We're All On This Ship Together

In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls -- grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?" ...

Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

Prepared a sinister mate
For her -- so gaily great --
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

Alien they seemed to be;
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,

Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident 
On being anon twin halves of one august event,

Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

--Thomas Hardy, "The Convergence of the Twain"

"Bail! Bail! Bail!" goes the cry from Wall Street.

"Fail! Fail! Fail!" is the response from Main Street.

There's a fundamental disconnect between the fat cats of finance and the average North American citizen. We read of it here, as New York's Finest and Frippiest have to forego the $25 million yacht, the "rite of passage" nosejob, and the $1200/week nanny.
But we plebes down here in the trenches tend to forget that the disconnect runs both ways. The rich, including those same Wall Street fat cats, drive the economy and have a direct effect on our standard of living.

So here we are out in the ocean, three days out from land. Most of us got suckered onto this here cruise ship with slick promises. "Play now, pay later", and all that. "Put it on credit and then forget it." 

"God Himself could not sink this ship."

Where have I heard that before?

Full speed ahead, into a known icefield. No binoculars--they were left behind in Southampton, and who needs 'em? By the same token, screw the lifeboats--half of them are missing, and there were arguments to forget about the other half--more room for the rich to cavort and promenade, you see.

The iceberg reared its ugly, subprime head after nightfall. We tried to port 'round it, but turning a financial system the size of the Titanic is no small task. Ramming the berg dead on would have been smarter, but that's a hard thing to argue when you're staring calamity in the face. If we had hit dead on, we would have damaged the first couple of compartments, but that damage might have been contained, and we could have been towed, ignominously  to be sure, to safe harbor.

Instead we thought we could dodge the pesky berg and continue playing at snootery, while the black gang toiled in darkness and soot seven decks below. 

But that subprime berg exposed a fatal flaw in the ship, and did it slick as you please, letting death into six compartments.

And now we're sinking.

The command was nearly instant: Lower the compartment doors. Confine this mess to Wall Street--they created it, after all. But just like trying to avoid the consequences of hubris by porting 'round the subprime berg, lowering those doors will prove to be a colossal mistake.

I know, I know, we've got these nifty neato watertight compartments specifically designed to keep the economy from going under. But they only extend up as high as E Deck. If we leave those doors open, the ship will sink slowly, on an even keel, giving time for other boats to wend their way through the icefield and rescue us. By closing the doors,  we'll drive the bow down into the water, creating stresses no ship of state was ever designed to withstand...eventually leaving a bunch of people clinging to wreckage in the water. Oh, some of the Astor and Rockefeller class will perish, sure. But vast numbers of the sheep down in steerage are going with them to the bottom. 

That, in a nutshell, is why we have to spread the pain around. You can't confine it to Wall Street, up there on the Promenade Deck, when the water's already flooded the mail room and half the Orlop Deck. We all need to bail together and hope the pumps can keep up with the flow of bad credit we're sailing on. What we need is a slow and steady hand. We need to avoid panic. We need to think this through. The solution might be as counterintuitive as hitting the berg dead on or leaving those compartments open. The last thing we need to do is flare up a class war. Because we're all on this ship together.

It was sad
It was sad (too bad)
It was sad when the great ship went down
to the bottom of the sea 
uncles and aunts, little children lost their pants
It was sad when the great ship went down.

Oh they sailed away from England
and were almost to the shore
when the rich refused
to associate with the poor.
So they put them down below
where they'd be the first to go.
It was sad when the great ship went down.

--"Titanic" jingle, ca. 1916