Missing Titanic Submersible Is Not The Only At-Sea Crisis We Should Be Talking About Right Now
More than 500 refugees are presumed to have drowned last week off the Greek coast.
From the Huffington Post, which I have little respect for simply because I found Ariana Huffington to be incredibly irritating.
But there's really a point here.
Or is there?
Some have already recast this story this way:
White privilege is corporate media's non-stop coverage of 5 people on $250,000 a person sightseeing submarine to see to Titanic wile ignoring that More than 500 refugees are presumed to have drowned last week off the Greek coast.
White privilege? Bullshit.
I'm white, and I don't have $250,000 to blow on something like this.
The entire term "white privilege is a left wing dog whistle. Go into any big city, and you'll see plenty of stoned street people living in ignored abandonment, most of whom are white. Where is their privilege?
And it's worth noting that the refugees in question are "Syria, Egypt and Palestine" would be émigrés. Up until some point during the Arab Israeli Wars, at least Syrians and Palestinians could in fact be regarded as "white". At least this was certainly the case with Syrians, of which the Lebanese were a sub category, again until the ongoing protracted hatreds of Middle Eastern conflict changed that. I have an entire set of partially Lebanese cousins and a late uncle who was half Irish and half Lebanese, who would have been surprised that everyone else in the extended family was part of some other (made up) racial demographic.
What Syrians, Egyptians and Palestinians largely are, is Muslim and poor. In the American WASP imagination, being Muslim makes you a non "white", even if the distinction here is purely imaginary. And quite frankly, at least to the American news media, which isn't really friendly to Christianity anymore, it's the latter category that really matters. They are poor.
So they aren't Europeans, which makes them not white to the benighted WASPs, and they are poor, both of which makes it really easy to ignore them.
The poor don't get much press.
The foreign poor truly don't get much press.
None of which this is really about.
Poverty and extreme wealth are.
I hope, as we all should, that those trapped in the submarine are rescued. I also hope that the refugees are relived from their maritime peril. But let't be honest.
There is something fundamentally immoral about a nation with so much wealth, at the very upper ranks, that people can spend $250,000 to go visit a maritime grave.
This statement would apply if they were Americans.
Except here, they actually aren't all Americans, as I thought they likely were.
Most of them aren't.
Nor are they all "white", as the Huffington Post would define it.
They are Shahzada Dawood, a Pakistani businessman, and his son Suleman Dawood; Hamish Harding, a British businessman, pilot and space tourist; Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French diver and Titanic expert; and Stockton Rush, the CEO and founder of the sub business.
Now, with at least Rush, his being there makes sense. And maybe Nargeolet is there for an academic or service reason.
Harding? Space tourist? Too much money by any definition.
The Dawood's. Well, I''m not in a position to judge, nor really are probably very many others.
So this story takes a weird turn, from what was originally presumed.
So why do we find it fascinating?
And now what is the moral equation? Do we complain, now, when we learn that two of them are really wealthy Pakistani's, or would that be beyond the pale?
Well, we are fascinated in part because it fits into the category of bizarre disaster that we are unlikely to endure ourselves. It's the same reason that Chilean mine disasters are fascinating. Mediterranean maritime disasters, however, are not, however, as they're part of a massive ongoing crisis that we'd rather not think about.
At any rate, a tourist business taking people to see a maritime grave for really high dollar is unseemly.
And any vacation frolic that costs $250,000 suffers from a moral deficit.
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