Cruisin’ on the Ship o’ State

      Once upon a time, there was a long cruise subjected to a bloody mutiny.  The second captain became the first and the crew divided allegiances between two groups permanently competing against each other for prominence.  To avoid the mutinous reoccurrence, since they were equally divided in numbers, the two factions decided to subject the ship to permanent conflict resolution by putting the captaincy of the ship up to a periodic vote by all the passengers, who after all were paying for the ride they were being taken for.
      This was a very long vacation/business cruise, really a cruise without end, in effect, going on forever, as long as life, only stopping from time to time to take on fuel and supplies.  Therefore there were all the other pastimes and pleasures and problems of any small country.  There was procreation, for instance, and hospital staffs and schools and courts of law shipboard.  As babies were born and families reared, older passengers died and were buried at sea as the great ship floated the fastness of time on the seas without end.
      For recreation passengers spent their time strolling decks, playing shuffle board or badminton, swimming, reading, engaged in other sports or merely lolling during the day.  Evenings were spent wining and dining.  There were bands and orchestras and films of all kinds in various ball rooms.  Feasting went on at various places all day long.  Staterooms ran the gamut from luxurious to spartan based on price of ticket purchased. The more expensively appointed accommodations were highest up on the third level of the very, very large and commodious ship.  Middle decks were reserved for the majority of passengers.  Below decks was where the poorest and the boat’s working class lived. 
       Because it was a cruise without end, the ship was also a cargo ship and the cargo transported allowed the ship to pay for its way, as a sort of free market collective.  As a business cruise as well as a pleasure boat, the passengers had meetings among themselves, buying and selling, making deals and forming alliances for mutual profit.  Some were more active in this than others.  Where some considered the trip as more of an easy excursion, a vacation trip, and did just enough to make the trip pay for itself, others did little or no work at all.  Still others wished to accumulate massive amounts of money from their fellow passengers, not only to buy benefits for themselves on board, but to, we have to admit, lord it over the others just a little bit.
       Of course, there were not only divisions based on wealth above decks but a rather pronounced division in place for the workers in the kitchen and the boiler room who also lived on the boat.  They didn’t have access to all the advantages the passengers did.  These lived under decks and generally didn’t, though they could have, participate in the votes for the election of the crew, or engage in the discussions over which direction the ship should sail.  Their lives were too hard and tedious, tiring and limited to even worry about sightseeing and all the grander or more pleasurable aspects of sea travel. 
They were never seen standing on deck gazing off the side of the ship the way the philosophers and philanthropists on board did, contemplating the eternal enigmas and meanings of life or plotting new directions ahead into the future along the deceptive contours of the ever changing sea.
      Now when the ship was operating smoothly and all was well, everyone and everything in its place, it was really a very pleasant life, the best of all possible worlds for the most possible people.  Everywhere the eternal sea propelled all before it and made it impossible to ever sail exactly the same water twice.  Nobody knew where this sea came from, where it started or where it ended.  Sometimes storms could be seen arising from a great distance away, with the advancing of the swelling and heavier seas, and sometimes the seas were as placid as glass for weeks on end.
    The management of the cruise itself, the captain’s cabin and the hub of the ship’s operations on the bridge, was responsible not only for the general operations of the crew but for navigation, the steady supply of goods and foods and the efficient running of the boiler rooms and engines below decks.  This was a complex charge, keeping one hand on the wheel while guarding the charts and maps and navigating the long term course and direction of the ship.  They were responsible for eluding icebergs and storms, setting the course through treacherous straits and managing their mutual funds, balancing revenues and expenditures, as the ship sailed from port to port of call.  Speed and direction of their progress was communicated to the under decks by the economic activity of the upper decks, operating in concert.   
       As a general rule, none of the other passengers ordinarily cared too much about the operations of the workers below decks or the crew.  They were the invisible minions, only there for the convenience of the passengers.  They were meant to run the ship efficiently, be of service and stay out of the way.  But those who knew their histories knew that on many ships of the past it was just these unseen places below deck that were the hidden, danger areas where anger could fester and build silently like an overworked boiler to dangerous levels which could eventually threaten the well being of everyone on ship.  Passengers and crew which didn’t tend to these issues did so at their own peril.  
