You want to blame somebody? Fine, good, go for it: BP, Barack Obama,
George W. Bush, Huey P. Long, Halliburton, the federal Minerals
Management Service, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the Tea
Party—all guilty.
Culpability-wise, it’s an embarras de richesse. BP’s so-called “safety protocols” lacked anything identifiable as “safety:" the more you spend on contingency systems, the less money you make. Why fool around with serious disaster plans (such a downer) when the crude’s still gushing and the profits keep piling up and the shareholders are blissed out? Congress capped damages for oil companies at $75 million back in 1990. That was right after the Exxon Valdez slammed into Bligh Reef, spilling 30 million gallons of crude in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. Never mind the drunken captain then; never mind the faulty blow-out protector now. Birds and fish don’t vote: what’s important is not to upset the price of gasoline.
BP wasn’t the only party without a spill plan. The government agency charged with protecting the diverse wildlife of the Gulf—everything from crab larvae to brown pelicans, dolphins to Kemp’s ridley turtles—they kind of, you know, figured everything would be cool. How often does a huge deep water rig blow its lid? What are the odds? The Fish and Wildlife program coordinator in Lafayette, Louisiana, said to the New York Times, “Obviously, we are going to relook at all these numbers for upcoming consultations.”
Perhaps she could call Dr. Peter Lutz, the sea turtle scientist all the major oil companies—ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Shell and BP—list as their go-to guy in case of an oil accident. The only problem is he’s dead. Been dead since 2005.
Members of Congress pitched a collective hissy fit over that one. They’re shocked! Shocked! They belly up to the nearest microphone and lambaste the current or the previous administration, blame too much or too little government, and suggest that Dark Forces are at work: Wall Street, the 1960s, socialism, illegal immigrants, and the plat du jour, oil executives. They’re all to blame. Your elected representatives love to hold televised hearings where they can holler at those executives from Shell, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and especially BP (nice, cheap way to get material for campaign ads), but when the cameras are switched off, members of both parties tug their forelocks and say, “Thank you, sir!” when fat campaign contributions are slipped into their humid little hands. In 2008, Democratic senate candidates received an average of $52,000 each from oil and gas companies; Republicans got $144,000. No doubt Big Petrol will be pleased and proud to repeat the performance this year, adding Tea Partiers to the gift list. After all, the Tea Party, cheer-led by squad captain Sarah Barracuda, are all hot for drilling here, drilling now, drilling, baby, drilling! Alaska, Virginia, hell, the Everglades. The Tea Party rallied in Houma, Louisiana the other day demanding that interfering commie Obama Gummint back off and leave the good capitalists of the extractive industries to do that voodoo that they do so well, i.e., suck oil and gas out of every nook and cranny of the old earth. At the same time, they want that elitist lazy Obama Gummint to get up off its pampered Harvard fanny and fix the oil spill, which was somehow its fault, anyway. While Washington is simultaneously doing nothing and doing something, they should send in the Marines and also the Navy. Nuke that naughty well.
I’m not making this up. There are people seriously proposing Obama order a nuclear strike in the Gulf of Mexico. Destroy this ecosystem in order to save it!
The American national attention-span is that of a pubescent goat, so many of us don’t remember just how passionate and profound was the love between the Bush administration and the petroleum Cosa Nostra. Dick Cheney hung out with the big boys from ExxonMobil, Shell and ConocoPhillips in that now-infamous 2001 meeting. BP’s then-CEO John Browne was also in on the fun. The oil execs crafted White House energy strategy. No environmentalists, scientists, Democrats, or girls were allowed.
As if letting the foxes draft henhouse policy weren’t criminal and stupid enough, the Minerals Management Service, the government agency responsible for overseeing oil and gas development on the outer continental shelf, was so in bed with Big Oil that MMS agents in the Denver office were, um, actually fucking industry people. I’m talking exchange of precious bodily fluids here. Oil execs and regulators partied together in the Lake Charles office, doing a little blow, watching a lot of porn. Instead of, say, figuring out how to stop the destruction should a big-ass spill occur. As Florida senator Bill Nelson put it: “In the Bush administration, these were the guys that were having sex orgies and pot parties and weren't showing up for work.”
The Gummint’s on the case, though. MMS has been re-branded. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar recently announced it is now the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement. How great is that? It’s not just “management” any more, but “regulation” and “enforcement!”
