When brave men have the courage to do the right thing

One hundred years ago today, 1,517 passengers and crew perished when the great luxury liner Titanic sank in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic. One survivor described the panicky scenes as people piled into too few lifeboats and the band bravely played on as “a fancy dress ball in Dante’s Hell.”

The Titanic lends itself to easy metaphors of hubris and futility; think how often you’ve heard the line about rearranging its deck chairs. The now-in-3-D James Cameron film uses the catastrophe as an extended exploration of the chilly artificiality of the First Class wealthy versus the warm authenticity of the ragamuffins in steerage (shod feet good, poorly shod feet better!).