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?”
I have a small book called The Birkenhead Drill by Douglas W Phillips. It is published by www.visionforum.com. This true story of bravery where the phrase "women and children first" came from inspired Kipling's poem Soldier and Sailor Too. I would like to make its reading mandatory in every school in our nation.
You make a good point. There are so many wonderful books out there, most of which were published before the 1960s, which would give young people a better perspective on society and the history of the U.S. and western culture in general. One I can think of is Pacific War Diary by Jim Fahey. American Caesar about Douglas MacArthur is another excellent book.
So on the one hand we have men who displayed great courage and dignity in the truly icy waters of the mid North Atlantic in winter while on the other we have men who showed great cowardice a short swim from shore in the warm Med.
Quite a juxtaposition.
Says all that needs to be said about present day Europe in particular and the west in general.
Exactly! Mr. Styen writes "Like every ship, the Concordia had its emergency procedures . . . . and then, as the ship tips and the lights fail and the icy black water rushes in" There was no icy balck water. What we saw was men acting like barbarians to be the first ashore. Maybe it was karaoke night in Giglio? Or were these men just excited to try their skills as gigolo's in Giglio? No matter, it's reprehensible behavior, these people were in the balmy Mediterranean Sea -- less than 100 feet from shore with life jackets on!
I earnestly believe that the captain acted correctly, in accordance with today's moral standards. Who would want to be courageous towards women like Snookie, Lindsay Lohan, pick your Kardashian, and Lynne Stewart? After all, in Europe more than here, everybody is screaming for equal rights and equal treatment. Well, let them have it. Chivalry and honor is as obsolete as the slide rule. Just ask Newt Gingrich about honor and chivalry toward women. Oh,yeah! What an shining example for us all! The new standard bearer of the GOP is our guide to modern living. Maybe we need a little sharia in our lives!
A young man born in the late 1980s or early 1990s has been subjected to anti-male bias from birth. They go to schools run by feminists that clearly favor the girls. The ones that do make it to college are in the minority, since college is now 60% women. Then they see women getting preferential treatment in the workplace. NOW even complained about stimulus money going to construction jobs where men might benefit. Do we really expect them to risk their lives with a chivalrous act to save women who have dedicated their lives to oppressing men?
You're talking about government and politics, not real everyday people. So yes, get over your self-pity and imagined angst generated by what you read about in the papers and be a good person to the real people you rub shoulders with each day.
It is difficult to argue that what remains of Western Civilization is not destined to failure, for want of simple, but difficult, virtues that have now fallen into disrepute.
When our society shuns God, He is humble and politely leaves – and takes His virtues with Him. Free societies inevitably fail without virtuous men and women – and dictatorships inevitably follow.
I have some sympathy for the proposition that women's demands on society relinquish their status as the 'fairer' sex and the preferential treatment that follows. The flaw in this argument however, in this case, is that children are always due that preferential treatment that was formerly imposed on women as a palliative for their second citizen status and that fed the male delusions of their 'manhood'.
But this ship didn't have to sink in this manner to demonstrate Steyn's viewpoint. Pan Am flight 73 was hijacked on September 05 1986. The crew abandoned their posts to safety, left their charges to the mercy of the hijackers and were hailed as 'heroes'. The Captain of that ship felt no compunction about this dereliction.
The argument went that their actions meant that the plane was rendered immobile. So for the benefit of the bureaucratic convenience of those who must deal with the problem, the lives of the passengers (20 passengers were killed and hundreds wounded) were merely forfeitable fodder.
The captain of the aircraft owed a duty of care to his passengers. He owed a duty to his rank and his profession. He utterly failed that duty and was lauded for it.
The hijackers took out their frustrations on the passengers. The Captain should have been there to act as a buffer between the Hijakers and the passengers. And if they were intent to create casualties, the captain was obliged to offer himself first or as a substitute.
'Duty', 'responsibility', 'obligation' are unknown terms in the modern lexicon. The 'me' generation has produced a rabble of 'rights' mongers and moral imbeciles whose only motivating principle of action is ruthless self-interest. A society pre-occupied with lying is always the first and hardest casuality in any war.
What do you expect? Those men on the Titanic are of the generation that walked into the WWI meatgrinder, without flinching. 60,000 casualties on the first morning of the Somme.Their sons hit the beaches at Tarawa and Normandy...sheer madness by today's standards.These were just regular men, but they were MEN.
Today, in all of America's "wars" since and including Vietnam, we have not lost many more than on one spring morning in France. If you are a poor minority lad, living in Chicago, Detroit., Los Angeles...any broken American city... you have a greater chance of being shot than in Afghanistan. Yet, we carry on about one single casualty like the world will never recover from it. We whine about bullies, instead of punching them in the face. We kowtow to cowards and sissies. We are shamed into believing that the greatest nation in the history of the world is equivalent to some Arab stinkhole.
The liberal termites have finally achieved the plan put in place by the Soviet Union, which is no longer here to benefit from it. Talk about irony!
If memory serves, there was a comment in one of Robert Heinlein's books to the effect that any attempt to build a society with any other basis than "Women and children first" is automatically suicidal.
And from the looks of things, we're well on the way toward a real-world large-scale test of the truth of that statement.
I was wondering again recently what makes our current President tick. After considering the usual suspects (progressivism, socialism, Europeanism, egoism, closet Islamism, ...) and finding inconsistencies (except for egoism), the best I can come up with as an underlying belief is that everything that happened before is wrong (enter Mom, Bill Ayers and Rev. Wright), that which wasn't wrong was irrelevant, and that it should all be replaced by those who would have anything different.
It's not even a different idea, but it does remove all the social norms. You're not even left with a sense of individual responsibility for being self-centered. Give your money and your responsibilities to the state and you will receive even more money and live more responsibly in return. This must be the Ponzi scheme of all Ponzi schemes, metaphorically speaking. And it is the removal of social norms that allows people to "invest" their lives in the biggest scam of all.
Coach Springer no doubt twice voted for George W. Bush who bravely served in the Texas Air National Guard while cowards like John Kerry and Max Cleland hid out in the jungles of Vietnam.
The President for whom Coach Springer voted for twice allowed the killer of thousands of Americans to escape. The President for whom Coach Springer voted for twice paid the government of Pakistan billions of dollars -- some of which went to maintain the killers of Americans in a comfortable lifestyle. The President for whom Coach Springer voted for twice bravely stated as policy that the USA would seek the permission of Pakistan before going after the killer of Americans.
I think we can trace the decline of Western civilization to the day the likes of Coach Springer became voters.
You're rebutal has nothing to do with Obama. Not very convincing and subsequently irrelevant. Thanks for wasting the 1/2 second of my time that it took to realize you're just blowing off steam because you didn't like Bush instead of intelligently debating an opinion with which you disagree.
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