I feel safer already. No doubt the pelicans feel positively cherished.
As for Barack Obama—well. He has disappointed those who assumed, hoped, he would kick the moneychangers out of the temple. But that was naive. The monstrous reality is that America runs on petroleum and American politics on petro-dollars. Obama had been doing this political dance, suggesting an expansion of ocean drilling in an attempt to sweet-talk the stupider Democrats and most all the Republicans into some kind of carbon emission-limits legislation. It wasn’t a terrible idea. At least until Deepwater blew. Then it became at once evil and absurd. Not, mind you, as evil and absurd as Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi: Barbour first denied there was any oil on the Gulf coast, then said it weren’t nothing but them itty-bitty tar balls, which were probably the result of natural seepage, then blamed the press for reporting on the oil on the beaches, all the while whining about how the $20 million BP has to fork over for restoration and clean-up is a bad thing because it may impede BP’s efforts to go drill elsewhere.
Haley Barbour, to jog your memory, is the fellow who recently assessed the importance of slavery to the Civil War as “diddly.” Wonder if he’ll use that same word to dismiss the impact of the spill on Mississippi tourism?
Anyway, Obama was naive and he was slow. Nobody told him he should act like a TV president, pitching a testosterone-fired tantrum, vowing to get that oil dead or alive. Instead he consulted experts: engineers and scientists. Doesn’t the man know that Americans don’t want him to get a passel of eggheads on the case? We want Air Force One landing on the beach at Grand Isle, the president blazing out onto the sand toting an AK-47, bitch-slapping the nearest BP suit, then stomping on a burning Union Jack. We want asses kicked. Eventually, the president got in touch with his inner George W. and hauled some boot-tempting backsides to D.C. The Lords of Petroleum sat meekly but mulishly in the Oval Office or in front of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, claiming to know nothing. Mistakes were made, but not, perish the thought! by them. Obama’s televised rage and the ritual (and not for real) humiliation of the Lords of Petroleum didn’t plug the gusher or purify the water or scrape the crude off even one pelican, but it offered a certain emotional satisfaction. We love that frisson of redemptive violence. And we need someone to hate: the villain, the monster outsider.
The alien. BP became “British Petroleum,” accent on the “British,” and hell, ain’t we done kicked they butts in 1776? Never mind that the corporation is as American as anything else. The multinational we know as BP merged with Amoco—which used to be Standard Oil—in 1998. Americans own half the stock. Should BP go bankrupt, our retirement funds and our investment portfolios are as much at risk as those of little old ladies in Liverpool—at the time of this writing, the state of Florida held about 15 million shares.
But let’s not allow logic to get in the way of a good animus. Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, served himself up to the American public as the designated culprit. But he would not play by American rules. He refused to weep for the TV cameras. He refused to beg our forgiveness. In our historical unconscious he became General Gage, enforcer of the “Intolerable Acts” in the 1770s, or General Howe ordering the hanging of Nathan Hale, a cold, superior, plummy-accented Englishman. Hayward could never understand our Gulf of Mexico. He’s never seen dolphins playing in the waters off Turkey Point or a mullet run at Indian Pass; he’s never gone scalloping nor dug lilac-colored periwinkles out of the surf-glazed sand. As if to prove us right, he said it was “a very big ocean” and all that crude gushing forth “tiny in relation to the total water volume.” He said he was sure the damage to the ecosystem would be “very, very modest.” And then he left the Gulf coast for the south coast of England and Regatta Week at Cowes. His yacht placed fourth in the “JP Morgan Asset Management Round the Island Race.”
Tony Hayward is no longer in charge of the Deepwater spill response. His embarrassed corporate masters have sent him to Siberia. Not metaphorically, either: BP has petroleum interests in the East Siberian Sea. By the time this is printed, he may have resigned altogether. So who next? Whom shall we burn in effigy? Whom shall we sue? Surely someone must pay.
If we don’t construct a new enemy soon, we might have to look to ourselves. And Jesus, that’s going to hurt. We’re the people who scream like junkies in the cold-turkey lock-up when gasoline heads toward four bucks a gallon. We’re the people driving our SUVs to our air-conditioned cottages and condos on Santa Rosa Island and at Apalachicola, on Perdido Key and at Grayton Beach, insisting that Barack Obama and the Environmental Protection Agency and Charlie Crist and the lawyers and the army get together to save our rich waters, our fishermen, our shrimpers, our oyster beds, our perfect beaches, our perfect childhood memories of sunsets and ghost crabs and sparklers swirled in the purple dark of the 4th of July. We’re the people posting comments on blogs and writing letters to the editor shouting “Something Must Be Done!”