      In general though, the nominal control the passengers exercised over the direction of the ship was very passively applied.  If the crew controlled the wheel it might be said that the people, through their periodic elections, indirectly managed the rudder of the ship. Once a new crew was put in charge and the coordinates and course corrections set, the rudder was locked down for another long term awaiting the next possible course correction at the next election.  All ship operations were subject to other vagaries and exigencies such as weather and commerce, of course, but because the ship was so very large and cumbersome, it took a very long time to turn from one direction to another.  This gradualism was fine with the passengers, who hated jolts and preferred predictability.  Besides, they had no interest in being in charge of the ship.  This was precisely why they hired others to do it.  
      Normally, the direction the ship was to travel and which ports should be visited along the way were easily agreed upon. Historically, when disputes arose, compromise and accommodation was arrived at with discussion without debilitating acrimony.  Trouble was, from off prow, it was often very hard for the general ship’s population to tell exactly what direction the ship was heading.  The sea was the sea and all looked the same to the untutored observer.  Therefore, decisions made in the wheelhouse took a long time for the results to be seen by the rest of the ship as long term trends and gradual shifts or direction changes were not always readily perceived.  This allowed a certain leeway to the crew in charge and as special interests began to arise even admitted the possibility of skullduggery.  To mix a metaphor shamelessly - as there was the potential of many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip, extremely loose and drooling lips had a way of sinking the good operations of ships.
       To try to fill the gap there were many amateur navigators and cartographers on board among the passengers who tried to keep tabs on the competing crews’ work by gauging the true latitudes and longitudes of the ship for themselves with home made astrolabes, cast off compasses and other pieces of outmoded equipment.  Or they tried to plot the ship’s course by studying the winds and currents and set the progress of the ship against the fixed stars in the firmament overhead.  Monitors were also established to make sure the presiding captain and his crew reported promptly and honestly any change in direction or speed and why such changes had been necessary.
      But of course, they didn’t always honestly do this.  The problem which bedeviled the passengers was twofold, either too much cooperation by the two crews in matters of mutual benefit to them or too little cooperation between them in areas of concern to the passengers.  Often both failures applied simultaneously.  This was the eternal Schylla and Charybdis of bad ship management for which the passengers had always to be on guard.  
      Therefore long experience had proven that these crews had to be constantly watched to make sure their narrow interests were not allowed to take precedence over those of the passengers.  And as only the managing crew had access to all the proper information, the passengers instituted meetings where the two crew factions of the competing captains had a chance to explain their differing positions to the elected representatives of the passengers.  When the captain and crew were straightforward and efficient these meetings were informative and had a strong sense of shared journey and purpose between the crew and passengers.  Unfortunately, if the crew had some ulterior motives or was trying to hide a malfeasance or duplicity, these meetings were shiftless and acrimonious and came to be highly mistrusted by the passengers.  
      In practice though, the passengers actually saw any time they had to expend in overseeing the crew as an annoyance and deflection from the profit and enjoyment they expected from the cruise.  Therefore the scant control the passengers exercised over the crews to begin with was often only fitfully applied which allowed a certain convenience of cooperation and connivance to arise between the two crews.  Over time then, the two crews, nominally fierce competitors with barely a civil word for each other, grew to have more in league with each other than they did with the general passenger population. 
      So despite the safeguards and the best efforts of the passengers to monitor the direction of the ship, over time, the longer they were at sea the more corrupt these crews became and the more lax the passengers’ attention became.  Then the ship gradually began to drift more and more erratically, veering and lilting strangely in one direction and then the other, or it would stop for extended periods at ports of call that only served the interests of a few of the passengers to the exclusion or acknowledgement of and certain detriment of the others. 
      Over time, animosities between the two competing crews became worse and worse.  Each started to more frequently misrepresent and exaggerate the other captain’s position to the passengers while their own interests became narrower and narrower.  They became so consumed with beating each other (at the same time cooperating to continue to feather their own nests), they eventually forgot the primary reason they were running the ship in the first place – to ensure the welfare of the passengers.  
            In such instances, the two crews could barely agree on a single map coordinate between them.  One side said we were in one ocean, the other said we were really in another.  One group wanted to keep going one way; the other group, the opposite direction.  One side said up the other down. 
Partly they were able to get away with this by playing off the normal divisions among the passengers. To leverage their positions against each other the two crews exacerbated these natural divisions for their own aggrandizement.  
      Instead of working for all equally, they began to promiscuously grant special privileges and favors to some passengers that they denied to others. In this way these natural divisions and disagreements were made much deeper as they were systematically exploited for their own advantage by the two crews.  Unjust privileges originally granted to some special interest to secure their support in the periodic elections, immediately became vociferously guarded by the recipients of these benefits who then lobbied even more vigorously to expand their already unjust and undeserved advantages.  
