Finally, a news story that can serve to float all our boats
Schadenfreude has been in short supply this year. Nobody can take any pleasure in the misery of others because we’re all too consumed by our own personal misery, which is abundant, and pleasurable in that everyone secretly believes the pandemic has been especially bad for them.
But schadenfreude is the glue that holds humanity together; society cannot function for long when other people’s screw-ups make us angry and not smug. The world is just too full of accidents and botches and for the last year even the most mundane have felt like a matter of life and death: a slipped mask, a thoughtless spin.
Celebrity nonsense has enraged us where before it provided light relief — the Kardashians’ obliviousness is no longer funny but murderous, symbolic of deep inequalities.
Yes, humans are too frail, too fallible to be our heroes; we didn’t know that what we needed instead was a 200,000 tonne cargo ship. It turned out that the big boat that got stuck, and then unstuck, in the Suez Canal was something we could all enjoy.
There was something satisfying, almost comforting, about the aerial photographs: the big stupid boat, the frankness of its sideways angle. It was so clearly a problem, and it had nothing at all to do with us. Yes, we were a million miles away from this one and couldn’t be tangentially blamed for failing in some way to adhere to public health guidelines. We have learnt that public health is messy, inconsistent, complicated. It’s difficult to explain the problem with early morning training sessions to somebody who believes that you can’t get Covid outside, or that it’s alright to get for the young and fit and short of pants. But here was a bit of global news that you could explain to a toddler, to an arts graduate, to a Dublin GAA player.
We didn’t need pastel infographics to explain that a big ship was blocking lots of other ships. We didn’t need a second round of infographics about the ways in which the first infographics were problematic. It wasn’t ultimately about climate change, or the pandemic, or systemic injustice — and the few voices that pointed out the ways that it was in fact connected to all of these things were politely ignored.
Before it got stuck, the boat had traced a course that looked a lot like a teenage boy’s rendering of a penis on another teenage boy’s copybook. The last time global commerce was newsworthily disrupted, it took several podcasts, a couple of explainers containing the phrase, ‘and here’s the thing’, and watching The Big Short to be able to successfully pretend to grasp it.
GameStop and Reddit and Bitcoin and NFTs are unintuitive and confusing, but everyone knows what went wrong with the big ship in the Suez Canal: it was facing the wrong way.
It didn’t matter in the end that the ship’s pilot had done everything right, that he was simply no match for the strong winds, sand storms and the tyrannical laws of physics, because for anyone who has ever tried to parallel park their
Polo when someone’s watching, it seemed very relatable.
The Suez Canal became a repository for all our shame, it gave us the space to own the mortifying mistakes that keep us up at night: the internet began to confess.
As soon as the boat refloated and started moving towards another part of the canal, the Great Bitter Lake, to dock and await inspection, there were calls to reinstate it.
The internet became a great bitter lake as ‘Put it Back’ trended. With Covid looking set to be with us indefinitely, we’ve come to understand The News as a chronic condition: six days just wasn’t long enough to appreciate the big stuck boat, though a couple of years ago it would have felt like a completely absurd length of time.
We would have been keen to see it moving again and for the world to go back to normal; we might have been anxious that such a thing could even happen; now we’ll take any bit of diversion, any excuse not to engage with the world’s shambolic status quo.
When the boat was stuck, nobody could pretend it wasn’t happening. We were, for once, united. The hero in the end, in a very zeitgeisty but also ancient way, was lesbian icon the full moon, which gave salvagers a vital few extra inches of tidal flow to help them get the ship back floating.
The Ever Given was the cherry on top of a year of human frailty and helplessness, a reminder that for all our scientific advancements and the ability to build artificial rivers and a global supply chain and ships a quarter of a mile long, nature is in charge.
It can stop everything with a gust of wind or a plague-ridden bat-pig. We’re still basically medieval.
April Fools’ prank a real shock to the system
As this was going on, Volkswagen America was running an elaborate April Fools’ prank: they pretended that they were changing their name to Voltswagen in honour of their electric car.
They denied it was a prank and lots of people believed them, including Associated Press, leading to a boost in Volkswagen’s valuation.
It was at this point that the manufacturer had to admit that it was a joke, actually. No one laughed.
Hot on the heels of, ‘Big boat blocks Suez Canal length-wise and interrupts global trade’, it was difficult to know where the comic absurdity lay in ‘Car makers change name slightly’.
When Supermac’s joined in the fun for the occasion saying it was offering drive-thru weddings, we could only ruefully roll our eyes and say: wouldn’t it be great, though?