For Titanic aficionados with a leftist agenda, the numbers and percentages of passengers who got to the lifeboats -- their sexes and social classes -- can be crunched to prove just about whatever one wants.
"The reality of class, selfishness, and altruism in the disaster is more ambiguous," observes Edward Tenner in his article "Titanic and the 1%" published by the American Enterprise Institute.
"As Titanic scholars acknowledge,
the survival rate of passengers depended in part on proximity to the boat deck. So it is no wonder that nearly all the women and children in first class were saved. Conversely, complex passageways and language barriers further delayed evacuation of third-class passengers. In all classes, as the literary scholar Stephen Cox has underscored in an essay and an excellent book, moral choices cut across social lines.
"Individual responses aside, there are surprises in the statistics.
For example, women in third class were significantly more likely to survive than first-class men: 46 versus 33 percent."
He adds: "The most surprising and least known statistic is that nearly twice as many third-class as second-class men survived - 16 percent versus 8 percent - despite the greater distance of the former from the boats.
How come the chivalry of Titanic's richest passengers failed get proper attention in the "Titanic" movie? Because today no one would believe the truth; so says Cuban-born author and historian Luis E. Aguilar in his essay "The Titanic and The Decline of Western Ethnic."
He explains: "The modern public; immersed in the moral relativism that justifies all conducts, bombarded by attacks on the hypocrisy of Western culture, will grasp base behavior more readily than self-sacrifice, all the faster if it denigrates the rich and the powerful. As in every Mexican TV soap opera, Titanic's rich behave like pigs. So much so that when Chinese president Jiang Zemin watched the movie, he smiled, "Gentlemen, behold the enemy." For him and many Americans, the movie's cloying, cowardly first class passengers represent that capitalistic ethic."
Read more:
Blog: Why the Left Loves the Titanic Disaster