      These corrupt practices broke down the former sense of shared vision and unity which had always been counted on to unite the passengers in difficult times.  In this way, the former cohesion of the passengers was gradually destroyed for the benefit of the two crews. The special favors and gratuities they granted became so prevalent and pronounced that the crew’s basic ministrations to the passengers and all their other duties of actually running the ship properly were crowded out as afterthoughts.  
      So it was that the very situations and procedures which any good ship management would have avoided, these bad captains religiously embraced.  In a situation true to any corrupted system, the more fair and honest you were on ship the worse you began to fare, which induced other factions to have to cheat just to try to keep up.  This all caused great consternation shipboard as purists among the passengers saw great fissures develop between them they had never seen before as they, never perfectly equal to begin with, watched helplessly as their ship began to be run more and more inefficiently and erratically.
       Another complicating bone of contention accompanied the rise of the moralists.  Arrogantly thinking they could discern the secrets held in the depths of the sea better than others, some of the passengers began to insist on acknowledgement of their own superiority.  Thinking some of the passengers too lascivious and not as hard working or as moral as themselves, they began to insist on curfews, the elimination of some of the more popular shows and certain other forms of behavior, some bad and others just frowned upon as not being uplifting enough.  Self appointed “seapreachers” rose up among them to rail against the immoralists aboard and they started to lobby the crews for a crackdown by a tightening of the rules.  
      These righteous few eventually made book with the most privileged of the upper deck who, for their own reasons, didn’t mind seeing other passengers’ freedoms infringed (penned sheep being easier to shear). Loss of rights of the majority always serve the moralists and the well-to-do best, who then have a better chance of manipulating events and suppressing people to their increasing power and advantage.  
      Of course, the upper deck denizens and moguls were no more moral than anyone else.  They merely hid their immoralities better because, “what went on on the third deck, stayed on the third deck”.  In fact, as pertaining to money and political pays offs of the crews, the third deck folks were the greatest and most pervasive corrupters on the ship. By mutual agreement with the moralists, they received variances from any controls on their behavior, especially on all things pertaining to the manipulation of money which was the mother’s milk of all their aspirations. 
       In practice then, it seemed to some that the moralists engaged in a type of moral malfeasance.  Because while focusing on the less harmful peccadilloes of the middle decks and especially the below deck people in steerage who had the least power to resist, by focusing on the frivolous rather than the most substantive, they actually abetted the greater immorality while obsessing over the lesser ones.  Others thought that the moralists had themselves become corrupted by the mutually profitable alliance they struck with the third deck way too much to be consistent with the modesty of their alleged faith.  
      At their height these moralists terrorized one whole half the ship, the stern, which was taken over by paternalistic speechifying and jeremiads against the rest of the ship, as imprecation upon imprecation was thrown against the unspecified sinners, generally, by description and implication, directed at the poorer or better educated people.  In tirelessly inveighing against some vague, general moral decay of the ship from below, they ensured, in fact, that the moral decay from above was able to expand without limit. By focusing on the personal morality of a few they ensured the corruption of the many.
      The rest of the ship tried their best to ignore them. In fact, the most extreme of the moralists never ultimately rose above a minority but, because of their political tryst with the upper decks, reveled in far more influence than they deserved.
       Ironically then, the overall morality on the ship, as it usually does in such contentious times, became worse for all this rampaging morality that accompanied it. Intemperate speech prevailed where discourse had once ruled. Pedantic platitudes replaced reasoned logic and debate.  A coarsening of shipboard society took place as a general lack of humanity and care for others took root.  The crudeness of money smeared honest people for their integrity while dishonest ones were promoted and lauded and lionized for their devout allegiance to greedy practices. The impoverished recipients of charity were accused of selfishness for actually accepting help rather than the well to do being called selfish for denying it. 
      The end result of this was that the lower deck people were treated with far less respect, working longer hours with fewer rights and even cut backs in rations.  Some things previously honored in trust or in common as responsibilities of all the people on the ship were cut back and curtailed. 
Education, for instance, before thought of as open right free for all, indispensable for good citizenship, was scrimped upon because the third deck people simply hired tutors for their children and the moralists complained that public education wasn’t narrowly defined enough to promote their interests.  Therefore, public education was assaulted and attacked and diminished in quality for everyone else.  This reduced the ability of the ship over the long haul to properly manage itself as general knowledge and awareness diminished.
