In my 15,000 page Mad Manuscript, is a section I am proud of, on the Titanic. What does the Titanic have to do with free speech? Everything! I analyze the speech, and sophistry, which occurred as the ship was designed; as it went to sea; as it navigated; as it hit the iceberg; as it sank; and then the generations of speech about it after. It is a rich case study in parrhesia, chatter.
Some of the contributory causes to the disaster are quite familiar: human arrogance, exceptionalism, hand-waving away risks, denial, and the formation of narratives which oppose randomness and despair. I found many exemplary speech-instances, for example that the Titanic had a fake smokestack so no one would think it had fewer engines than a rival, or the idea that compartments which were basically fillable fish-tanks made it "unsinkable". In real-time, in the short duration of the actual sinking, are some intriging examples of the impacts of language: on one side, an officer interpreted the Captain's instructions, "women and children first", literally, sending lifeboats out half-filled if there weren't enough people of those descriptions to fill them; the officer on the other side more sensibly allowed men to fill the empty seats.
However, there is one aspect of modern apocalypse entirely lacking in the Titanic disaster: the rank silliness, the extraordinary inanity, the slapstick. There were no officers assuring passengers that the ship was not actually sinking; there was no line of passengers to receive ivermectin injections from a quack assuring them that the veterinary drug would make them float better. Today, watching the spectacle of the clown-president, the Vaudevillean-in-Chief, the present apocalypse has an element of dark slapstick: as if Laurel and Hardy actually were killed when the house collapses at the end of the film (right after Hardy has said, "This has been the worst day of my life").
I have theories, but it actually seems harder to account for the inanity of the end of the world, than the end itself. It is as if someone said to Gibbon, "OK, write it again, but with humor". One of my favorite lines, my whole adult life, has been, "The situation is hopeless, but not serious"-- but I never thought I would be living it this intensely, in the moment. Every day offers something-- yesterday, Laura Loomer, a batshit-crazy social media personality, met with the President in the Oval Office, to tell him to fire the head of the NSA, and Trump did so within the hour-- government by gossip, rumor and impulse. As if the president of the fourth grade class had authority to launch a nuclear weapon. Even his sinister tweet is funny: "Shalom, Columbia", as he deprived the university of $400 million in funding as punishment for a nonexistent antisemitism.
I also remember Marx's saw, that all human events happen twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
Most human events have their parallels in the recent past; I have traced five free speech emergencies in our history, prior to the current one: the Alien and Sedition Acts circa 1800, the World War I oppression of those opposing the war or the draft, the McCarthy era, the Vietnam era, the Patriot Act after 9/11. But there is no precedent among major world leaders for this slapstick: not Napoleon or Hitler, or further back, Frederick the Great or Henry V or VIII, or Charlemagne. You could of course turn to Third World dictators like Idi Amin, but they lacked the power to tank the world economy, as Trump did yesterday with his silly tariffs.
To find parallels, you really need to go back to figures in the late Roman Empire, like Caligula or even Helagabulus. One would think that the conditions, though, were very different: there had already been centuries of degradation, the Republic forgotten, quasi-religious adoration of talentless emperors. Trump succeeding Biden is rather like Helagabulus replacing Augustus (see the title of last month's essay, "That Fell Apart Really Quickly").
At the end of last month's essay, I mentioned my "Stupid Voter Theory"-- the idea that neither party has assigned much value to educating voters, let alone imparting moral principles to them-- its easier to win elections if you grow an electorate easily baffled by bullshit. But there is still a missing piece here. Decades ago, I iamgined an alien race that did not know falsehood: if you told them to jump off a cliff, and that the wind would bring them back up, they would do so. But I imagined a basic human common-sense, a groundedness, that would prevent almost any human anywhere-- certainly any American, admitting my own exceptionalism-- from believing that. I was wrong.
Whenever our best analysis of a problem ends in "plus a missing ingredient, which we can't identify right now"-- think gravity, or consciousness-- ample room remains for the irrational, even the supernatural. I don't like living in that zone-- let alone dying in it.