Get Ya Hustle On

The BP oil spill is something I've taken a long time to write about, relatively speaking, but since the only thing taking longer than this post is BP's cleanup efforts, I think the complete destruction of the Gulf Coast is probably topical.

Yesterday, I was sitting at my neighborhood Mickey D's wolfing down some post-rave sausage-and-biscuit goodness with my Ese Loco Big Clobby from the Pit.  This Mickey D's is one of those remodelled to look like a Starbucks from a decade ago, so it's all warm earth tones and tasteful sagebrush and ochre hues.  You expect to hear the Gin Blossoms on the speakers.

We could drive around this town, let the cops chase us around...

As we sat there drinking scalding hot coffee and rocking out to Dishwalla, I had a good view of CNN on the big flat screen TV behind my friend.  There was a polite weather lady announcing that hurricane season was starting up, and upon seeing this announcement, the implications of a miles-wide swirling vortex of wind and water possibly making Landfall west of Florida became clear.  Of course, that didn't stop CNN from tediously over-explaining the whole thing in order to fill up some of their overlong and under-stuffed 24-hour news cycle.

To put the effect of a hurricane striking an oil slick in perspective, conduct the following experiment:  place all your finest white linen so that it completely covers your kitchen floor.  Then, fill a six-quart glass mixing bowl with chocolate syrup.  Place the bowl and a small quantity of plastic explosive in the middle of your white linen, and then detonate the explosive.  Your Linen is now a 1/1,000,000,000,000 scale model of the Gulf Coast. 

Also, the chocolate syrup kills everything in your home. 

There's a metaphor to be made here somewhere

So it seems likely that the hurricanes will exacerbate this spill, carrying crude oil right up over the buoys designed to contain it, and into the heart of the big easy.  Alternately, it could push the oil out to sea.  Then again, a direct hit could just disperse the slick and throw oil everywhere.  Nobody really seems to be sure about this because it's never happened before. 

In the meantime, entire ecosystems are crumbling and a region is completely losing its way of life.  Arguably, you can say something to the effect that any fishermen affected by the spill could just retrain and adapt to other work, but that implies the only people affected by this sort of thing are fishermen. In truth, the fishing industry defines much of the Gulf Coast, and by proxy much of the southeast.  It's not just fishermen, but also dockyard workers, boatmen, canners, shippers, clerks, and the entire infrastructure that makes all that fishing possible.  Removing fishing from the southeast is as disastrous as the removal of the auto industry from Detroit - more so, because so many fisherman have those charming Cajun accents. 

Ecological DevastaSHON

There's nothing I can say myself except to shake my head and talk about what a shame it is that the region is pretty much fucked.  I like to hope for the best, but this whole scenario has already zipped right past the worst.  I don't have a solution, but then, I thought that's what the people at BP and the Energy Department were for.  The only thing they've really managed, it seems, is to fail several times, and then not offer up much in the way of back-up plans for their back-up plans. 

A popular Facebook status suggests (with dubious accuracy) that a BP representative dismissively said that "Louisiana isn't the only place to get shrimp," and that we in turn should remember that BP isn't the only place to get gas, which is all well and good, but by the time you protest every oil company that ever had a spill, you'll soon find yourself walking to work. 

The good old days

Not that walking would be such a bad thing when you really look at the alternative.  Kurt Vonnegut said in one of his last essays that Americans are addicted to oil - this latest spill is analogous to getting drunk and puking all over the front of your shirt.  The last time this happened it was in remote Alaska.  This time, it was down in the south, the continental 48, or in other words: in 1989 we got drunk and puked at a kegger up north.  Right now, we're so drunk that we're shitting ourselves in our own living room.  

Alternative energy looks better and better.  The question for most is: what are you willing to give up?  Electric cars are hardly ubiquitous, and they're not making very good progress towards proliferation either, but that or something like it is what it would take to shift away from oil.  Enough consumers have to come out and say that they want electric cars (and such) and then go back those words up with their checkbooks. 

Of course, there are other forces at play...

For now, the Gulf Coast is, to put it nicely, doomed.  If the leak were plugged today there would still be nearly 50 million gallons slowly slicking it's way inland.  Some people have borrowed a term from the zombie horror genre and called this event a "slow-motion apocalypse," and rightly so.  Already significant portions of the coast are devoid of life, and many more soon will be.  

A complex and interwoven web of corruption, incompetence, and greed made the oil spill possible.  Poor oversight, deep cost cutting - you name it.  That thing was born to fail.  How many others are in a similar predicament?  It seems like we won't know until it happens again, until these ticking time bombs go off. We're slow dancing with possible human extinction scenarios.  To complete the drunkard analogy, we're just guzzling it now, and we don't care how we get it, or what it's doing to us.  I just hope Dr Drew's got the time and patience to get us off this stuff before we drink ourselves to death.

 It goes down smooth - do you like it smooth?