Titanic 2.0: My Heart Will (Not) Go On

Never let go, Rose... unless my salary expectations get too high.

Well, unless you’ve been living under a rock - or, perhaps, more apropos, at the bottom of the ocean, and under a rock - you probably heard about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

I never quite got the fascination with the song. It’s alright, but it never did that much for me. Also, I was always more partial to Dan Fogelberg than Gordon Lightfoot, but that’s just me. It’s just been on my mind, mostly because I heard it in a few public places and couldn’t help but think, Huh. That’s a bit weird. Then again, it does seem to be a perinneal boomer favorite, and I do live in a town mostly populated with such people, so maybe local businesses are just courting their target audience.

Oh, and, uh - yeah, there was that whole submarine fiasco in the North Atlantic, too, I guess.

That… sure was a thing that happened. Given that I’m a busy ape with many simian responsibilities to attend to, of course, by the time I get around to publishing this little op-ed, they’re scraping what’s left of the damn thing off the ocean floor already. Apparently, human remains have also been found, which I’m not sure if I buy or not when it’s very likely just some outlandish claim by the media to squeeze one last picoliter of milk from this cow’s shriveled utter before it’s shipped to the slaughterhouse.

Even though the story should have been born, lived a full, happy life, died, and been buried and forgotten about, the internet is still abuzz around the thing. It’s a bit strange since a petty criminal turned hot dog vendor turned warlord (supposedly) staged a coup in Russia the very same day it turned out OceanGate had been tugging everyone’s chain for the entire duration of events and knew damn well the rinky-dink tub toy they put in the water had popped like a pringles can under the tire of an eighteen-wheeler, yet I’ve seen less about the Wagner Group’s Minute-to-Win-It and more about this submarine.

If it sounds like I’m making fun of the deceased, I’m really not. There is something darkly humorous and even morbidly poetic about the whole ordeal, if I’m being perfectly honest and exposing some unflattering colors in my plumage, but I think dark humor has long been my way of coping with horrific things - and if being trapped thousands of feet beneath the ocean in a PVC pipe with a motor on the back and compacted and/or incinerated as thousands of pounds of sheer pressure crush the thing like an empty can of Bud Light under a Mexican roofer’s steel-toed boot isn’t your definition of horrific… I’m not sure which of us would be crazy.

That being said, it is a tragedy, ultimately, as stupid as it was senseless. All of those men - save Stockton Rush, I suppose, the CEO of OceanGate - should have taken one look at that thing and known better than to get on it. I suppose Mr. Rush’s own willingness to get in the thing and consign himself to Davy Jones’ locker may have been somewhat reassuring, since it’s only logical to think, Well, if the CEO of this thing is getting in with me, he doesn’t want to be crushed by the forces of Neptune anymore than I do. Then again, these men, all being wealthy, ambitious individuals, should know damn well the lengths someone will go to scrape a few dollars up - and, by all accounts, Mr. Rush was desperate to start getting asses into the submarine seats… er, well, on it’s floor, I suppose, since there were no seats. But you get what I mean.

I’d do a lot of things for a dollar. Climbing into this death trap is not one of them.

Over the past couple days and my own research into the company, it seems like OceanGate was attempting to market itself as the hip, young, cool, and trendy tech start-up equivalent of the submersible tourism industry. Because that’s apparently a thing, and, if it isn’t, there’s people trying to make it a thing. Either way, rather than try and run the thing like an actual company with a responsible steward, he tried to be the Poochie of the submarine world and win over prospective employees and, more importantly, that sweet, sweet Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion money from the regular suspects among the foul and cursed halls of BlackRock’s headquarters, Silicon Valley venture capitalist co-ops, and the Tech Bros diaspora that Reddit is always bitching about, which is a nebulously defined term that varies depending on who you ask, but seems to boil down to that one thirty something year old chode who’s always trying to sell you on a new crypto pyramid scheme every time you see him at the local trendy coffee spot. You know the types - the ones who get genuinely excited and worked up every time some big tech cabal announces a new gizmo. The people who genuinely think Elon Musk is a real life Tony Stark. The people who think Apple’s headset grift is a legitimately good idea because they heard on a podcast that it was, like, totally gonna take humanity to a dystopian cyber-hell to the next level, bro, like, for real.

There’s an argument to be made that their stupid transhumanist fetish could get us all killed (or worse) the same way a dumb chimp with a loaded pistol is liable to dump a magazine of nine millimeters into you, but we’re not here to talk about them right now.

The point is, those guys eat up all that corporate non-talk the same way I clear out the tin of diced salmon at the local Poke bar. I mean, these are the same people who were bilked out of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, with nothing but the words next-generation, hype, and a whole lot of ugly fucking monkey JPEGs.

These people should be tried in the Hague for their grotesque war crimes against good tastes, aesthetics, and simians everywhere.

Mr. Rush was leaning very hard on trying to appear cool and appeal to this crowd, but, the only people who have more of a taste for that kind of language than someone who actually bought on-line real estate in the Metaverse, are the LinkedIn crowd.