As long as we don’t have to do it. All these long generations, we’ve assumed that we’ve a right to take what the earth has to offer, especially the ancient, decayed bodies of creatures that lived before we discovered fire or turned the first wheel, now transfigured into petroleum in the deepest recesses of the planet. Surely that fuel was meant for us. And surely we have made something of ourselves with it, haven’t we, with our machines and our great buildings, our speed, our technological grandeur? We want “our way of life,” and that means luxury built on profligacy and waste. “Our way of life” should mean understanding that the oysters and the ghost crabs and the porpoises and the rays—all the creatures—the salt-white sand, the dunes and the grasses, the mangroves and the marshes, the jewely green-blue waters themselves, are necessary to us, all avatars of the genius of the place. The sea is ours, mare nostrum. And we are the sea’s: mater nostra.
—Diane Roberts, professor of English at FSU, columnist, and author of Dream State: Eight Generations of Swamp Lawyers, Conquistadors, Confederate Daughters, Banana Republicans, and other Florida Wildlife
Diane Roberts is a Professor of English at FSU and a Visiting Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Northumbria in England. Her latest book, Dream State: Eight Generations of Swamp Lawyers, Conquistadors, Confederate
Daughters, Banana Republicans, and
other Florida Wildlife, about her politically prominent (and very
odd) family has been called "perfect," as well as "hilarious," "wild,"
"fun," "strange,"and "splendid." Roberts' previous two books—Faulkner and Southern Womanhood and
The Myth of Aunt Jemima—are
explorations of Southern culture. She is also a journalist, writing
op-ed pieces for The New York Times, The New Republic,
and The Times of London. She is a political columnist for The
St. Petersburg Times in Florida and makes documentaries for BBC
Radio in London, where she also spends part of the year. She has been a
commentator for NPR since 1993 and she writes for the Washington
Post.
[Read more A Tribute to the Gulf Coast]
Culpability-wise, it’s an embarras de richesse. BP’s so-called “safety protocols” lacked anything identifiable as “safety:" the more you spend on contingency systems, the less money you make. Why fool around with serious disaster plans (such a downer) when the crude’s still gushing and the profits keep piling up and the shareholders are blissed out? Congress capped damages for oil companies at $75 million back in 1990. That was right after the Exxon Valdez slammed into Bligh Reef, spilling 30 million gallons of crude in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. Never mind the drunken captain then; never mind the faulty blow-out protector now. Birds and fish don’t vote: what’s important is not to upset the price of gasoline.
BP wasn’t the only party without a spill plan. The government agency charged with protecting the diverse wildlife of the Gulf—everything from crab larvae to brown pelicans, dolphins to Kemp’s ridley turtles—they kind of, you know, figured everything would be cool. How often does a huge deep water rig blow its lid? What are the odds? The Fish and Wildlife program coordinator in Lafayette, Louisiana, said to the New York Times, “Obviously, we are going to relook at all these numbers for upcoming consultations.”
Perhaps she could call Dr. Peter Lutz, the sea turtle scientist all the major oil companies—ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Shell and BP—list as their go-to guy in case of an oil accident. The only problem is he’s dead. Been dead since 2005.
Members of Congress pitched a collective hissy fit over that one. They’re shocked! Shocked! They belly up to the nearest microphone and lambaste the current or the previous administration, blame too much or too little government, and suggest that Dark Forces are at work: Wall Street, the 1960s, socialism, illegal immigrants, and the plat du jour, oil executives. They’re all to blame. Your elected representatives love to hold televised hearings where they can holler at those executives from Shell, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and especially BP (nice, cheap way to get material for campaign ads), but when the cameras are switched off, members of both parties tug their forelocks and say, “Thank you, sir!” when fat campaign contributions are slipped into their humid little hands. In 2008, Democratic senate candidates received an average of $52,000 each from oil and gas companies; Republicans got $144,000. No doubt Big Petrol will be pleased and proud to repeat the performance this year, adding Tea Partiers to the gift list. After all, the Tea Party, cheer-led by squad captain Sarah Barracuda, are all hot for drilling here, drilling now, drilling, baby, drilling! Alaska, Virginia, hell, the Everglades. The Tea Party rallied in Houma, Louisiana the other day demanding that interfering commie Obama Gummint back off and leave the good capitalists of the extractive industries to do that voodoo that they do so well, i.e., suck oil and gas out of every nook and cranny of the old earth. At the same time, they want that elitist lazy Obama Gummint to get up off its pampered Harvard fanny and fix the oil spill, which was somehow its fault, anyway. While Washington is simultaneously doing nothing and doing something, they should send in the Marines and also the Navy. Nuke that naughty well.
