Media coverage of the wreck of the Bayesian continues, bodies have been found and extracted, and now the blame game begins.
Ninety-four rather less important people died in the same waters in one incident last year. Those deaths involved undocumented migrants and were therefore less culturally significant. Even in death, billionaires are more equal than most other folk. Their narratives have more power.
But billionaires never rest easy, particularly when jostling for status amongst their own kind. Mr. Lynch’s yacht boasted a grotesquely-tall mast, all 278 feet of it, the tallest aluminium mast in the world. A naked challenge to Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire, whose own yacht, Koru, soon pipped Lynch’s record.
It reminds me of Bologna.
A few years ago, a publisher was kind enough to fly me to the children's book fair there. It was fun, but one afternoon I decided to explore the city a bit. Browsing the local museum, one medieval engraving stopped me in my tracks.
It was a cityscape all right; but none I’d ever seen outside of science fiction. Here was the city as pincushion, an urban landscape riddled with more skyscrapers than present-day London or Manhattan combined. And all with the same square, solid and frankly rather ugly design; the sort of visually-aggressive fuck-offery more often associated with Bugattis or Lamborghinis than with the refined aesthetic of medieval architecture.
“Between the 12th and the 13th century,” explains Wikipedia, “Bologna was a city full of towers. Almost all the towers were tall, the highest being 97 metres (318.2 ft)… in the 13th century, many towers were taken down or demolished, and others simply collapsed.”
Always a rich city, Bologna’s borghesia likely got into a pissing match. My tower is taller than yours. Mine is closer to heaven and the ear of God. You will not be remembered, but I will.
And what of Mr. Lynch’s towering, Ozymandias-like mast? There is the uncomfortable, grimly-ironic possibility that it may have played a role in the boat’s watery demise. We will find out quite soon. And then, as with all things, we will forget.
Ninety-four rather less important people died in the same waters in one incident last year. Those deaths involved undocumented migrants and were therefore less culturally significant. Even in death, billionaires are more equal than most other folk. Their narratives have more power.
But billionaires never rest easy, particularly when jostling for status amongst their own kind. Mr. Lynch’s yacht boasted a grotesquely-tall mast, all 278 feet of it, the tallest aluminium mast in the world. A naked challenge to Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire, whose own yacht, Koru, soon pipped Lynch’s record.
It reminds me of Bologna.
A few years ago, a publisher was kind enough to fly me to the children's book fair there. It was fun, but one afternoon I decided to explore the city a bit. Browsing the local museum, one medieval engraving stopped me in my tracks.
It was a cityscape all right; but none I’d ever seen outside of science fiction. Here was the city as pincushion, an urban landscape riddled with more skyscrapers than present-day London or Manhattan combined. And all with the same square, solid and frankly rather ugly design; the sort of visually-aggressive fuck-offery more often associated with Bugattis or Lamborghinis than with the refined aesthetic of medieval architecture.“Between the 12th and the 13th century,” explains Wikipedia, “Bologna was a city full of towers. Almost all the towers were tall, the highest being 97 metres (318.2 ft)… in the 13th century, many towers were taken down or demolished, and others simply collapsed.”
Always a rich city, Bologna’s borghesia likely got into a pissing match. My tower is taller than yours. Mine is closer to heaven and the ear of God. You will not be remembered, but I will.
And what of Mr. Lynch’s towering, Ozymandias-like mast? There is the uncomfortable, grimly-ironic possibility that it may have played a role in the boat’s watery demise. We will find out quite soon. And then, as with all things, we will forget.
