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BP's Moby Dick?
"Call me Ishmael."
But what Melville did not need modern science, or undersea robots for, was plumbing human nature, and the damage unrelenting greed causes - not just to a man such as Captain Ahab, but to all his crew and to the whole society that supports their round-the-world quest for... oil. (photo by Flickr user 'J') So begins Herman Melville epic seafaring novel, ostensibly about whaling, an American Odyssey recounting Captain Ahab's obsessive pursuit of a great oil-carrying sperm whale, Moby Dick.
It ends in disaster.
I write this in a sand barrier motel in Grand Isle Louisiana, in a hot room overlooking an empty beach, and just a few of the six hundred-plus oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.
And it is hard not to ask: is BP another Captain Ahab?
Or, worse, is the United States?
Crude oil is not, of course, sperm whale oil, or "spermicetti". But they have had equally pervasive influences on their societies.
In Melville's 19th century, the oil was used to burn in lamps, make candles, soften leather and even, he writes, to anoint kings:
"Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar oil, nor castor oil, nor bear's oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil. What then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted state, the sweetest of all oils?"
A whole whale-hunting industry quickly grew on the Northeast Coast of the United States, especially in the town of New Bedford: the Houston of the whaling era.
What Melville's vast exploration of the culture of whaling does not recount, or foresee, is the hunting to near-extinction of those prize whales, and the untold damage to the environment caused by their merciless hunting.
Here in Louisiana, the potential damage is far more evident.
Science has progressed much since Melville's time: we have underwater robots filming the crude spewing into the sea; experts predicting, before it even happens, that giant plumes of oil one kilometre under the ocean will strangle all life forms requiring oxygen there, for a decade or more.
But what Melville did not need modern science, or undersea robots for, was plumbing human nature, and the damage unrelenting greed causes - not just to a man such as Captain Ahab, but to all his crew and to the whole society that supports their round-the-world quest for... oil.
Thus America today?
This Al Jazeera crew has been chasing stories of environmental damage, tantalizingly dramatic in their details, but impossible to confirm.
A fish wholesaler who wanted to remain anonymous provides cell phone numbers of local fisheries men who, he says, have stories of "porpoises spewing orange foam out their blow holes", and sundry dead fish caught far out at sea, which, he reminds me, one does not especially want to handle or take aboard.
Thar she blows?
Nope.
One call is not returned.
Another one gets such a curt and eager denial that I can't help but feel there's something to hide.
And as it turns out, many of the fishermen who can no longer fish, because BP has destroyed their fishing season, if not grounds, have now accepted temporary work for the oil giant in cleaning up its mess.
They have had to sign non-disclosure agreements which prevent the fishermen from saying anything which might hurt BP.
Melville's reading public surely would know the dictum "the truth shall set you free".
But not here. Not for this oil.
Tar balls washed ashore about 10km up the road from this motel.
Producer Tom Szypulski, cameraman Ryan Jackson and I quickly deployed, with visions of a dramatic news report in our heads.
But access was limited to two half-hours each day; limited as well to a 20 metre-wide section of land ("don't go on the beach please") along a 16-km stretch of coastline hit by tar balls.
This TV crew pointed out to the kindly municipal PR man that this was not the stuff of which good television was made, and, frankly, that it looked like BP was covering something up.
He responded:
"What would you do?"
- Posted in
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56 Comments so far
Show AllI knew this was being considered all 'classified'.
Falluja.
Yup, like Falluja, and as the dying Harold Pinter said in his recorded acceptance speech for his Nobel Prize:
"It never happened.
Nothing ever happened.
Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening.
It didn’t matter.
It was of no interest."
I hadn't read this before.....Thank you. Sabo!
Oooh! You should look up the entire transcript of Pinter's speech. It was one for the ages!
Exactly, everyone should be familiar with Pinters 2005 Nobel speech - itself ignored by the US corporate media of course.
http://nobelprize.org/
nobel_prizes/
literature/
laureates/
2005/
pinter-lecture.html
links to both video and text.
"They have had to sign non-disclosure agreements which prevent the fishermen from saying anything which might hurt BP." I was literally forced to sign one of those God Damn things by a former employer. Pretty much anytime they can hold something over your head financially they'll force you to sign one. IMHO this practice should be made illegal, because it's main purpose is to prevent inconvenient truths from coming out that these companies want to keep suppressed.
Of course our government is in the same business of truth suppression when it suits them, so don't hold your breath waiting for them to outlaw the practice. The older get and the more I learn about how big government and big business works in this country, the more disgusted I become with the whole thing.
But on a more upbeat note, this was a great article and a great analogy. You'll never see something like this on MSM.
