I woke up this morning and started thinking about the Titanic, and how the US is like a sinking ship, and how politics can be explained quite easily in this metaphor.
First, with Republicans in charge, seats on the lifeboats would be sold to the highest bidder.
If Libertarians were in charge, they would insist on filling the boats with women and children, and would hold the boats in until no men were on the lifeboat, and all the people on board therefore would perish as no compromise could ever be made.
Meanwhile the Democrats in charge do actually fill the boat with women and children, but 95% of the women are actually men in drag and each and every child on the boat gets molested and has psychological problems the rest of their lives.
One of the mistakes made with launching lifeboats is that "women and children first" was misinterpreted as "women and children only". The result is that some of the lifeboats launched with empty seats - there weren't enough women and children around at the time to fill the boat and men weren't allowed on board.
Even for the surviving men, life was no picnic. For the rest of their lives, they carried the stigma of being a coward who let a woman or child drown to save their own lives (despite the situation as described above). I know that at least one man killed himself because he couldn't take it any more.
The Titanic was such a hideously avoidable catastrophe all together, but these things usually are. "Safety rules are written in blood" and whatnot. Every vessel must have enough lifeboats for its passengers these days.
Thomas Andrews tried telling Ismay and White Star from the design stage how vulnerable the Olympic class was, and even tried building in massive safety systems (contiguous bulkheads, davits with 4 boats on each, reinforced hulls), but was overruled and ignored at every turn, because Ismay and his bosses despised him.
Ah, that makes sense. "Unavoidable" disasters aren't so unavoidable when someone was loudly sounding the alarm long before it happened. Good old human stupidity strikes again!
Word is there were several powerful opponents of the Federal Reserve on that ship. The Fed was created in the following year.