent rise of socialism. Lehman brothers was the first salvo of reestablishing individualism and its eventual rise replacing socialism.
his analogy should be reversed..
the Titanic sank in water, socialism is sinking in paper, called debt.
Amazing, just downright amazing!
Submitted by MacWell on Thu, 04/05/2012 - 8:19pm.
How can someone who has been educated in America's public school system, not understand that history, (for those of you here that are libtards, history has already happened, it's NOT opinion), history has proven, beyond doubt, that socialism/communism/progressivism doesn't work. It hasn't worked anywhere in recorded history. Of course there are exceptions, which someone who reads these blogs pointed out to me. There have been small bands of people who've lived with the concept of communism. Most of them expire on their own, some are helped to expire, and with others the people get bored and leave on their own.
We the people have what's looking more and more like a dire task in November. We must remove all of those people who believe America needs to be "fundamentally transformed". We must also break up the good old boys club, you know, the den of lawyers and thieves we call Congress.
Congress was never meant to be a career!
Congress was never intended to be run by all lawyers!
Think about it?
"If the government isn't working for you, then it's working against you"