I’m not making this up. There are people seriously proposing Obama order a nuclear strike in the Gulf of Mexico. Destroy this ecosystem in order to save it!
The American national attention-span is that of a pubescent goat, so many of us don’t remember just how passionate and profound was the love between the Bush administration and the petroleum Cosa Nostra. Dick Cheney hung out with the big boys from ExxonMobil, Shell and ConocoPhillips in that now-infamous 2001 meeting. BP’s then-CEO John Browne was also in on the fun. The oil execs crafted White House energy strategy. No environmentalists, scientists, Democrats, or girls were allowed.
As if letting the foxes draft henhouse policy weren’t criminal and stupid enough, the Minerals Management Service, the government agency responsible for overseeing oil and gas development on the outer continental shelf, was so in bed with Big Oil that MMS agents in the Denver office were, um, actually fucking industry people. I’m talking exchange of precious bodily fluids here. Oil execs and regulators partied together in the Lake Charles office, doing a little blow, watching a lot of porn. Instead of, say, figuring out how to stop the destruction should a big-ass spill occur. As Florida senator Bill Nelson put it: “In the Bush administration, these were the guys that were having sex orgies and pot parties and weren't showing up for work.”
The Gummint’s on the case, though. MMS has been re-branded. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar recently announced it is now the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement. How great is that? It’s not just “management” any more, but “regulation” and “enforcement!”
I feel safer already. No doubt the pelicans feel positively cherished.
As for Barack Obama—well. He has disappointed those who assumed, hoped, he would kick the moneychangers out of the temple. But that was naive. The monstrous reality is that America runs on petroleum and American politics on petro-dollars. Obama had been doing this political dance, suggesting an expansion of ocean drilling in an attempt to sweet-talk the stupider Democrats and most all the Republicans into some kind of carbon emission-limits legislation. It wasn’t a terrible idea. At least until Deepwater blew. Then it became at once evil and absurd. Not, mind you, as evil and absurd as Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi: Barbour first denied there was any oil on the Gulf coast, then said it weren’t nothing but them itty-bitty tar balls, which were probably the result of natural seepage, then blamed the press for reporting on the oil on the beaches, all the while whining about how the $20 million BP has to fork over for restoration and clean-up is a bad thing because it may impede BP’s efforts to go drill elsewhere.
Haley Barbour, to jog your memory, is the fellow who recently assessed the importance of slavery to the Civil War as “diddly.” Wonder if he’ll use that same word to dismiss the impact of the spill on Mississippi tourism?
Anyway, Obama was naive and he was slow. Nobody told him he should act like a TV president, pitching a testosterone-fired tantrum, vowing to get that oil dead or alive. Instead he consulted experts: engineers and scientists. Doesn’t the man know that Americans don’t want him to get a passel of eggheads on the case? We want Air Force One landing on the beach at Grand Isle, the president blazing out onto the sand toting an AK-47, bitch-slapping the nearest BP suit, then stomping on a burning Union Jack. We want asses kicked. Eventually, the president got in touch with his inner George W. and hauled some boot-tempting backsides to D.C. The Lords of Petroleum sat meekly but mulishly in the Oval Office or in front of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, claiming to know nothing. Mistakes were made, but not, perish the thought! by them. Obama’s televised rage and the ritual (and not for real) humiliation of the Lords of Petroleum didn’t plug the gusher or purify the water or scrape the crude off even one pelican, but it offered a certain emotional satisfaction. We love that frisson of redemptive violence. And we need someone to hate: the villain, the monster outsider.