You know this type, too - people who went to business school, learned the lingo, and look ambitious on paper, but their definition of ambition is not so much build something of tangible value or provide a valuable service, but rather climb the corporate ladder of middle-management. They tend to be young and willing to take less mone to get their foot in the door at a bigger company, or a place that will make for an impressive name on their resume. These people either end up being the type of miserable, abusive middle-management types that populated cubicle farms across the open air tax plantation cum insane asylum of America, or burn out in spectacular and end up back on their parent’s couch once they can’t get their adderall prescriptions filled due to a national shortage and can’t keep up their amphetamine-fueled grind anymore. Now, these folks are often easy marks for DEI/Woke language and talking points. In college business schools, they’re conditioned to respond best to that type of talk. When they repeat the professor’s talking point of, say, Diversity in the workplace helps raise morale, whether it’s true or not, they’re rewarded with good grades, thus, they continue to repeat it like a parrot in the real world.

It’s basic animal conditioning. You can do the same thing with your dog if you say diversity and inclusion before you take them on a walk. Do it for a couple weeks and you’ll have your dog feverishly jumping with delight when you say Inspiring Women in the Work Place.

Mr. Rush knew this little trick well and recited the corporate shibboleths accordingly, like a keen hunter using a duck call to lure in some fat mallards for a Peking-style rosast. By now, every has seem this deeply cynical - and unwise - quote from a year or so prior to his untimely death at the mighty hands of Poseidon:

You gotta love it when a 60 year old white man who wants to be down with the young folk starts maligning his own demographic just for a few brownie points. Some other choice cuts from Mr. Rush is that he also apparently fired one of those 50 year old white fuddy-duddies because, what the hell did he know?

David Lochridge, the fired employee in question.

Just another antiquated Caucasian moid from another, less enlightened era, I suppose.¹

There’s also a lot of conflicting information about the size, the ethnic make-up, and gender composition of the OceanGate staff. I’ve heard reports that he hired a 25 year old TikTok girl as his safety chief, which sounds… incredibly unlikely, but also not impossible. Unfortunately, I’ve tried to verify these facts, but Google is practically worthless and the results are clogged with various iterations of the same story about David Lochridge - the former security chief - posted dozens of times, often by the same outlets. Don’t even search OceanGate TikTok unless you want endless reams of dead-eyed, mush-mouthed wannabe TikTok influencers reading off articles you can read with your eyes into the shitty little microphones built into their headphones instead of, y’know, investing in a real mic.

I don’t think this is the same team responsible for the current disaster, but, as you can see, they don’t look overwhelmingly young, or brown, or female, for that matter.

Unfortunately, these days, the sheer glut of content constantly cascading across the digital landscape makes it very difficult to find almost any real information without doing actual, legitimate, buckle-down and put on your Lo-Fi Beats to Study To playlist hardcore internet scouring. There’s a reason for that, I think, and it’s something done by purposefully malicious actors, but that’s a topic to dig into another day. Just, next time you think to yourself, God, Google really has gone to shit, remember - that’s by design, not incompetence.

Though, we’ll get to incompetence in a moment.

The fact is that I simply don’t have time - not if I want this to be even slightly topical - to do that kind of research at the moment, nor does it ultimately matter to my point.

Let’s look back to Mr. Rush.

I’m a naturally cynical person. I’ve also worked in the corporate world long enough (unfortunately) to know insincere, mealy-mouthed corporate double-speak when I hear it. I know whenever I see some wormy, pasty little guy in a suit who looks like someone who stepped out of a LinkedIn ad shuffle up in an ill-fitting suit and start blithering about synergy and work-life balance and work-place passion, I already know I’m not gonna hear a damn word of actual substance leave his lying lips. Inspiration. Innovation. Equality. It’s nothing. It’s all nonsense. It’s verbal filler there to beguile the guileless and waste the time of anyone with sense. It’s hogwash, balderdash, poppycock, codswallop, flapdoodle, and hoo-ha.

Oh, so you wanna motivate the next generation, do ya?

Remember when Joe Biden looked like this and not the weird, decrepit flesh homunculus they’ve Weekend at Bernie-ing around for the past few years?

I have my suspicions inspiring anyone was as important to Mr. Rush as it is any CEO - absolutely none.

Now, I think the Substack crowd is a deviation above the mean in terms of being keyed in to the truth, so I have a feeling that you, dear reader, already know, or at the very least, have suspicions that none of these corporate stooges actually give a Dutch fuck about diversity and inclusion and equity or anything they say they or their company cares about.

There’s a lot of talk about the knock-on effects of diversity hiring. It’s coming up more and more. The men who are thanklessly holding the world together right now by maintaining infrastructure - mostly 50 plus year old white guys, like the kind Mr. Rush didn’t find inspiring or good for his bottom line - describe it as a Competency Crisis. Morgoth - one of this platform’s preeminent users, in my humble opinion - already wrote an article on the link between diversity hiri and this catastrophe when it was still white hot, that I highly suggest you read here.

But, personally, I think the issue is not all just diversity hiring. Diversity hiring is a symptom - not a cause. Bear with me here.

Competency crisis is a term I’m seeing increasingly more of, and I don’t really need to explain why it’s becoming so popular. Just a few days ago as of this writing, there was another near-collision on the runway at Austin-Bergstrom Airport, in Austin, Texas.