A US-style "libertarian" would simply say that it was your free choice to sign the non-disclosure gag-contract as a condition of employment. To prohibit such contracts would be "coercive" and "collectivist" oppression on the individual freedom of the employer. On your part, you are also a free man. You can refuse to sign the thing - and gone hungry and homeless. But as that shrill-voiced leader of that old Canadian rock-band champion of "libertarianism" sings:
If you choose not to decide
you still have made a choice!
The same "libertarian" principles apply to those who complain about their employers making them pee in a jar as condition of employment.
As for me, I have worked in both private and the US government, and only in the US government am I NOT treated like a piece of property. I could probably never work for a capitalist boss again.
Fuck the capitalist "libertarians".
I appreciate the literary flavor....
Arrr!
Can anyone imagine the airheads on CNN or Fox News making an analogy between Moby Dick and our disastrous pursuit of oil? Well done, Nick Spicer.
Joe
Hey BP, stop the spin, stop trying to get out of facing the full extent of what you owe! This infuriates me! Pay BP, pay for all you have destroyed, I dont care if it forces the company into bankrupcy, freakin pay for what you have done and shut the f*** up with the spin already, especially you CEO Hayward - you win Worst Person In the World for 2010 hands down you scumbag!
Post script:
Have you all noticed that one of the big problems in this world is the inability of people who f***-up to say, "I was wrong" or "We were wrong"? People have no integrity today, no sense of honor. Honor. Now there's something totally absent in our world today. Stupid, I know, to expect it from a corporation.
We need to completely de-legitimize the corporate elite and this grotesque idea that they should be running this planet as they see fit. F*** em! - I am so sick of these slimeballs - all of them - the oil and coal industry, the whole MIC, Wall St., big Pharma - they are destroying this country and this planet and they all need to be stripped of the power they should never have had in the first place
Despite their power, it's good to remember that "they" only number in the thousands while We, the People number in the billions. The old axiom reads "in numbers there is strength". I wonder if that holds true in this day when drones controlled by "they" can blow a hundred people demonstrating to bits with one missile.
Kitaj --- I totally concur --- I would observe that by nature corporations are psychopathic in structure and in nature. When human psychopaths cross over the line of legality, we prosecute them and sometimes punish them. When corporate psychopaths do the same things, we simply say that is the corporate way. My point is that (especially now with the recent SCOTUS decision) if corporations have human rights, they must also have responsibility. Until and unless such is the case, our plight as real human beings will continue to worsen. I suspect that with the recent SCOTUS decision, that it is too late, and that our country and society both are doomed.
Misnomer! How can anyone have a "white" whale in an oil slick?
Speaking of misnomers, "Beyond Petroleum". I don't think they're beyond it. As an organizing tool could we come up with a few better terms for "BP"? I'll make a start:
"Belated Promises"
"Blackened Pelican"
"Bisexual Prawns"
"Bull Pucky"
"Baloney-Phoney"
A blog medium isn't the best for winnowing the good ones.
Boorish Pricks?
Baneful Predator.
Bayou Polluter.
Beyond Pernicious.
I could go on and on...
PaulK, Harvey Wasserman, in his article "BP's Nuke-Powered Liability Cap" came up with the best of all:
BP = Bumbling Petro-criminals.
When the people fear their government there is tyranny,
when the government fears the people there is liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson
Love it.
Bigger Payoff
Bitter Poison
Burning Pyre
Better Pray
Burrowing Parasites
Buggered Populace
Buying Politicians
- Billions of Possibilities, and all can be used in context to Bloody their Proboscus.
Burning Porpoise
Bush's Payback
Bilge Purge
Beyond Patience
...
Big Pollution
(is what I've been using for a few days now)
nice, simple, to the point. C'mon y'all, jump right in, the water's slime.
Broken Pipes
Blowout Pretenders
Bickering Phonies
Blog Provocateurs?
Brash Prigs?
Brainless Pissants?
No, It's BEYOND PROFANITY, which is what I've been calling it. BP's actions have gone beyond the realm of negative human speech.
Media access restricted in the U.S.? Call me naive, but I didn't know it had come to that yet. We ARE in a police state! And the oil is already in the Florida keys. Now I am starting to get a little scared.
The St. Petersburg Times reported the finding of several tar balls off the Key West shores. It is being determined whether they are from the Deepwater Horizon fiasco, or just "normal" tar balls washing up on shore. Supposedly there will be millions rather than double digit numbers when they inevitably begin to wash up. They imply when, not if. Peace and Love
Tar Balls in Florida Keys, Oil Plumes Raise Fears of Wider Spill
Fears are growing that the massive BP oil spill in Louisiana could be entering waters beyond the Gulf of Mexico. The US Coast Guard says it’s discovered twenty tar balls off Key West, Florida—an indication the spill could be caught in a loop current that’s carrying it to the Florida Keys and up the East Coast. Up to 70,000 barrels of oil have been leaking into the Gulf every day since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20. Meanwhile, on Monday, scientists discussed their findings of enormous plumes of oil in the Gulf of Mexico that suggest the spill is wider and more threatening to marine habitat than previously thought. Vernon Asper of the University of Southern Mississippi said the oil was found at deep sea levels.
