Friday, January 27, 2017

Manning our stations until relieved




    Twenty-one years ago today my first regular column ran in the Chicago Sun-Times. Which means I'm finally legal. I thought I would celebrate the anniversary by digging back into the archive for something relevant, and stumbled over this, written in 2012 for the centennial of the sinking of the Titanic. (I don't have a column in today's paper because I took a few days off to finish my next Mosaic project).
     Why is this story of the Titanic's radio operators relevant? Yes, for the image of the great unsinkable vessel striking an iceberg through carelessness and going down. But more for its tone. With Donald Trump and his henchmen attacking on the mainstream media, they forget that, for many of us, this is not a job, this is a calling. If we wanted money, we'd have become rapacious businessmen like the plutocrats Trump surrounds himself with. But we aren't amoral charlatans like Trump et al, doing anything, screwing anybody for a buck, even ripping off struggling students trying to get an education at his ersatz college. We're trying to comprehend the world and present what's happening as best we understand it.  If Trump can't stand a single fact that doesn't shimmer with his supposed glory, the media is the opposite, following facts where they go, even if they make us look bad. There's a nobility in that.
Steve Bannon
     Trump chief advisor Steve Bannon's comment this week, that the press should "just keep its mouth shut" and yield the microphone to him and his bundish buddies, because THEY represent real America, shows just how out-of-it all these goosesteppers truly are. That's never happening, and the fact that Bannon would beg for relief shows it's getting under his paper-thin skin, already, one week into their attempt to ruin this great country. Sorry Charlie. The media isn't going anywhere but up his ass like a swarm of hornets. We're at our stations, tapping out our distress signal as the cold water laps around our ankles. If they think it's bad now, just wait.




                                        Oh, they built the ship Titanic
                                          to sail the ocean blue
                                         And they thought they built a ship
                                         that the water couldn't go through.
                                         But the good Lord raised his hand,
                                         said the ship would never land.
                                         It was sad when the great ship went down.



     Or so the version went that we sang at Camp Wise, in Chardon, Ohio, in the 1970s, a song that had been sung at summer camps for the previous 50 years, is sung still, and might very well be sung forever.
     Exactly 100 years this Sunday, the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, taking the lives of 1,500 passengers. With a weekend sure to be dedicated to its memory, the question is: why?

      Why this shipwreck? What about it so resonates in the public's mind? The Lusitania, torpedoed in 1915, took 1,198 lives and is a trivia question. Nobody sings about it.
     The obvious answer is that the Titanic story has something for everybody. There is luxury and poverty, heroism and cowardice, its midnight iceberg rendezvous a payback for the boast of being "unsinkable." Movies and books keep the memory alive, as does its presence in the language—almost everybody knows what rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic means.
     As the son of a radio operator, who grew up listening to the urgent chirpings of Morse code coming out of the Hammarlund Super Pro radio receiver displayed in his den, the part of the Titanic story that always gets to me is the heroic tale of the Marconi operators, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride.
     As the junior radioman—he was just 22—Bride had the night shift. It was just after midnight, April 15, 1912, and he was telling Phillips to go to bed, when the captain stuck his head into the wireless room.
     "We've struck an iceberg," Captain Edward Smith said. "You better get ready to send out a call for assistance."
     Ten minutes later Smith was back, telling them to start calling for help.
     Phillips began tapping out "CQD" —"CQ" meant "calling all stations" and "D" meant "distress" — as well as the ship's location and call letters, "MGY."
     "He flashed away at it and we joked while he did so," Bride recalled. "All of us made light of the disaster."
     Bride told Phillips that here was his opportunity to send an "SOS."
     "It's the new call and it may be your last chance to send it," Bride said. "We picked up first the steamship Frankfurt. We gave her our position and said we had struck an iceberg and needed assistance."
     Phillips reached the Cunard liner Carpathia. "Come at once!" he signaled. The liner replied it was 58 miles away and "coming hard." Phillips told Bride to tell the captain. "I went through an awful mass of people to his cabin," he later said. "The decks were full of scrambling men and women."
     Over the next two hours, as the ship slowly sank, Phillips kept sending out distress signals, hoping to find a closer ship ­— there was one, but its radio operator had gone to sleep. Bride kept tabs on what was going on outside.
     "I went out on deck and looked around. The water was pretty close up to the boat deck. There was a great scramble aft, and how poor Phillips worked through it, I don't know," Bride later recalled.
     Phillips suggested "with a sort of a laugh" that Bride look out and see if all the people were off in the boats, or if any boats were left. Bride found one collapsible boat left, only because the men were having an "awful time" trying to get it free. Captain Smith returned to the radio shack one last time.
     "Men," the captain said. "You have done your full duty. You can do no more. Abandon your cabin. Now it's every man for himself."
     "I looked out," Bride said. "The boat deck was awash. Phillips clung on sending and sending. He clung on for about 10 minutes, or maybe 15 minutes after the captain had released him. The water was then coming into our cabin. He was a brave man. I learned to love him that night and I suddenly felt for him a great reverence to see him standing there sticking to his work while everybody else was raging about."
     Bride returned to the collapsible boat, and was holding onto it when a wave crested over the deck and washed it away. He turned for one last look at the ship, "smoke and sparks were rushing out of her funnel." Bride lost hold on that boat and had to swim through the icy water to the other boats, as the band played "Autumn" on deck. Hands pulled him into another lifeboat. Phillips perished.
     For me, the Titanic radio operator story is a metaphor for life. It signals to us something about duty and perseverance in the face of difficulty. You're not the captain. You didn't design the ship. You don't own it. But you stay at your station, no matter what, tapping out your messages with all the skill you have, as long as you can, until relieved.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 13, 2012