       And because the third deck people didn’t want to pay their fair fare share and were supported by the moralists, rather than previous fare assessments which were based primarily on one’s ability to pay, others were introduced.  These included fees, sales taxes, food and fuel assessments which all fell disproportionately on staples that the poorest and middle deck people could least afford to do without and were most liable to price changes which could be manipulated by the upper deck folks.  
      To allegedly make up for the revenue shortfall which still persisted – and to gull and sedate the poor at the same time - get rich schemes were promoted.  The fast talking financial operators on the third deck started up a number of plans for investment which promised generalized wealth but which always had a way of turning into very specialized profits for the authors of the schemes. Other rake off and pyramid schemes designed to benefit only a few proliferated. Shortages and huge accompanying price run-ups, previously unknown on board, began to show up with greater frequency.  Illnesses born of poor food care and medical availability, which were also apportioned according to ability to pay, began to surface more often, even erupting in ship wide epidemics which naturally victimized the poor more than others as well.  Even gambling, previously unknown, was instituted to raise revenues, and a lottery, also designed to plunder the poorest on board, was instituted by the party which preached morality and self-reliance.
       Though these seapreachers professed to disapprove of all this gaming and injustice that seemed to accompany their crusade they considered it a necessary evil to continuing their predominance and so didn’t dislike it enough to offer to do anything about it.  Even though these financial depredations also afflicted many of their own flock, the moralist leaders continued to blindly support the same arrogant regime that had instituted them, and so continued to loyally permit the plundering of their own sheep.       
      Naturally, one captain and his crew seized on these two seemingly divergent movements (though both led to one end, domination of the many by the few), almost contradictory in purpose, of the pseudo morality of rules and the unquestioned amorality of money, and adopted them as his own beliefs.  This gave him and his crew a certain unassailable domination, a stranglehold of unbeatable leverage over the other crew who could only grouse at the hypocrisy of the new direction the ship was embarking on and try to keep their heads down until the squall blew over.  Unfortunately for them, the squall was a tempest that did not blow over for many years, during which time many other problems, which always occur during times when the balance of the ship was lost, to take hold.
      Finally, the common ethical bond which had once united both sides was lost as, awash amid a plethora of irrelevant rules and annoying orders, the quality of life and efficiency of services suffered.  More fights and violence occurred.  To combat the unprecedented violence, more weapons were introduced on board, controlled by some, deplored by others, which worked for those with and against those without and in the end just led to more violence.  Meanwhile, strange ports of call began to appear on the schedule and mystery cargos taken on late at night not appearing on lading lists, which made many suspicious of smuggling and profiteering by the crew not officially acknowledged by the captain.
      Not all of the passengers, of course, disagreed with the new course.  Those profiting from its bonuses and excesses liked the change and the rigor, the energy, the discipline the crew exhibited even if it came at the expense of some freedom and comity.  They supported the captain unreservedly.  And of course, the upper decks did very well in these times.  And yet, though the moralists had a few passing successes, generally speaking, they received little for their unwavering support of the upper deck but promises unrequited. 

It was during this time, the time of all these great distractions, that the great tribulation occurred. 

       Late one night, unexpectedly, though there had been many warnings ignored, the ship was assaulted by pirates.  Actual damage done to the ship was costly but slight and a small percentage of passengers were killed in the heinous attack.  But the shock to the ship’s crew and passengers was enormous, disproportionate to the threat.  Only twenty pirates had attacked and their success could mainly be attributed to the element of surprise and unpreparedness of the pacific, quite self-absorbed vessel.
       The brave captain spoke to the ship and vowed to search down the pirates, run them to ground (or water) and bring them to justice “dead or alive”.  Of course, the inhabitants of the ship, outraged at the attack, agreed wholeheartedly with this strategy.  They were on board with this, so to speak.  So the ship changed course and immediately sailed to the pirates’ infamous lair, the island where they holed up in these waters.  There was a vicious fight, brilliantly handled by the dominant captain’s crew which soon overwhelmed the arrogant pirate port’s defenses.  
       Unfortunately, in the celebratory atmosphere surrounding this victory, the real culprits who had planned the assault on the peaceable ship escaped deep into the highlands and jungles of the small island.  Even though victory was not concluded but was still very much at hand, the captain, power drunk and feeling invincible, left only a few of his crew to clean up this important operation while he led the ship on another raid against a separate island he had long nursed a personal grudge against from the days of his father.