The alien. BP became “British Petroleum,” accent on the “British,” and hell, ain’t we done kicked they butts in 1776? Never mind that the corporation is as American as anything else. The multinational we know as BP merged with Amoco—which used to be Standard Oil—in 1998. Americans own half the stock. Should BP go bankrupt, our retirement funds and our investment portfolios are as much at risk as those of little old ladies in Liverpool—at the time of this writing, the state of Florida held about 15 million shares.
But let’s not allow logic to get in the way of a good animus. Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, served himself up to the American public as the designated culprit. But he would not play by American rules. He refused to weep for the TV cameras. He refused to beg our forgiveness. In our historical unconscious he became General Gage, enforcer of the “Intolerable Acts” in the 1770s, or General Howe ordering the hanging of Nathan Hale, a cold, superior, plummy-accented Englishman. Hayward could never understand our Gulf of Mexico. He’s never seen dolphins playing in the waters off Turkey Point or a mullet run at Indian Pass; he’s never gone scalloping nor dug lilac-colored periwinkles out of the surf-glazed sand. As if to prove us right, he said it was “a very big ocean” and all that crude gushing forth “tiny in relation to the total water volume.” He said he was sure the damage to the ecosystem would be “very, very modest.” And then he left the Gulf coast for the south coast of England and Regatta Week at Cowes. His yacht placed fourth in the “JP Morgan Asset Management Round the Island Race.”
Tony Hayward is no longer in charge of the Deepwater spill response. His embarrassed corporate masters have sent him to Siberia. Not metaphorically, either: BP has petroleum interests in the East Siberian Sea. By the time this is printed, he may have resigned altogether. So who next? Whom shall we burn in effigy? Whom shall we sue? Surely someone must pay.
If we don’t construct a new enemy soon, we might have to look to ourselves. And Jesus, that’s going to hurt. We’re the people who scream like junkies in the cold-turkey lock-up when gasoline heads toward four bucks a gallon. We’re the people driving our SUVs to our air-conditioned cottages and condos on Santa Rosa Island and at Apalachicola, on Perdido Key and at Grayton Beach, insisting that Barack Obama and the Environmental Protection Agency and Charlie Crist and the lawyers and the army get together to save our rich waters, our fishermen, our shrimpers, our oyster beds, our perfect beaches, our perfect childhood memories of sunsets and ghost crabs and sparklers swirled in the purple dark of the 4th of July. We’re the people posting comments on blogs and writing letters to the editor shouting “Something Must Be Done!”
As long as we don’t have to do it. All these long generations, we’ve assumed that we’ve a right to take what the earth has to offer, especially the ancient, decayed bodies of creatures that lived before we discovered fire or turned the first wheel, now transfigured into petroleum in the deepest recesses of the planet. Surely that fuel was meant for us. And surely we have made something of ourselves with it, haven’t we, with our machines and our great buildings, our speed, our technological grandeur? We want “our way of life,” and that means luxury built on profligacy and waste. “Our way of life” should mean understanding that the oysters and the ghost crabs and the porpoises and the rays—all the creatures—the salt-white sand, the dunes and the grasses, the mangroves and the marshes, the jewely green-blue waters themselves, are necessary to us, all avatars of the genius of the place. The sea is ours, mare nostrum. And we are the sea’s: mater nostra.
—Diane Roberts, professor of English at FSU, columnist, and author of Dream State: Eight Generations of Swamp Lawyers, Conquistadors, Confederate Daughters, Banana Republicans, and other Florida Wildlife
Diane Roberts is a Professor of English at FSU and a Visiting Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Northumbria in England. Her latest book, Dream State: Eight Generations of Swamp Lawyers, Conquistadors, Confederate
Daughters, Banana Republicans, and
other Florida Wildlife, about her politically prominent (and very
odd) family has been called "perfect," as well as "hilarious," "wild,"
"fun," "strange,"and "splendid." Roberts' previous two books—Faulkner and Southern Womanhood and
The Myth of Aunt Jemima—are
explorations of Southern culture. She is also a journalist, writing
op-ed pieces for The New York Times, The New Republic,
and The Times of London. She is a political columnist for The
St. Petersburg Times in Florida and makes documentaries for BBC
Radio in London, where she also spends part of the year. She has been a
commentator for NPR since 1993 and she writes for the Washington
Post.[Read more A Tribute to the Gulf Coast]
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