Vernon Asper: "We found some oil just below the surface which is formed into these aggregates that we think are probably settling. We also found oil much, much deeper in the water column. We found layers, or I guess you could call them clouds, of oil that are well down, over 2,000 feet down, in the water column, some of them much lower than that."
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/18/headlines#1
Thanks to the others who responded. I read it from today's headlines at the DemocracyNow! website.
I suppose drones will patrol the beaches, now, keeping folks at a distance so as not to witness...will boaters be targeted, too?
the Planet of the Apes had the Forbidden Zone...
strange to be present on this planet at this time...actively engaged in, and observing, rampant destruction...
tough charge to answer...
shall we turn it all off on September 22, 2012?
it is the right thing to do...
"and the third part of the sea became blood and the third part of the creatures which were in the sea and had life, died" - Revelation, 8:8,9
BP has punched a hole in Hell !
The same hole that caused the great extinctions of the last dinosaur era.
In ominous undertones of the Stephen King novel, the Gulf of Mexico looks slated to become a gargantuan "dead zone" bereft of all marine life forms. What a monumental tragic testament to the folly of the pursuit of ever greater advances in oil extraction science.
"... municipal PR man": What would you do?
It appears that cover up has become socially acceptable. It used to be treated as a crime. Now it is a crime to be a whistle blower.
The collapse of this empire includes cutting off the legs of our future. Empires do not rise up out of their own ashes.
When the people fear their government there is tyranny,
when the government fears the people there is liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson
I read somewhere that the oil gusher could be stopped, or at least greatly slowed, by bombing the wellhead, causing rock to fall around the oil pool and close it off. This post said that BP won't do that, because they don't want to give up the oil they still hope to pump from the well (or from the containment capsule if they ever get one to work.)
Is there any truth to this? How would anyone know if bombing the sea floor would make things better or worse? But this is a really desperate situation. The Gulf of Mexico a dead zone? And apparently it won't stop with the Gulf.
Apparently the Soviets used nuclear devices at least four times, beginning in the 1960's, to plug runaway underwater wells. I've read that the US military has ways of plugging this blowout with high explosives but, you may be correct, BP is doing all it can to capitalize on this gusher, to hell with the environment!
BTW, it seems the oil has entered the gulf loop. Oil is showing up in the everglades and may be heading for the Atlantic.
Wait a minute, can a foreign company demand that hired U.S. citizens sign away their free speech rights? Non-disclosure?
O.K. These workers won't say anything to people in England. This is bizarre. Didn't we have this free speech problem with England before?
Oh and another awful thing. MSNBC is having a "lovely" article on google news about Mt. St. Helens. They are saying, how wonderful it is that Nature repairs its own, and in just 30 years.
OMG, this is Limbaugh thinking. WHY are they running this article NOW? Hello! Aren't there any Gulf stories that should make some "Top News?" What's the point? Are people supposed to see these recovering volcano stories and think, "Oh, the Gulf will do that too."
I don't think so; can all these creatures, and humans make it 30 years by living and breathing oil? NOT!
When does hurricane season start? I know they go in alphabetical order. If the first one is a big one, skip the letter "A" and go right to "B" for BP.
I read another business article interview with Mr. Hayward... Looking refreshed and relaxed he said" When this thing turns around..." It's not going to turn around, but it will TURN on the planet.
It was also reported that Mr. Hayward was getting death threats. Oh, please, don't kill him; just take him off shore, about 50 miles, make him swim back, and let Nature take its course.
"Wait a minute, can a foreign company demand that hired U.S. citizens sign away their free speech rights? Non-disclosure?"
They can't legally enjoin the employee from saying anything, but they can sue the employee for all they were paid - plus hefty legal fees, since the signing the non-disclosure.
So it's sign the disclosure and make the mortgage payment, the payment on the work boat and buy food, or not sign the disclosure and starve - it is a perfectly free-will as a libertarian capitalist sees it.
The fact that BP is "foreign" has nothing to do with it. Most large US industrial or mining firms are subsidiarys of foreign firms.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Now would be an excellent time for an organized Left to appeal much more broadly to the middle-class to support a Green New Deal, but the American left, such as it is, did not prepare or organize enough to seize this opportunity and, unfortunately, America and the world will pay for the ongoing failures of the American right AND left regardless of how insanely idiotic they become.
