An Anniversary To Remember

For some reason, the one hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic didn't resonate so much in my consciousness this past weekend, maybe because the sinking of the "unsinkable" ocean liner on April 14, 1912 is an ongoing obsession that doesn't need an anniversary to get people interested in it.  It remains one of the greatest maritime disasters of all time, and it speaks to the age-old lesson of what happens when human arrogance and hubris meet reality.

The astonishing thing about the Titanic's legacy is that people continue to obsess over the lessons it teaches without actually learning any of them. Because, for the past century, human arrogance and a desire to conceive of and build things in the superlative have only continued, often with disastrous results. Space travel worked out well at first, but NASA engineers were so overconfident in their abilities that they didn't foresee the possibilities of something like the Challenger and Columbia disasters in the space shuttle program. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey built two 110-story skyscrapers, and the World Trade Center's engineers thought they'd thought of everything to ensure its permanence . . . without thinking of a possible weakness in the towers' lightweight construction that terrorist commandos wishing to do us harm could exploit, or even whether the Twin Towers made sense to build in the first place. That human arrogance has now manifested itself in China, where even taller skyscrapers dominate the Shanghai skyline.

The best example of such arrogance portrayed in the cinema may not be in the movie Titanic or in its 1958 predecessor, A Night To Remember, but in fact it may be in Star Wars.  Specifically, it's where the Galactic Empire's mighty, planet-destroying, impregnable Death Star turns out to have a small thermal exhaust port running to the reactor system . . . a minor, seemingly insignificant feature that the rebels fighting against the Empire exploit and seek to hit with a torpedo to destroy the station. Luke Skywalker accomplishes the feat, and the station blows up, killing the Imperial officers on board who boasted of the station being "the ultimate power in the universe."

It should be noted that not every act of audacity on the scale of the Titanic is punished by fate. Most NASA missions were carried successfully, including the Apollo 13 rescue of 1970, just as the Titanic's slightly smaller sister ship Olympic managed to stay in service for 24 years before reaching the end of her design life and being retired by the White Star/Cunard Line (the White Star and Cunard companies had merged just before the Olympic was taken out of service and dismantled). But even the Olympic had her issues, having collided twice with other craft and causing one of these ships, a lightship, to sink, killing four of its crewmen. Yes, reaching for the stars can yield great results, but overreaching can lead one to be star-crossed.