“It was later than I thought; When I first believed you; Now I cannot share your laughter; Ship of fools.” - Grateful Dead.
Comedian Dave Chappelle does a bizarre impression of the dead people on the Titanic as OceanGate’s doomed submersible approached.
In a gurgling voice, he cries, “Come, join us in our watery grave.”
I don’t know why I find this funny. It’s in poor taste to poke fun at dead people who cannot poke back. Yet Chappelle deftly captures a comical absurdity: A shipwreck on its way to a shipwreck.
The pilot of this submersible, OceanGate’s Stockton Rush, ignored warnings about the integrity of his vessel.
The comedy is that this arrogant CEO imploded with his inadequately engineered craft, the Titan, on June 18, 2023 at age 61. The tragedy is that he took four passengers with him.
The U.S. Coast Guard has launched a 10-day hearing into this disaster that will continue into next week. But OceanGate’s former operations director David Lochridge has already pinpointed the most likely cause in just a few words.
"Stockton liked to do things on the cheap," he testified on Tuesday.
Sell it, don’t smell it
In 2016, Lochridge moved his entire family from Scotland to work for OceanGate. The veteran engineer and submersible pilot said he soon came to feel that he was hired to lend the company a touch of scientific credibility.
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