Shit show ship lessons

Why it's important to teach children how to cope with adversity.

Girding my loins for an upcoming episode of From Bama with Bite (with bestie Taylor McLendon) I found myself watching this turkey of a Netflix documentary about an infamous 2013 incident on a cruise ship stuck in the Gulf of Mexico, powerless and toilet-less. It was either that or watching the coverage of the Bezos Venice wedding.

I went with the shit buckets.

The story is of course gross and disturbing. Appalling, even. There is no way to make the experience sound pleasant. Cruise ships are awful enough when they work as advertised. How people pay so much money to be in such close floating quarters with so many other bipeds is utterly beyond me.

When the power went out and the toilets stopped flushing, it became bonkers. But at the same time, being forced to use something other than a ceramic bowl to empty your body of the waste it produces is a few notches below nuclear winter on the apocalyptic scale. Have these people never camped in the woods? Heard of toilettes à pédales? I’m a fairly ordinary adventurer and I’ve personally succeeded in using those in parts of Southern France you couldn’t find on the map. I’ve survived many a creaky smelly outhouse and also luggable loos. Hell, once I got stuck overnight in the car during a nasty snow storm and I did manage to pee outside with the wind whipping up my behind. If you can’t deal with using buckets or bio-hazard bags as your business destination for a few days, are you really ready for the world?

Photo by Roger Starnes Sr on Unsplash

Over two decades ago the American conservative intellectual Michael Barone wrote a very provocative book called Hard America, Soft America that claimed the country was divided between people who lived with competition and accountability, and those who lived protected from such realities. You could call it a cranky precursor to today’s culture war between the woke and those who think woke is actually a thing.

Of course the real question this terrible movie elicited in me wasn’t about Barone’s book. It was: Why call it “poop cruise” when “turd boat” was available?

I read Hard America, Soft America when it came out and it made a strong impression on me. I believe in raising young humans so they are strong enough to withstand hardships and challenges. I homeschooled my kids and no, I never protected them from failure. Because failure (within limits, obviously; you don’t actually let them get hit by a car to teach them the rules of the road) is the fastest way to learn who you are and what you’re capable of.

Anyway, Barone’s book came back to my mind watching hapless cruisers remain stuck on the horror of having to poop in a bio-hazard bag and unable to move on to the part where you just do what you have to do to get through an unexpected ordeal. Instead people got drunk and fought.

At some point, before passengers knew they were going to be rescued and touch grass in Mobile, Alabama, they started praying in groups and there was a spontaneous eruption of Amazing Grace and that, dear reader, is when I just about lost it.

Amazing Grace is a religious hymn. It’s christian, even. From the 1770s, written by a clergyman repenting his role in the slave trade. I am aware it has bled into the secular world, and I probably shouldn’t get on my high horse so easily but what the fuck, man. You’re waiting to be brought back to flush toilets, you’re not coming to grips with your role in the selling and purchasing of human beings.

The story of the cruise ship that turned into a floating open sewer is a good one and it deserves to be told — and told well. But it seems to me they should have focused on how people rose to the occasion, not on how they got stuck on the horror of unusable johns.

If you want a well-made film about people transcending evil, you should watch the 2006 movie Amazing Grace, about William Wilberforce and John Newton, which is complex and nuanced and harrowing but also inspiring. Everything this shit show of a faeces ship docudrama isn’t.