       Doubts about this operation, which had nothing to do with the pirate attack on their ship, were squelched by the speeches and tirades which the captain and his lieutenants gave saying just the opposite.  The majority of the people on the cruise liner came to believe that this second attack was somehow connected to the first, though they were left entirely in the dark as to how this could be.
       To make a long story short (way too late, we know), after initial success, because of the hubris and arrogance of the captain and the blinkered support of the wealthy and the moralists who followed him for their own selfish reasons, things soon began to go immensely wrong.  Not content to just merely depose his father’s ancient enemy, the increasingly megalomanical captain decided to transform the entire island in his own image, promoting some and demoting others randomly as he tried to build a monument to himself with other peoples’ property.
      This eventually plunged all the innocent people of the island into bloody, internecine warfare against each other, as well as against the hated interlopers from the cruise ship, who kept insisting that they were only trying to help.  Seeing they were tied down, the original pirates who had attacked the cruise ship actually sent some of their own raiders to fight the hapless crew of the ship where it was stuck trying to tame this island which had no interest in being tamed.  Despite these out of control setbacks, the passengers were continually assured that all was going exactly according to the errant, changeable plan of the increasingly mad captain.
       Hopelessly caught in a web of their own devising and lies, the crew began to engage in behavior that eventually came to resemble the tactics of the very pirates they were allegedly there to fight, though there had been no pirates had been on the island prior to their attack.  There were many excesses, much summary justice and a great deal of shoot first ask questions later behavior, more often associated with piratical behavior than a simple democratic pleasure cruise at sea.
       On board, the captain’s malevolent first mate kept everyone in line, prowling the decks with his bully companions and ruthlessly beating anyone who dared question the propriety of their bad behavior.  In short, the whole ship turned dark, darker than it had been in anyone’s memory of all the bad captains past.  At first the captain’s odd coalition of morals and money held together but finally, when there was a previously scheduled election, the majority of the passengers refused to let a number of the captain’s allies serve.  This was a rebuke.  The captain’s trust and popularity began to plummet.  But he seemed not to hear, not to care.  He insisted on staying anchored to his dead ender policy he had condemned the cruise ship to follow as penance for having put their trust in him.  
       Meanwhile, everything else on the ship continued to deteriorate.  Debts began to build, commerce suffered, animosities between the passengers and the captain’s long time supporters who had run rough shod over the ship for so long, began to come out into the open.  In spite of all, just enough of the wealthy and moralists, held together by the illicit advantages the captain had helped them acquire, stuck by him and took turns guarding the anchors, which effectively made it impossible for the ship to pull them up and leave.  
      The sorry impasse continued to no real purpose other than to perpetuate the corrupt quorum of the captain’s wholly discredited regime. Having reveled in their power for so long, the captain’s supporters had no intention of doing the right thing now, and were determined to stand by and allow the mad captain to pursue all his destructive fantasies no matter what the costs.
       Unfortunately, there was not another scheduled election for some time.  And since, dulled and made indolent and unenterprising with prosperity, or having given up too many of their rights and freedoms to the fanatics who ran the ship to reclaim them now, most passengers had forgotten how to think for themselves, and no longer knew what to do.  They had forgotten how to speak up and run the ship even if they had wanted to. Even the shadow crew was only slow to stir from its cowed lethargy, making timid dissents to the bully power in charge, but still afraid to confront it directly.  
      Now hurricane season was approaching in these waters.  Hurricanes were the captain’s nemesis.  His popularity had first begun to fade when he had last recklessly led the ship into the teeth of one.  Investigations sponsored by the new members of the opposition crew ensured that questionable and illegal lies and misappropriations by the captain’s henchmen were everyday being uncovered.  
      It seems the captain, true to his star crossed fate, had led them into one of the most dangerous harbors in the world.  Hidden rocks and shallow shoals were abundant near these uncharted, shark infested shores.  Passengers looked nervously over the side at the fins endlessly circling around them.  Meanwhile, a la Ahab, the obdurate captain refused to budge, but continued to nurture his delusions as the clouds began to gather, the sea started to heave and the rocking of the boat began to increase to frightening levels.  In the distance were thunder and lightening as the storm could be seen approaching.  Meanwhile deep in the bowels of the ship, among the lean and hungry, for the first time in many, many years an old word had started to make a new appearance – mutiny. Old salts ominously recalled the old sea shanty’s saw, “eventually the sea levels all”.