With Indiana Gov. Mike Pence in the news due to his state’s controversial religious freedom law, BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski has been digging around Pence’s old campaign websites. Today, he found this old article in which Pence grapples with the immense box office success of the film Titanic — and concludes that Americans love it because the titular ship’s sinking is a metaphor for the US turning away from traditional values.
Mike Pence thought Titanic was popular because it symbolized the US abandoning its values
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
After considering several possible explanations for the film’s popularity, including its “breathtaking” cinematography and “powerful” story, Pence concludes that “something else is going on here.”
Perhaps, he says, “what draws us to this film is an undeniable sense that we are seeing America of the late 20th Century in metaphor before our eyes … Just as the Royal Mail Steamship Titanic left Southhampton, England on her maiden voyage with deckloads of proud and waving passengers, do we not see ourselves, steaming away from the safe harbor of our best moral and religious traditions?” He continues:
In another article, Pence proclaims that “global warming is a myth,” and suggests that CO2 and coal can’t be causing it because they’re “natural.” Though “Monica Lewinsky seems like the most important issue in America,” he writes, stopping Democrats’ “liberal environmentalist agenda … could be more important.”
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