Trainwreck: Poop Cruise

This is gripping true story of a Carnival cruise ship that experienced some major technical difficulties which turned a 4-day jaunt into an 8-day nightmare and which brought out the worst in its passengers.

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After a fire in one of the engine rooms took the electricity down, the ship lost the power to flush toilets, cook or refrigerate food, and ventilate the ship. When 4000 Americans are facing a crisis, you can bet that it becomes “every man for themselves” pretty quickly.

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I laughed through quite a lot of this, but really, it’s sad the way Americans respond to crises.

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When food and water became something one had to stand in line to get, predictably, people began to take more than their share. When getting a deck chair became difficult, fist fights broke out. If there had been guns on board, there’s no doubt shots would have rang out and people would have been killed over a set of king-sized white sheets. Those, too, became a must-have item when the AC went down and families and friends began building their own tent cities to sleep on deck with some privacy and sun protection.

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When asked to manage their personal toxic waste by pooping into a hygienic bag and placing those bags in specially demarcated waste receptacles, passengers said, “No fucking way!”, “Not happening!”, and “This is not what I wanted!”. With just a bit of imagination, you can guess the consequences of that reluctance to do the right thing for the greater good.  

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Watching this, I thought about the power outage in Spain and Portugal in spring of 2025, when people went out of their way to help the elderly get out the metro system safely and gathered in the town squares with guitars, and shops gave away their melting ice cream for free. I remembered the floods in Valencia when people risked their lives to pull strangers out of trapped cars and help their neighbors get to higher ground.

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It’s not that America doesn’t have heroes and good people - there are plenty of those kinds of people in America, sure. But the combination of late-stage-capitalism and a “me first” attitude is dangerous when trapped on a gigantic ship adrift in the Gulf of Mexico with limited supplies.

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This is a must-watch just for the reflection it encourages.

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