drifting into darkness

Rarely, if ever, have we been more weirded out than by the circus tents and fireworks encircling the...BP and Barry Show. I agree it hangs out foremost in your mind, or at least brings you back to reality if you happened to wander. It is like a Ferris Wheel lurching to a stop as it leaves you rocking in the wind waving a little prize flag while allowing new passengers aboard. A play with many acts in which the curtain comes down between them. Of course, the curtain is gilded and patterned in a Cajun wildlife theme as it exists at this moment. Do you look? You should look. There but for the grace of God go you or I.

While you look, also look at this, just to get a good feel for what is happening.

It is unfortunate that this was entirely predictable, there is nothing quite like being in a disaster that makes it crystal clear your fate is in your own hands, or webbed feet or fins. I know you've been keeping up, it is riveting I'll admit, you can't keep away from it, but when it isn't there, you want it to be. One of the strangest aspects of media handling is the business as usual selection of reports. A general observation calculation would be 10% GOM/BP-OB/Offshore Drilling compared to 90% Treasure in Afghanistan/cellphone wars/female Viagra/Candidate Greene/Miley Cyrus and the Family Values coffee klatchers, etc. What does this say? It says a large part of the media audience is okay with that. Excuse me? Where have you been in the last 10 years? They are as okay with that as they are with laughing at late night comedians delivering one liners concerning the very Cataclysmic Catastrophe taking place in which there is no humor. None. Honestly. "Life goes on" according the cable/dish satellites mostly consisting of twenty-four hour a day, seven days a week, season upon season, sales pitches for something jammed together, shipped here and piled in pyramids of materials distributed to our TBTF variety of branded job lots.

This catastrophe won't be any once in a lifetime catastrophe. Without a total reversal of present policy, we have the extraordinary potential to become another Nigeria, we've been well on our way for some time now, you might not have seen it if you travel only inland. Perhaps eventually there will be pristine [gentrified] places with exorbitant admission policies and the remainder tarry shores and dead zones. Or, perhaps everybody will start migrating inland, there are plenty of vacancies. Multiply exponentially all that you are seeing today by ten years with nothing able to reign it in. Infinite collapse, inside the cyclone of this moment, the days before and days to come, not a pretty picture.

Pardon me, but I am feeling very negative about the crisis having any resolution. The situation at hand appears to be expanding in the usual variety of blunders we've come to recognize is hallmark of our supposed plumbers and cleanup/crisis management crews since the evening of April 20, 2010. This feeling is impacted by the continuance, rather, full throttle escalation of our teetering foreign policies furthering certain previously imagined paranoias in which our worst fears are gradually realized into concrete reality. I wrote in a past post something about I'd love to be wrong, as it becomes increasing clear we were right. You may now remove any and all ideas about anything being a delusional hologram.the paragraph below is all too typical of the wanton waste observed in our careless, dangerous species:

"As you can see in the pictures," said the text of the email, "plastic bags containing snare boom were recklessly placed without consideration for the natural wildlife" on Queen Bess Island where the Plaquemines Parish Inland Waterways Strike Force recently discovered broken eggs and crushed chicks of the precious Brown Pelicans.

"They (the Brown Pelicans) already have the oil affecting their population during their reproduction time. Now we have the so-called clean-up crews stomping eggs,” said Nungesser. “The lack of urgency and general disregard for Louisiana’s wetlands and wildlife is enough to make you sick.”

The above text perceives our situation as a one time, local issue as if a different leader and all the other deepwater drillers will never, ever suffer this problem when the exact opposite is true. Let's say theoretically, being that the damage in the Gulf is somewhere in the mile deep well casing beneath the seabed rendering it impossible to repair, such impossibility leads the reckless and inconsiderate to do anything they think necessary to come out of this mess looking good. They can't of course, we're way past that, but desperate people in desperate situations are too often given to desperate measures, the most desperate is this godawful nuke option which like martial law, lies on the table, eyed by some itchy fingers, awaiting deployment. If you think its bad now, should any other solution evade them, as appears to be emerging, we'll see worse. And worse after that and then again. You see, once the most tragic of steps are taken, the barn door is open for anyone else, anywhere to emulate the action. If the superpower does it, well, hey, it must be okay, right?

As we review the past decade, oh, go further back because they have known what we are seeing today for over half a century, ask yourself what is the real policy? Oil and water. Everything else be damned. Thus, everything else was indeed damned.