That said, the current obsolete 19th century political spectrum from communism to fascism has failed to honestly or comprehensively address the two greatest problems of our age: Global environmental degradation and human over-populations' acceleration of the degradation of the biosphere due to the resource demands placed on the planet by our sheer numbers and the inefficiency of prevailing resource distribution, energy systems, waste disposal and recycling systems around the world. I no longer believe that economists and politicians are either fit or capable of constructively influencing governance or governing. Their ideologies are too personal, too self-interested, too capitalist, and especially, too SUBJECTIVE. Wantonly so now on a globalist scale that is operating out of control at the peril of humanity and too many other living species.
A new Third Way is called for and I believe that way must be an attempt to create a global system of environmentally sustainable resource management and humane human population reductions that harmonizes human population groups and their activities to the specific ecological and resource limits of the regional habitats they inhabit on a long-term sustainable basis. To achieve this would require a global participatory economic (parecon) democratic body of scientists employing a scientifically OBJECTIVE decision making process based on regional optimized habitat/population plans generated by the most advanced computerized biospheric and resource information gathering system ever attempted. One that combines real time biosphere data gathering with verifiable geographic annual resource extraction and utilization data into one system. Such a system should be able to develop "down-growths" plans for populations and economies.
Under such a system capitalism could only be allowed to remain under heavily regulated and enforced conditions with the profit incentive confined by scientifically imposed limits that absolutely prevent capitalism from continuing to undermine the biosphere.
The failure of doctrinal communism was its vain notion that it could entirely stamp out capitalism. Capitalism will always find a way to thrive in secret in black markets and always has. It operates on a psychological level of reptilian brain gratification than can only ever be carefully regulated and conditionally limited--with eternal vigilance--but never fully eliminated. Capitalists, especially American capitalists know this. Even so they whine endlessly about any attempts to regulate them as being somehow "destructive" of capitalism. Utter nonsense. I believe it can and must be gelded and broken like a headstrong stallion.
tar she blows!
Greg Palast:
"In the end, this is bigger than BP and its policy of cheaping-out and skiving the rules. This is about the anti-regulatory mania which has infected the American body politic. While the "tea baggers" are simply its extreme expression, US politicians of all stripes love to attack "the little bureaucrat with the fat rule book." It began with Ronald Reagan and was promoted, most vociferously, by Bill Clinton and the head of Clinton's de-regulation committee, one Al Gore.
"Americans want government off our backs ... that is, until a folding crib crushes the skull of our baby; Toyota accelerators speed us to our death; banks blow our savings on gambling sprees; and crude oil smothers the Mississippi.
"Then, suddenly, it's, "where was hell was the Government!" Why didn't the government do something to stop it?
"The answer is, because government took you at your word they should get out of the way of business, that business could be trusted to police itself. It was only last month that BP, lobbying for new deepwater drilling, testified to Congress that additional equipment and inspection wasn't needed."
Toward thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconqueroring whale. From hell's heart I stab at thee. For hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee---Ahab
Toward thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconqueroring whale. From hell's heart I stab at thee. For hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee---Ahab
And I only am left alone to tell thee---Job
Excellent quotes........Thanks.
Toward thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconqueroring whale. From hell's heart I stab at thee. For hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee---Ahab
And I only am left alone to tell thee---Job
Toward
40:1-2 And the Lord said to Job: "Shall a fault finder contend with the Almighty? He who argues with God, let him answer it."
Aye.
Interesting about the fishermen and their arrangement with B.P. It is a deal with the devil.
They need to talk with the poor defrauded guys in Alaska.(the twenty year battle) Many of the boat owners did the same with Exxon- did they get it in the a..!
Why do the average guys from the working and middle classes keep believing the false song of corporate criminals?
Why do people think they will beat the casino? Greed and need are one thing- what Americans need to realize in their collective gut is just who or what the upper managers of these companies are.
They are a peculiar life form- the kind your mom told you to avoid!
You all know--Bruno, the guy with a sledge hammer, the real friend of the block captain(capo). Corporate lawyers and special agreements are suited fine print Brunos. Their sledge is the court.
They are hit men and enforcers for those who WRITE and MANIPULATE the laws.
Boat owners, you should have stayed on the porch and waited for B.P. to come crawlin- then you work - but only day wages and SIGN NOTHING.
Even the worker has become bourgeois in the US.
The bourgeoisie have never changed the world. They are froth and always have been. Mao pointed this out at the formation of the communist party in China. At that stage he was one of two. Mistakes he subsequently made do not invalidate his insight (this is a foundation of PRC understanding)
It is very possible that derivations of Maoism, which is based firmly on the words of Confucius is going to lead the world in the future.
It is not just that the Chinese have millions of little yellow men and women. It is that they are wiser.
Too bad John Wayne and the Hellfighters couldn't be here to help stop the leak,
I wonder if Red Adair could plug that well.