Chris Powell: Wretched excess in the deep; Ellsberg’s lesson

— Photo by Jjm596

MANCHESTER, Conn.

As they descended toward their target 2½ miles under the North Atlantic, the five people aboard in the OceanGate Expeditions submersible vessel Titan were, at least superficially, aware of the risks they were taking for a close look at the wreck of RMS Titanic. They apparently had been compelled to provide a waiver of the company's liability, a waiver that repeatedly noted that the journey could be fatal.

But no one had been killed yet on such expeditions, and the five could consider themselves heroic explorers.

Since the wreck of the Titanic already had been discovered and extensively photographed, there was no necessity for the trip. To the vessel's pilot, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, it was a way of making a lot of money -- $250,000 per passenger. For his passengers the trip was more than a bit of arrogance and wretched excess.

Because the vessel imploded at great depth, there is little chance that its occupants suffered or even knew they were being killed. As many in the submarine service and industry in Connecticut know, death by implosion in the deep is instantaneous, a matter of milliseconds, too fast for the human brain to perceive.

In exchange for this mercy there will be no bodies to recover.

Many prayers sought the rescue of the occupants of the Titan, and their loss has been felt throughout the world. Instead of the granting of those prayers, the world has gotten two valuable reminders: first, of the limits imposed on mankind by the natural world, and second, of the incredibly precious smallness of the environment in which humans can survive. Despite many science-fiction movies to the contrary, the environmentalists are right in one respect: There is no Planet B.

While the ocean bottom holds many secrets, as the infinity of the universe does, mankind hardly needs to learn them as much as how to get along with itself and improve life where it can be lived: on the surface of the planet. Lives can be expended far better than in pursuit of another look at a shipwreck, and while the deep will always have to be challenged now and then, the poet George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) saw long ago that it would remain master.

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean -- roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain.
Man marks the earth with ruin. His control
Stops with the shore. Upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.

xxx

How should the country remember Daniel Ellsberg, who died the other week?

As national security adviser in 1971, Henry Kissinger called him “the most dangerous man in America” for copying classified documents about the Vietnam war -- the Pentagon Papers -- and distributing them to news organizations.

Ellsberg was charged with espionage. But the Pentagon Papers revealed nothing of battlefield use to the enemy. Instead they showed that the administrations of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon had been lying to the country about the war. Ellsberg was dangerous only to dishonest and criminal government officials.

Ellsberg might have been convicted except for the crimes the Nixon administration committed in pursuit of him, illegally wiretapping him and burglarizing his psychiatrist's office. So the charges against him were dismissed.

The Ellsberg affair may have been understood best by Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman, a criminal himself. He was taped telling Nixon: "To the ordinary guy, all this is gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing. .... You can't trust the government. You can't believe what they say. And you can't rely on their judgment. The implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it's wrong, and the president can be wrong."

Has anything changed in 50 years?

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics and other topics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).