Idioms I Hate #217: "Rearranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic"

In a Tea Party rally this past weekend, Palin, using her tried and true playbook, railed against President Obama for spending the country into a future fiscal Armageddon, and the GOP for not cutting taxes on all poor people, rather than just most.

Such stories are entertaining for me these days, as opposed to frightening, when I believed she would seek, and get, the Republican primary nomination. The only reason the story stuck in my head this time was one of her idioms:

“Yeah, I’ll take on the GOP establishment. What more can they say about us, you know?” she said. “We didn’t elect you just to rearrange the deck chairs on a sinking Titanic. We didn’t elect you to just stand back and watch Obama redistribute those deck chairs. What we need is for you to stand up, GOP, and fight.” via today's Chicago Tribune

I've always liked that metaphor. Even if it's a bad one.

Not that that's Ms. Palin's fault. It's just that, if you put it in context, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic is a lot like playing music on the Titanic, or serving drinks on the Titanic. It's a lot better than some of the things people did in an effort to save the Titanic. Or themselves, for that matter.

To the best of my knowledge, the saying was cooked up sometime in the 1970s, when some politician was talking about his campaign. I don't know that anyone was rearranging chairs anywhere on the Titanic, but if we're going to keep using the ocean liner as a metaphor for anything doomed regardless of our efforts, then deck chair arranging doesn't actually sound so stupid.

Some other stuff people did on the Titanic, as per my exhaustive research (that is, my fuzzy memories on James Cameron's Titanic:

Fought over life boats
Fought over life jackets
Shot each other
Yelled at each other
Fell overboard and died
Drew each other in the nude
Fell in love and had sex in the storage space

Rearranging chairs in the midst of all this seems like a desperate attempt to retain one's sanity and sense of order in the face of impending madness, death, mob rule and rampant rich-person adultery. And if our current economy really is doomed to die a watery death and plummet to the depths of the ocean, then whoever's holding the chair-arranging seminar, sign me up. I need to blow off some steam.