Not to mention just how flat-out silly the comments of those coming to BP's defense -- such as Sarah Palin's blaming of environmentalists for the oil spill. There's a clever lady. Or Fox News' coverage -- which is an oxymoron in and of itself.
The seeming passivity of Obama's administration and the lack of accountability by anyone is also pretty damned frustrating too.
Piecing it all together isn't easy. Corporations are great at deflection and confusion. And I never thought I'd be quoting a film critic and essayist on BP's oil spill. But in his essay BP's Tree Fell on My Lawn, Roger Ebert provides thoughtful -- albeit simplistic -- observations on the events surrounding this mess.
And mess is being nice about it. Sort of like comparing the effects of the atom bomb on Nagasake to microwaving a bowl of soup.
At the heart of Ebert's article: accountability and misleading rhetoric. But I think also, a wholly necessary indictment of corporate greed -- the willingness to put everyone and everything at risk for personal gain.
An excerpt from Ebert's article:
Let me begin with a tiny anecdote. We've had strange weather lately, as you don't need me to tell you. A big tree blew over on our property. That was an act of God. Parts of it landed on my neighbor's property. Another act of God. It was my responsibility to pay for its removal. If I'm going to go around growing trees, I have to pay if they get blown over. You can be sure my neighbor will pay if one of his trees blows this way. And if my neighbor could prove that I was trying to cut the tree down (for fuel, let's say) and it fell the wrong way, he'd have grounds for a lawsuit. Especially if it fell on his house and he could no longer live there.
BP had a very big tree that blew down in the Gulf. It was not looking after it properly. It ignored or evaded safety regulations. It possibly bore criminal responsibility. The tree fell on my property. BP should have to pay to remove that tree, right? What if it enlisted cops to prevent me from even walking over and taking photos of what they were doing on my property? What if they issued statements saying it wasn't such a large tree, and my property would soon recover? What if it landed on my house, and BP said it wasn't much of a house in the first place?
2 comments:
It's a nice analogy, but it misses some of the complexity of the situation.
BP wasn't deep-drilling in the Gulf of Mexico for amusement. They were there because all of us car-driving suburbanites are constantly demanding that they supply more and cheaper oil.
In effect, we've paid our neighbour to plant a tree on his property... on a slope... in sandy soil... next to our house... because we want some shade on our yard. When the wind blows it over on our house, who is responsible?
Is our neighbour? He only did what we asked. Is it us? Well, nobody forced our neighbour to plant the tree.
Perhaps the reason that the media and government have gone so easy on BP is because deep down they realize that we are all complicit in the mess that's been made.
A fair point Kenneth -- and I do concede Ebert's over-simplistic viewpoint. Thanks for commenting.
Perhaps your analogy misses a bit too? The neighbor doesn't "need" the shade in your anecdote...not in the same way energy consumers "need" oil.
And if the shade was known to come from a source that could completely wreck your yard and home, at any moment, then I doubt you'd want to rely on said shade all that much.
The other problem, too, is that the BP disaster has nothing to do with an act of God (wind) and everything to do with negligence -- at least that's how I see it.
So even if I desire my neighbor's shade, if I know he's cut through the trunk of the tree to angle it a bit, perhaps give me a little more shade, I'd probably be looking for a less-dangerous source.
In my mind, BP is accountable. Just because there is a demand -- a manufactured dependency -- for their product, doesn't mean the public doesn't get to question its source.
And for the most part, big corporations go to great lengths to keep the source(s) of their products hidden from the public.
Post a Comment