Not even six months after the first. I’ve seen people handwave this statistic away. Psh. C’mon, YakubianApe. You silly whitoid - it’s just a near miss. These happen all the time! It’s only natural that there’s gonna be a few close calls.

Oh? Is that so? Well, let’s do a bit of basic research, and - oh. Well…

Not to toot my own horn, but -

And, I don’t know about anyone else, but, personally, I don’t fancy burning to fine crisp in a fiery conflagration on the airport tarmac because Pat the 64 year old white guy who’s worked at the Austin airport for most his adult life got laid off in favor of 23 year old Ashleighynn-MickKenssy was filming a dance video for TikTok with her work-bestie LaShawnda and Luis the token flamboyant Latino homosexual instead of watching the fucking radars, because Ashleighynn, LaShawnda, and Luis get paid less collectively than Pat got paid in a year.

Diversity hiring absolutely kills. The competency crisis will continue to kill. But, I just want to point out that, when it comes to a lot of this, much of it is not as deeply rooted in the woke agenda as it seems. This isn’t to say that there aren’t true believers in high positions. There absolutely are. Human resources departments are famously lousy with true, dyed-in-the-wool woke harridans. As of this writing, the impending belly-flop of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is putting Disney on track for a billion dollars in losses in the span of several months, which would have never happened if true disciples of the DEI Gospel weren’t in very high positions of power.

Make no mistake - Kathleen Kennedy is most definitely as legitimate a true believer as they come.

And, of course, this is to say nothing of marketing and advertising firms and departments, which I’m fairly certain are where the devil’s most ardent, fervent, and truly heartless cronies dwell.

If you’ve never seen this horse-mouthed harridan before, you damn well have seen the fallout of her decisions.

But, when it comes to men like Mr. Rush and many of his type, I don’t think they’re followers of the Woke Cult. They’re more the Christmas-and-Easter type who show up to service when they need to show up. They say what they have to say, but not because they really care about, like, closing the wage gap or some such trite. Some of it is just keeping up appearances to keep in the good graces of the lefty leviathan, sure, but I think the real root of why they follow the dogma is this: they don’t want good employees

They don’t want the best. They don’t want the brightest. Those guys cost money.

No - these penny-pinching cretins want mid-wit yes-men and gullible idiots who can be duped into thinking they’re getting in on the ground floor of a good thing by spending a small fortune on pictures of cartoon apes, when they’re really just being hired to be turned, burned, and discarded once they can’t keep up. They want people who look good on the company TikTok when they jump on the next shitty dance trend, and will get investors to sink money into their grift to support women in oceanography, or whatever.

Most importantly of all, they want people they don’t have to pay as much as an older, skilled, and talented individual of any reace or gender that knows what they’re worth and demands proper compensation for their services.

Karl from Spokane, who’s sixty-six and tinkers with ham radios as a hobby, may be one of the last men to be able to understand, write, and most importantly, repair programs coded in the COBOL language, but he’s just not as inspiring as Rajeesh, because, er… well, Rajeesh was born in Bangalore. He was raised in Bellevue, Washington, but he still came from Bangalore, and he really struggled to get into college with that 4.0 GPA (the valedictorian had a 4.2!) And old Karl, well - he’s certainly not as fashionable, fun, or good for your company’s TikTok page as Kayleigh! She’s twenty-two, she’s spirited, she’s sassy, she’s totally passionate about social justice, like, for real, now, and, best of all - she’s a respected member of the LGBTQIA+ community! She’s bisexual, after all…

What was that?

Oh, okay, yeah, sure, I know, I know, she’s dating a guy, but, c’mon - she kissed a couple girls back in college, so, just go with it. Get with the program, okay? Think about it. We could keep on Karl and keep paying him six figures… or we could get Kayleigh and Rajeesh on for less! And hey - if we do, we’ll be saving a pret-tee penny, there. Maybe that gets rolled out into our year end bonuses? Eh? Eh? I know! Genius, right? So, let’s get that old loser out of here and get these two bright, shining stars on maintaining King County’s power grid. I’m sure they’ll do just fine.

Western Washington is in capable hands…

I think I’ve made my point.

I’m not celebrating Stockton Rush’s death. My sense of empathy is still functioning. The man made some very bad calls, but I would hesitate to say that what happened to him was deserved in any respect. Whether it was the siren song of Mammon and gold or, perhaps, he really was a true devotee to the Temple of Woke, his actions when it came to hiring had consequences, and he paid the ultimate price for them. Unfortunately for the rest of us, men of his type still have their cold, clammy claws wrapped firmly around our society, and, unlike Stockton Rush, they will not so easily be held accountable for their decisions.

The wages of sin is death, so the good book says. So long as the competency crisis continues, however, these disciples of Mammon will continue to reap the profit, and the paycheck of pain, suffering, and death will be collected by the laypeople. So…

Stay healthy. And, for God’s sake… stay out of the ocean.

1. Funny enough, it has now come out that the exact safety concerns this man was fired for bringing up was most likely the prime cause of the sub’s destruction. Real Greek tragedy levels of irony.