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发帖数: 29846 | 1 Abe Greenwald of Commentary magazine tweets:
Is there any chance that Mark Steyn won’t use the Italian captain
fleeing the sinking ship as the lead metaphor in a column on EU collapse?
Oh, dear. You’ve got to get up early in the morning to beat me to
civilizational-collapse metaphors. Been there, done that. See page 185 of my
most recent book, where I contrast the orderly, dignified, and moving
behavior of those on the Titanic (the ship, not the mendacious Hollywood
blockbuster) with that manifested in more recent disasters. There was no
orderly evacuation from the Costa Concordia, just chaos punctuated by
individual acts of courage from, for example, an Hungarian violinist in the
orchestra and a ship’s entertainer in a Spiderman costume, both of whom
helped children to safety, the former paying with his life.
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The miserable Captain Schettino, by contrast, is presently under house
arrest, charged with manslaughter and abandoning ship. His explanation is
that, when the vessel listed suddenly, he fell into a lifeboat and was
unable to climb out. Seriously. Could happen to anyone, slippery decks and
all that. Next thing you know, he was safe on shore, leaving his passengers
all at sea. On the other hand, the audio of him being ordered by Coast Guard
officers to return to his ship and refusing to do so is not helpful to this
version of events.
In the centenary year of the most famous of all maritime disasters, we would
do well to consider honestly the tale of the Titanic. When James Cameron
made his movie, he was interested in everything except what the story was
actually about. I confess I have very little memory of the film except for
Kate Winslet’s lush full breasts and some tedious sub-Riverdance prancing
in the hold, but what I do recall traduced the memory of honorable men: In
my book, I cite First Officer William Murdoch. In real life, he threw
deckchairs to passengers drowning in the water to give them something to
cling to, and then he went down with the ship — the dull, decent thing, all
very British, with no fuss. In Cameron’s movie, Murdoch takes a bribe and
murders a third-class passenger. The director subsequently apologized to the
First Officer’s hometown in Scotland and offered £5,000 toward a
memorial, which converted into Hollywood dollars equals rather less than
what Cameron and his family paid for dinner after the Oscars.
On the Titanic, the male passengers gave their lives for the women and would
never have considered doing otherwise. On the Costa Concordia, in the words
of a female passenger, “There were big men, crew members, pushing their
way past us to get into the lifeboat.” After similar scenes on the MV
Estonia a few years ago, Roger Kohen of the International Maritime
Organization told Time magazine: “There is no law that says women and
children first. That is something from the age of chivalry.”
If, by “the age of chivalry,” you mean our great-grandparents’ time.
In fact, “women and children first” can be dated very precisely. On Feb.
26, 1852, HMS Birkenhead was wrecked off the coast of Cape Town while
transporting British troops to South Africa. There were, as on the Titanic,
insufficient lifeboats. The women and children were escorted to the ship’s
cutter. The men mustered on deck. They were ordered not to dive in the water
lest they risk endangering the ladies and their young charges by swamping
the boats. So they stood stiffly at their posts as the ship disappeared
beneath the waves. As Kipling wrote:
We’re most of us liars, we’re ’arf of us thieves, an’ the rest of us
rank as can be, But once in a while we can finish in style (which I ’ope
it won’t ’appen to me).
Sixty years later, the men on the Titanic — liars and thieves, wealthy and
powerful, poor and obscure — found themselves called upon to “finish in
style,” and did so. They had barely an hour to kiss their wives goodbye,
watch them clamber into the lifeboats, and sail off without them. They, too,
’oped it wouldn’t ’appen to them, but, when it did, the social norm of
“women and children first” held up under pressure and across all classes.
Today there is no social norm, so it’s every man for himself — operative
word “man,” although not many of the chaps on the Titanic would recognize
those on the Costa Concordia as “men.” From a grandmother on the latter:
“I was standing by the lifeboats and men, big men, were banging into me and
knocking the girls.”
Whenever I write about these subjects, I receive a lot of mail from men
along the lines of this correspondent: “The feminists wanted a gender-
neutral society. Now they’ve got it. So what are you complaining about?”
And so the manly virtues (if you’ll forgive a quaint phrase) shrivel away
to the so-called “man caves,” those sad little redoubts of beer and
premium cable sports networks.
We are beyond social norms these days. A woman can be a soldier. A man can
be a woman. A seven-year-old cross-dressing boy can join the Girl Scouts in
Colorado because he “identifies” as a girl. It all adds to life’s rich
tapestry, no doubt. But I can’t help wondering, when the ship hits the fan,
how many of us will still be willing to identify as a man.
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A day or two after the cruise wreck, I read the obituary of a man called Ian
Bryce, who found himself at Dunkirk in 1940, when an ad hoc flotilla of
English fishing boats, pleasure cruisers, and other “little ships”
evacuated Allied troops cut off by the advancing Germans. Young Bryce, a 17-
year-old midshipman, singlehandedly rescued 109 British soldiers, eight
Belgian officers, two Frenchmen, and two Jewish refugees in multiple trips
in a motorboat under Luftwaffe fire. Nobody asked Captain Schettino to do
anything extraordinary, only his duty.
Abe Greenwald isn’t thinking big enough. The Costa Concordia isn’t merely
a metaphor for EU collapse but — here it comes down the slipway — the
fragility of civilization. Like every ship, the Concordia had its emergency
procedures — the lifeboat drills that all crew and passengers are obliged
to go through before sailing. As with the security theater at airports, the
rituals give the illusion of security — and then, as the ship tips and the
lights fail and the icy black water rushes in, we discover we’re on our own
matter of moments.
Today the wealthiest nations in human history build cruise ships rather than
battleships, vast floating palaces dedicated to the good life — to the
proposition that, in the plump and complacent West, life itself is a cruise,
sailing (as the Concordia’s name suggests) on a placid lake of peace and
harmony. Since the economic downturn of 2008, the Titanic metaphor — of a
Western world steaming for the iceberg but unable to correct course — has
become a little overworked, the easiest cliché for any politician
attempting to project urgency. But let’s assume they’re correct, and we’
re heading full steam for the big ’berg. When we hit, what’s the
likelihood? That our response will be as ordered and civilized as those on
the Titanic? Or that we will descend into the hell of the Concordia?
The contempt for “women and children first” is not a small loss. For soft
cultures in good times, dispensing with social norms is easy. In hard times,
you may have need of them.
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America:
Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn |
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