As rich, famous and influential broadcasters, politicians, lawyers and associated celebrities bicker over who said what to whom and where and as the death toll mounts in Iraq while our poor and disabled continue to suffer privation and hardship, its good to know that in some corners of the world there are those who can experience a truly relaxed and comfortable existence.
Last week a ‘little’ tete-a-tete took place in New York harbor when the Queen Mary 2, the largest, most luxurious cruise ship ever built docked in the city that never sleeps in a triumphalist public display of the gross self-indulgence of the world's super-rich.
The Cunard Line's PR spiel gives us some idea of the obscene luxury of this floating behemoth. The spin doctors proclaim that it is the "largest, longest, tallest and widest" passenger ship at sea with "the only Canyon Ranch SpaClub(R) at sea, the world's first planetarium at sea, the largest ballroom at sea, the largest library at sea, the largest wine collection at sea, as well as a Veuve Clicquot Champagne Bar, a two-story theatre, a casino, five indoor and outdoor swimming pools, hot-tubs, boutiques and children's facilities complete with British nannies". With a construction cost of about $A1 billion it is the most expensive liner ever built, and a floating monument to late-capitalist hedonism, par excellence.
But that’s not all. The Cunard line’s press release makes the point that on the 25th April the QM2 was joined by the QE2 making it the first time since 1940, when their name sakes entered New York harbour together, that the two flagship vessels of the Cunard line were in the same port at the same time. To celebrate this ‘milestone’, prior to leaving the harbour ... "both vessels will be positioned near the Statue of Liberty at approximately 8:30pm for a spectacular serenade of fireworks by Grucci, the award-winning creators of fireworks programs for three sets of Olympic Games, six U.S. presidential inaugurations and three World's Fairs". The press release goes on to note, "The fireworks display is being sponsored by American Express and American Express Travel". Talk about bread and circuses!
Petty jealousy on my part? No, much more than that. It is sheer outrage at the injustice of such ostentatious waste of so many and so much of the allegedly ‘scarce’ resources we are regularly told about and in the face of ever-rising world poverty, deprivation and misery for countless millions. One must ask why it is that the culmination of the QM2’s inaugural trans-Atlantic crossing just ‘happened’ to coincide with the arrival in New York harbour of that other rare luxury ocean liner these days, the QE2. Perhaps because the rich who travel the oceans on these boats leave the likes of the Jones and Laws in their wakes to squabble over petty jealousies and fight over the spoils of their increasingly irrelevant avarice.
At the same time that resources for truly investigative journalism that can expose the crimes of the powerful are being wound back, thousands of metres of film recorded the "social event of the season" and countless column inches of breathless descriptions of ‘this luxury feature’ or of ‘that celebrity or business mogul’ were written by the fawning, sycophantic wage-slaves employed by the corporate media and PR barons. Sickening statistics will be rolled out of the "tonnes" of venison, lobster etc, loaded on board, along with the pallets of caviar, champagne and "the best wines the world has to offer", while the subservient press fails to record the body count coming out of Iraq or the atrocities that go on "in our name" in places like Somalia, West Papua and Sudan.
Indeed the passenger list will surely include many of those who have profited from the carnage wrought from the globalised neo-liberal agenda and expose the complete and utter indifference of the world's dominant economic elites to the worsening plight of billions of their fellow human beings, including millions in their own ‘rich’ countries! For with the exception of the media barons who own the mass circulation commercial newspapers, radio and television stations across the globe, who among ‘ordinary’ Aussies, Yanks, Poms, Japanese, Malaysian, Indonesian, Chilean, Brazilian, German, Italian, French, Spanish or Chinese ‘consumers’ will ever get to travel on this latest bastion of elitist privilege?
Despite Tin Man Howard's occasional purile attempts to convince us that "Australia is a classless society", having the time and cash to spend travelling the world’s oceans on ships like the QM2 or QE2 is the exclusive preserve of an elitist class of extremely wealthy and powerful individuals and families. Their ability to ‘joyously’ experience the benefits of over two decades of neo-liberal economic re-structuring and the ‘victory’ of ‘humanitarian’ wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Yugoslavia, to name but a few, exposes their complete lack of understanding and comprehension of the world they have helped create.
Current U$ president Shrub ‘Dubya’ Bush was for once correct when he recently suggested that there was "class war" going on in America. The QM2 and QE2 being 'welcomed in New York harbour are surely obscene symbols of the rare truth he has bunglingly managed, Freudian like, to utter. However if American society and the rest of the world are to survive this one-sided onslaught, the Second American Revolution and indeed the people’s revolution across the globe must begin - sooner rather than later! As ‘Dubya’ said, "you’re either with us or against us". Only this time the us is all those who strive to overthrow the injustice and greed of those who would rule us.
Thanks to John for research and background work on this piece.