It's now reached the point where an editorial piece on this is warranted. Strap yourselves in, boys and girls, I'm setting the TERCOM to 200 feet, hard ride.
Some of the more egregiously negligent decisions taken by this Stockton Rush character have already been covered, but I've since learned of another one, and this one should
really result in people reaching for the flaming pitchforks -
Rush struck a deal with Boeing to buy carbon fibre that Boeing had declared unsuitable for use in aircraft manufacture, and bragged about it.
Yes, that's right. Rush
knowingly used structurally unsound material in the construction of his underwater Hindenburg.
Just
how egregious does this individual's conduct have to be, before we start re-evaluating the whole "simping for the rich" business that's now become it's own cottage industry on social media and elsewhere?
Just to recap, the death toll from this incident was
five people. An earlier incident involving a death toll
two orders of magnitude greater has seen an inverse level of coverage. Along with the revelation that Greek authorities deliberately held off launching a vessel that could have rescued those people, because said authorities wanted said vessel and its passengers to be someone else's problem.
In summary, the response of the rich capitalist press to that loss of life in Greek waters consists in the main, of "yawn, yawn, lots of smelly brown foreign plebs have drowned, womp womp". By contrast, the rich capitalist press responded to Rush's foolhardy misadventure with
"OH NOES WE MUST SAVE THE RICH PEOPLE!!!!1111ELEVENTYONE".
So, 500 people fleeing desperate conditions in their homeland are written off, because they're not rich enough to own penis-extension Bond villain yachts and have slush funds in the Cayman Islands, while five rich tossers end up having
entire fucking navies rushing to try and dig them out of their own shat nappies.
I've already commented on the underlying phenomenon in
this post, which I wrote
no less than eleven years ago, in which I mentioned Tom Wolfe, author of
The Bonfire of the Vanities, and his coining of the word "plutography" to describe sycophantic scribbling about rich people, with his deliberate intention that the word be seen as being in association with "pornography".
Of course, one of the sleazier manifestations of this phenomenon is the infamous
Fifty Shades of Grey pulp fiction, which sees gratuitous sexual assault being normalised, so long as whoever is doing the assaulting has enough money to insulate himself from the consequences. Cynics have already remarked that if the central character was a welfare recipient, this wouldn't have been a Hollywood movie, but an episode of
Crimewatch.
But the level of utter obsequious toadying, grovelling and simping in this regard, has reached the point now where even
Hello! magazine is ashamed of treading in some of the waters in question, preferring to stick to the safe waters of "celebrity" gushing and yakking about various Royals. Though of course
no such restriction applies to the more foetid sections of the social media Wild West, which has also seen the usual suspects turn this episode into yet another excuse to rant about "woke" - yes, you read that correctly. Some of the shittier specimens are claiming that Rush hired young people because of a "woke hiring" policy, and that he "cancelled" the idea of 50 year old white men from being part of the staff.
No, Let's nail this bullshit once and for all.
Rush hired those young people because they were
cheap. Indeed,
all of his major financial transactions have been driven by cost cutting and corner cutting. The reasons he didn't hire older, experienced people, are [1] because their expertise is expensive, and rightly so, and [2] they would have offered active resistance to his bad decisions, in a manner that young people lacking the security of 30 years' hard won experience would be unable to.
None of his decisions had anything to do with being "woke", but instead had
everything to do with his being an ego-preening narcissist, borderline sociopath and entirely typical capitalist cheapskate.
Indeed, it's fair to characterise Rush as the Donald Trump of submersible operations - hubristically cocksure of himself and his entirely self-declared "genius", drawn to the tackiest options like a three year old to shiny Xmas baubles, and manifestly bereft of even the most basic level of human concern for others. Rush was willing to take dangerous risks with other people's lives in order to line his pockets,
For decades, we've seen the über-rich treat Planet Earth and its other inhabitants as their personal playthings - their toys. That's all we are to these people. For too long, the individuals in question have launched into vanity projects of varying levels of tackiness, only to decamp at speed to the business of sipping pina coladas in their mansions the moment reality bites hard, leaving the poors to mop up the shit - assuming of course that the poors aren't among the casualties. For once, we've seen one of the over-moneyed wastrel class given a short, sharp lesson in consequences that sadly won't be educational for him, upon account of said consequences being crushingly fatal.
The time is long overdue, for the rest of us to start making these people face the consequences of their spoilt toddler mentality. It's also long overdue for the "news" to start covering
real issues in a substantive manner, instead of wasting air time on rich tossers and their Hooray Henry antics. The one hope I have from this episode, is that it may become the catalyst for flushing the "neoliberal" pestilence down the toilet once and for all, and putting fuck-you right-wing capitalism and its exploiters into the dustbin of history.
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