Q. Why does a dog lick its testicles?
A. Because it can.
Q. What are five rich men on the bottom of the ocean?
A. A good start.
Ordinarily I would have at least some sympathy for people in life-threatening situations.
Anyone who travels 12,500 feet under the sea for the purpose of exploration and knowledge deserves my best wishes, and if in trouble, deserves my sympathy. Heck, thoughts and prayers.
But someone who paid $250,000 for a ticket on a submersible for no other purpose than to dive under the sea and see the wreck of the Titanic? Who has no other purpose in the trip than being able to brag that they could afford to toss that sort of money around and do something very few people could ever afford to do.
And of course American mass media is in an uproar about those five poor rich people who are running out of oxygen on the bottom of the ocean.
We are spending millions of dollars on the search to save these poor rich adventurers because everyone knows, the Good Lord wants rich people to be safe.
Unless you’re really paying close attention, you may not realize that 500 poor non-rich people drowned in an accident off Greece,
You may not realize that whyat we have here is a case of what we might call Natalee Holloway Syndrome.
Holloway was a a pretty blonde from Alabama who disappeared from Aruba in the late spring of 2005. She was 18 and had just graduated from high school. The case was never solved and no one really knows what happened to her, although her family did have her declared legally dead in 2012.
What 24-hour cable news taught us in 2005 is that it is not possible to give too much coverage when a beautiful blonde disappears.
The five people in the submersible are basically the 2023 version of Natalee Holloway.
The 500 people who drowned off Greece are the 2023 equivalent of the girls who disappeared that summer who weren’t blonde, beautiful or white.
I really couldn’t care much less whether the five aquanauts are rescued other than maybe the most basic feeling of not wanting people who aren’t evil to die.
I suppose there is one very minor silver lining in all this coverage. Every minute cable news spends on the folks on the bottom of the ocean is one minute that can’t be spent on Donald Trump, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kari Lake or the rest of America’s right-wing wack jobs.
Maybe we could send some oxygen down to the crew.
One person, an expert on submersibles, declined to go because he thought the joints were questionable. If an expert decides not to go, follow the expert!