Remember the Titan?

“The Titan submersible disaster could have been prevented, the U.S. Coast Guard said in a report Tuesday that held OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush responsible for ignoring safety warnings, design flaws and crucial oversight which, had he survived, may have resulted in criminal charges.” —Associated Press, August 6, 2025

In the summer of 2023, my phone started buzzing with texts from friends and family: “Have you seen this?” “Check this out!” “Ten other people have probably sent you this already, but…”

A submersible called the Titan had lost contact with its mothership on a tourist voyage to the remains of the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean. Over the next 24 hours, it seemed like the whole world was transfixed by the drama of the missing vehicle, its wealthy passengers, and the race against time to find them. Then we learned of its implosion, and the certain, horrifying death of the five aboard. And we shook our heads and sighed at the preventable tragedy of it all.

Afterward, the most common question friends asked me was: Would you have gone on the Titan if you could? In response, I’d tell them the following:

In 1898—14 years before the Titanic sank, nine years before it was even conceived of—a sailor, jewelry-maker, and writer named Morgan Robertson published a novella called Futility that received little fanfare at the time.

Futility told the fictional story of the world’s largest and most luxurious ship… traveling on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic Ocean… carrying the world’s richest passengers but too few lifeboats… that struck an iceberg and sank… with thousands of lives lost.

The name of the ship? The Titan.

The takeaway? Don’t board a vessel named Titan OR Titanic—it ends in tragedy, both in fiction and in fact.

Now, two years later, the findings by the Coast Guard investigation of OceanGate are fairly damning: a culture of silencing staff who raised safety concerns, shady maneuvers to skirt regulations on passenger vessels, and straight-up lying about the Titan’s registration, specifications, and crew qualifications.

They’re not dissimilar to the critiques of the Titanic’s captain and shipbuilder from the official government inquiries into that disaster: that they should have prioritized safety over speed, that they ignored ice warnings, that they were too slow to alert passengers to the danger.

But what I find most striking about the Titan saga is that the history was all right there, and Stockton Rush must have known it. Any budding third-grade Titanic enthusiast—I speak from personal experience—can tell you that one of the salient features of the Titanic story, one that has made it so universally resonant, is that it is a cautionary tale about human hubris. (In fact, I’d wager that this is exactly how many a young Titanic enthusiast first learns the word hubris.)

But Rush and his enablers at OceanGate seem to have been so hubristic, so confident in their own genius, and, perhaps, so in the thrall of the profit they could make, that they failed to see the obvious parallels—that they were reenacting the Titanic story in real time. Or perhaps they did know, but were sure that their story would end differently.

To be clear: I believe in my bones that every life is precious. I’m not cheering for anyone’s death. I’m looking for lessons in it.

I’ve been thinking about this now that I’m back in the belly of the beast (that’s the USA): An extraordinarily hubristic president and cadre of opportunistic enablers seem intent on extracting as much personal profit as possible as they drive the complex vessel that is the American economy, democracy, and empire as a whole into an iceberg of their own making. The hubris, shortsightedness, and drive for profit seem the same. A key difference, I suspect, is that many of them don’t know the history that would be instructive in this case. Or perhaps they do and are willfully ignoring it.

That gives me hope. Because if Trump and his backers (or, for that matter, Netanyahu and his) looked at the history of autocratic regimes that rely on media control and distraction, of regimes that try to take people’s rights away or sell them to the highest bidder, of regimes that scapegoat easy targets to deflect attention from their own corruption, they’d know that it generally doesn’t end well. Sooner or later, the people take back their power.

This regime’s hubris will contribute to its downfall. We can’t know when, of course. It’s likely it’ll take way too long. And that they’ll take way too many unsuspecting people down with the ship. Because that’s the other thing all of these stories have in common: They end in tragedy for everyone involved. The devastation racked up by this administration is already too heavy to hold, too overwhelming to mourn.

On the other hand: what if U.S. democracy isn’t the ship and the Trump regime isn’t the reckless crew dashing us all against the rocks? Perhaps it’s more accurate that the Trump regime is the ship itself—too big, too brittle, moving too fast—and the people, organizing in the venues where we have power, will be the iceberg that disrupts it.

Perhaps, at least, we can choose to make it so.

Remember: It wasn’t a dramatic, deep wound in the side of the Titanic that sank the ship. It was the pressure of the hull against the bumpy ice—creating small ruptures in a handful of steel plates in just enough critical places—that made the whole thing go down.

What else?

• Speaking of escalating pressure: I’ll be at the “Workers Over Billionaires” rallies on Labor Day—you in?
• The clean energy revolution is here no matter what—and we’re celebrating and demanding it all over the world on “Sun Day,” September 21.
• The Onion is also chiming in with Titanic updates this week. I’m afraid this would be me.