     Postscript: I like to act on a good idea when I see it. In the comments below, Bob Miller had a good suggestion. I jumped on Twitter and put it out there, for all the good that might do, and I'll try to tuck it in the column as well. Language is everything, as Newt Gingrich showed us, to a great nation's misfortune. 



13 comments:

  1. Read this WaPo article by Margaret Sullivan and thought it was similar to your sentiment: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-traditional-way-of-reporting-on-a-president-is-dead-and-trumps-press-secretary-killed-it/2017/01/22/75403a00-e0bf-11e6-a453-19ec4b3d09ba_story.html

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  2. A good one! Considering Mr. Bannon's "bundish" warning, I think the free press should stand up a little taller and stop calling yourselves "the media," which could mean anything. You are the free press. We need you to be "the free press".

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    1. That's a great idea. I'm going to do that. Thanks.

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  3. Bob Miller, I like that... the free press.

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  4. I heard yesterday that the ACLU had a huge jump in membership. I hope the events of the last few months will bring people back to legitimate newspapers and journalists. People armed with knowledge cannot be controlled. Without knowledge we are just puppets to be manipulated by the puppet masters.

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  5. The story of the wireless operators brought a tear to me eye once again and I found it an apt metaphor for journalists refusing to surrender to the bullying bundists. Lets not go down with the ship however. Maybe the ship of state can right itself and sail on if we stick to our posts, free press and free people.

    john

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  6. I hate to pour cold water on a noble idea, but "free press" has (for me, anyway) a bad undercurrent, or aftertaste: "free" as in "you don't have to pay for it." That characterizes much if not most of the information that's available through the internet, which is the situation that has undermined a lot of newspapers and other traditional media.

    Bitter Scribe

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  7. "If a country has a free press, its newspapers, magazines, and television and radio station are able to express any opinions they want, even these criticize the government and other organizations." The Cambridge Dictionary

    I think "Free Press" works nicely to meet the current need.

    Hard to find any humor in a tragedy like the sinking of the Titanic, but a newspaper account that noted the London Symphony had booked a passage but it was cancelled at the last minute motivated some wag to lament the lost opportunity for "one Hell of a rendition of 'Nearer My God to Thee.'"

    That The Lusitania is, unlike the Titanic, lost to public memory might be due in part to the fact that it was only one of many wartime tragedies, but it did play a major role in convincing the American public that we should enter the Great War. When I worked for the Army and visited the Pentagon I frequently walked down a corridor lined with historic recruiting posters, the most provocative one sporting a "Remember the Lusitania" slogan over a chilling picture of a young mother, babe in arms, drowning in a blue green sea.

    Tom Evans

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  8. #FreePress or we're doomed! Keep up the good fight for all of us!

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  9. Here is another story of a woman in Chicago, who no less heroically remained at her station saving lives, while facing certain death. If you ever find yourself wandering around Holy Sepulchre Cemetery go to Section 24, Block 7, Lot 65, and pay your respects to Julia Curran Berry.

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  10. Oh, it was a big tragedy. I like the movie "Titanic". I watched it a lot of times. You know, I found one company which suggests a great expedition near the West Greenland https://poseidonexpeditions.com/antarctica/falklands-south-georgia-best-southern-ocean/ And I consider about joining it.

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  11. At least no idiots were telling passengers or possible rescuers not to worry since it was a fake iceberg.

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