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I would like to begin by acknowledging Molly’s point from last week. At first I staunchly believed that the Titanic had absolutely no intrinsic meaning and it was an entirely blank slate. I found Molly’s argument that the disaster did have inherent personal meaning to those on the Titanic and those directly affected by it to be very convincing, and she has totally changed my mind on this issue. I do think that while the personal meaning of the disaster is important to those directly affected, I think that it is significantly less important on the broader scale of historical memory than perceived cultural meanings, which affect millions of people. In Part II of Down With The Old Canoe, I was personally disturbed by the intense neo-conservative and misogynistic cultural meanings placed on the re-discovery of the Titanic.
Biel frames the search for the Titanic with the Carter Presidency and quotes a variety of sources that essentially tear down president Carter as a weak minded liberal who is essentially the worst thing someone can be- a woman. Aside from the being incredibly simple minded, its shocking that these things were published a mere 40 years ago. Biel also discusses Clive Cussler’s book, Raising the Titanic!, which framed the search for the Titanic as a struggle against communism, liberals, feminism and government regulation. What I thought was interesting was that while the book was a bestseller, the movie was “a big-budget Hollywood flop in 1980” (Biel 202). In the four years between the publishing of the book and the making of the movie did American cultural thought shift to reject Cussler’s reactionary views? If so this is great proof of the inherent lack of meaning that disasters have in terms of national culture as a whole.
I am curious if the Titanic had been found in the late 90s if it would have been framed differently by the media. Biel raises a question similar when he muses on how the discovery of the Titanic might have been framed differently if the French found it. During the late 90s the American economy was having a surge of growth under a liberal president, Bill Clinton. America was also the undisputed world power after the fall of the USSR. How would society react to the discovery during this time? Would it have been framed in terms of a different social issue? Or would it just have been less culturally prominent and only important for historians and disaster lovers?