Nautical Justice

When is a tragedy a good thing? When it happens to bad people.

Greek tragedy is defined by several key characteristics. The protagonists of Greek tragedy are almost always of notable birthright or class, like a king; they are sympathetic to the audience; or, if not exactly likeable, they have an otherwise secure, ideal life. Regardless of their goodness, the tragic protagonist suffers from a fatal flaw, a self-inflicted, fortune-reversing failure that leads them to misery and, very often, death.

Tragedy, a word hopelessly overused in today’s world, is now merely an adjective assigned to anything that makes us sad. I might blame this linguistic and cultural decay on dramatic tragedy’s many metamorphoses since its ancient Attic roots, culminating in modern preoccupations with mundane and ordinary misfortune, such as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, but it is not my purpose to relitigate that argument here.

My purpose is to laugh at dead and dying billionaires.

The extremely-dead occupants of OceanGate’s submersible, the people who spent $250,000 each for a macabre glimpse of a marine graveyard, have been missing long enough for the probability of cannibalism, piss-drinking, and decomposition to have increased to near-certainty.

I personally believe they died days ago with an instantaneous implosion, which seems the most likely cause of death given the submersible’s shoddy craftsmanship. This has not, however, stopped the American and Canadian governments from launching an expensive, stillborn search and rescue effort. Indeed, there are still those praying for a miracle before their precious supply of oxygen runs out—which, at the time of this writing, is in about six hours.

Frankly, if I were a billionaire trapped at the bottom of the ocean in a tin can, I would simply pull myself up to the surface by my own bootstraps.

Their disappearance is not a tragedy by any modern standard. Five fewer billionaires, among them a terf-island private jet financier and a landlord heir to one of the largest fortunes in Pakistan, is not sad news. Their demise is a deliverance.

That said, these doomed idiots and their story do fit the general narrative of Greek tragedy. They may be wholly unlikeable characters, but they nevertheless torpedoed otherwise ideal lives because of their unresolved personal flaws. This is, of course, why I am labouring over what tragedy used to mean and what it means to us today.

Tragic characters often fall victim to not just any flaw, but their own hubris. They do not heed warnings, they do not accept their fate; they believe their exceptionalism allows them to surpass the limits of ordinary mortals. Tragedy is also buoyed by a healthy helping of dramatic irony, when the audience knows what is happening, why it happened, and what will most likely happen, while our hapless heroes do not. In Shakespearean terms, the peak of dramatic irony is when Romeo, believing Juliet is dead, kills himself while the horrified audience can only watch, their dread intensified by the knowledge Juliet is only temporarily sedated.

You and I are smart enough to know what happens when a tiny metal can dives over 10,000 feet down to the crushing pressure of the ocean floor. You and I know exactly how fast to run when handed a waiver that, repeatedly, signs away our lives in the case of disaster. We know not to place our fates in the care of a slippery tech-bro whose preoccupied hands pilot his patchwork vessel with an off-brand Xbox controller.

We know these things, but rich people do not. Wealth and status rot their brains. The same anti-regulation, anti-health & safety, ant-‘red tape’ caprice these billionaires weaponized while alive also manifests as the hubris necessary to believe themselves immortal, believe themselves swashbuckling adventurers instead of privileged fools lured by a conman to a lightless, lonely grave.

If they were ordinary people, they would merely be stupid and we could feel bad for them. Hell, one of the passengers was a 19-year-old whose billionaire father likely dragged onboard against his will. But they are not ordinary people, they are entitled wasps who routinely exploited the misery of others to fuel their lavish lifestyles.

The crushed, sunken billionaires are worthless compared to the crushed souls of countless employees and ordinary people who they oppressed while ruling their terrestrial fiefdoms.

This is why so many of us revel in their doom, because there is a real sense of justice to it, justice we are denied in our dystopian, capitalist world, structurally designed as it is to protect the rich from comeuppance and bearing responsibility for their crimes. Collective experiences like this are, quite simply, cathartic.

Catharsis: another key element of Greek tragedy. Catharsis can mean to cleanse, to purge, to clean out. “Catharsis” is, in fact, what thousands of Greek citizens chanted in the streets as their fascist government collapsed in 1974. It is what happens at the end of the tragic play, when the dread and the suspense and the horrible ordeal of knowing something bad will happen is released from us as if shot from a cannon when the bad thing does, at last, happen.

It’s what we feel when pods of killer whales conduct organized assaults on yachts in the Mediterranean. We live vicariously through them and we cheer them on. We wish we could literally dismantle the millionaires and the billionaires and the unjust world they have created, but we can’t, because we have something to lose, so we let the orcas do the work. All they have left to lose is their home.

You know what is a real tragedy in modern terms? On June 14, a huge boat filled with hundreds of migrants—risking their lives in search of a better future for themselves and their children—capsized near the shores of a ferociously anti-immigrant Greek state. Nearly 100 of them are reported dead.

This horrific loss of life has been completely overshadowed by five fallen kings who willingly entombed themselves in a nautical coffin. If you feel so inclined to shed tears over a handful of billionaires, perhaps take a moment and recalibrate your moral compass.