Please Advise! What Can We Learn from the Titan Disaster?

[Editor’s note: Steve Burgess is an accredited spin doctor with a PhD in Centrifugal Rhetoric from the University of SASE, situated on the lovely campus of PO Box 7650, Cayman Islands. In this space he dispenses PR advice to politicians, the rich and famous, the troubled and well-heeled, the wealthy and gullible.]

Dear Dr. Steve,

A U.S. Coast Guard report on the fate of the Titan submersible disaster has been released. The craft, owned and operated by OceanGate, imploded during a dive to the Titanic in June 2023. Five people died, including company founder Stockton Rush. The report blamed a culture of shortcuts and intimidation at the company.

Are there larger lessons to be learned here, Dr. Steve?

Signed,

Jack Rose

Dear JR,

The Coast Guard described a workplace culture of “fear and silence” within Stockton Rush’s company. “OceanGate’s toxic workplace environment... used firings of senior staff members and the looming threat of being fired to dissuade employees and contractors from expressing safety concerns.”

It also cited a “lack of comprehensive and effective regulations.” One witness who testified at the inquiry said questions involving safety would be answered with: “This is what Stockton wants.”

Sound familiar? Does the late Stockton Rush resemble another guy who fires people when they bring bad news? Does he sound like a graduate of the “Deny it and it Never Happened” school of management? Might the Coast Guard report mirror the state of a nation whose CEO is also executing a deep dive to disaster?

A tragedy like the Titan implosion has the effect of clarifying and quantifying the consequences of bad decisions. There’s no ambiguity to it — corners were cut, standards were dropped, five people died. Even Fox News can’t fudge those numbers.

Politics and government are rarely so cut and dried. Nobody is killed when Donald Trump fires the head of the Bureau of Labour Statistics after a negative jobs report. But something does die. Credibility, alas, does not get a prominent obituary in the New York Times. When the stock market reacts to his tariffs Trump probably tries to fire Dow Jones. After the rude reception he got last month, he probably wanted to fire Scotland. Yet somehow his make-up artist still has a job.

Trump’s denial of reality surely super-sized the lethality of the COVID pandemic. But obtuse and inept as he is, it is hard to hang a specific number on him. It’s all indirect. While we wait for Trump to finally get around to shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, he is busy delegating the carnage to underlings, like the humanoid pestilence currently holding the office of Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Even a monster like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does not come with a precise death toll. But he will almost certainly end up with enough blood on his hands to fill a thousand Titan submersibles. Trump’s boss quack just cut approximately $500 million in funding for mRNA vaccine programs, making him a key field marshal in the administration’s continuing war on human progress.

Whatever else he may accomplish, RFK Jr. is doing for the Kennedy name what Lucifer did for his. RFK Jr. is the son of the late great Bobby Kennedy, and never has the “Jr.” suffix carried so much freight. They say the apple does not fall far from the tree. But as we all know, this dude’s apple comes with a big, fat worm.

Donald Trump has a severe allergic reaction to reality. He says bad poll numbers are fake news. He tried to redirect a hurricane with a Sharpie. He cheats at golf. It’s all delusional but in those specific cases, mostly harmless. What a blessing it would have been if Stockton Rush only cheated at golf instead of safety regulations.

More important than the specifics is the general culture. Trump is the latest in a long line of authoritarians who choose to live in a hermetically sealed chamber of narcissistic self-regard, even as he fosters a perverse hatred of anything that might advance the common good. Blindness and stupidity are his highest ideals. It’s all reinforced by a cast of hired sycophants, plus a few volunteers like Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.

But as catastrophes like the Titan failure prove, blindness and stupidity have consequences.

For one thing, they do not exist in a vacuum. Trump is authoritarian and idiotic — the Chinese government is authoritarian and smart. As Trump has squelched science research into climate change, the Chinese have invested massively in electric vehicles and alternative energy. Meanwhile Trump’s attacks on American universities are likely to create a free R&D buffet for other nations. Trump is a crack sniper, picking off his own feet.

Under the leadership of Trump, America is embarked on a slow but steady descent into depths yet unfathomed. And like it or not, we all have tickets for this ride.