Shipwrecked

Heh. Apparently, House speaker Paul Ryan read the lyrics of Gordon Lightfoot’s Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald into the Congressional Record last evening after the failure of the Senate’s umpteenth attempt to derail Obamacare.

So happens I was at Michigan Tech when the Fitzgerald went down, and knew all the cited landmarks as the investigation proceeded; my understanding is that it passed near enough to Copper Harbor to be seen from the shore. I wasn’t directly touched by the sinking, but it was an affecting local event. And anybody who has spent any time around Lake Superior has no difficulty imagining a wave that swamps an ore carrier.

By the way, it’s true that, as the song says, “Superior never gives up her dead.” It’s so cold — “icewater mansions” is an apt description — that the bacteria in the drowned bodies don’t metabolize the corpse and produce gases.

So it seems a weirdly fitting coda to a week of Republican humiliations. Enjoy.

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