Heh. Apparently, House speaker Paul Ryan read the lyrics of Gordon Lightfoot’s Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald<\/i> into the Congressional Record last evening after the failure of the Senate’s umpteenth attempt to derail Obamacare.<\/p>\n
So happens I was at Michigan Tech when the Fitzgerald<\/i> 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<\/i> event. And anybody who has spent any time around Lake Superior has no difficulty imagining a wave that swamps an ore carrier.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
So it seems a weirdly fitting coda to a week of Republican humiliations. Enjoy.<\/p>\n