WHO’D KNOW THE DIFFERENCE?
The world’s biggest cruise ship launched this past week (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/30/worlds-largest-cruise-shi_n_340481.html). It’s called the Oasis of the Seas and is 40% bigger than any other cruise ship ever put to sea. Its “five times larger than the Titanic, has seven neighborhoods, an ice rink, a golf course and a 750-seat outdoor amphitheatre”. You can view a YouTube video of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZXpWK5M4gI. It’s actually pretty good. (Careful though – I just lost a half hour in the Interhole watching videos of cruise ships almost tipping over in high seas).
The Oasis beast also cost $1.5 billion and was in the news this week not just because it was launched from Finland on its way to its ‘home’ port in Ft.Lauderdale, but because it had to get out of the Baltic Sea and under the Danish Great Belt Fixed Link bridge. The 20-story high boat lowered its telescoping smokestack, and spend up to ride a little lower in the water, but still only had 2 feet of clearance room. It made though, which was a great relief to me, all anxiously checking Twitter feeds a few times a second, hoping for the good news. It made it.
You know what the OOTS looks like: essentially a mind-bogglingly huge mall/gated community staffed by a brutally-treated, ill-paid multinational workforce enforcing a regime of Disney-happy rainbows and unicorns activity, grotesque overeating and relentlessly bland ‘luxe’ aesthetics. Or something like that. I’m guessing. I’ve never been on a cruise ship, but I’d sure like to. At least just to walk around. My entire knowledge base about cruise shipping comes from my favourite David Foster Wallace (RIP) essay ever ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ in which Harper’s pays him to take a cruise and be savagely funny/self-effacing/pithy/smart-as-hell. (I can’t recommend that essay enough) (that’s you CBR).
I keep thinking about DFW’s thread about pampering. He argues that the cruise experience is fixated on satiating your every need, even needs you don’t even know you had. Removing any and every spot of bother, reducing you to a flabby, consumptive baby, sleeping and eating and fussing. And that’s exactly what the (post?) modern world is so fixated on achieving: comprehensive infantalization.
Technology and the lust for comfort is succeeding in incremental leaps in buffering the Western world from any kind of possibly risky interaction with anyone else, with the natural world, with material objects, with disease or suffering or cold or wet or labour. Our core successes are shopping and screens and security guards and antiseptic hand-wash stations and managed, guided edutainment.
The travel industry is following along beautifully, and like Arthur Frommer (the travel-guide guy) says – cruise ships shouldn’t even leave port, the Oasis doesn’t even have to move because it will be the same experience either way, just without burning a bunch of fuel. If a cruise ship just sat in the hrabour, “Who would know the difference?” he says. I think that’s kind of the point of cruise ships: making sure you wouldn’t see the difference.
November 9th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
I thought you might be interested in a workers perspective.I worked on a cruise ship once. I was travelling and thought it might be a fun place to be over the Xmas holiday season. What a fool. Big distinction between officers staff and crew. As a bar waitress I was crew. Being white and English I was extended staff privileges until someone noticed my job meant i wasn’t entitled. As a vegetarian I maintained the “privilege” of eating staff and officer food, courtesy of the ship’s doctor. he said I would starve if I had to eat the crew’s food. he was right. It was truely disgusting. One of the officer’s said the captains dog ate better than the crew.
If you were crew you rarely saw daylight unless your work took you there or when you went ashore. The cabins were damp and smelly. There were no days off. You had to work a year to get any holiday. Most working days were around 18 hours. Most of the staff and crew were Jamaican, Phillippino Honduran or Guatemalan. The crew would get fined from their paltry wages for even the mildest transgressions until there were a few who owed money to the company. My immediate boss was Jamaican. He worked 18 hours a day for 5 days a week and 24 hours a day for the other 2. He was trying to last long enough to save enough money to buy a bar on the beach in Jamaica. While I was working on the ship the piano player died and his body was air lifted off. We saw the Us fighter planes fly over to bomb Panama. There was a b it of concern as the ship was Panamanian registered in order to avoid US workers laws. My room mates boyfriend ended up in the brig with 5 other Philippinos, a cell designed for one person. One of the Philippinos got angry with a Greek officer who took it as a threat and decided to arrest him. 5 others decided to stand by him and all were arrested and flown back to the Philippines at their own expense.
A Guatemalan officer told me he didn’t think i would last because I was European and he was right. I remember crying and being comforted by one of the passengers who told me to leave. “I can’t they’ve got my passport!” But one day I lost my rag and stormed down to the offices and demanded it back and I walked off the ship after 2 weeks in Mexico, a changed person.
November 9th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
I knew somebody who once worked on a Disney cruise. While the conditions were better than what Jane described, she said at the end of each (long) day her face would hurt from having to maintain the “Disney Smile” at all times while interacting with the passengers.