Hollywood Always Has It End Well

The narrative in and around the Gulf is so compelling - so riveting - if it never had happened, we would have had to invent it. And so we did. Plenty of horror movies out there in which some threat is burgeoning and seemingly unstoppable. Then the hero rides to the rescue on his white horse… Hollywood always has it end well.

It occurs to me that in this particular oil spill saga there are no heroes – at least none that we can see (yet). It just keeps chugging along, getting worse every day. The means we have currently devised to mitigate the immediate problem – the loss of jobs; massive dislocation, and overall threat to the environment – seem inadequate. We’ve elected to sacrifice BP on the altar of public opinion and, along with it, even more jobs. The moratorium on drilling ups the ante as even more jobs are absurdly sacrificed to our pagan god, Gaia. In short, we seem to be fighting the loss of jobs with the loss of more jobs.

In the meantime, the spill spills on. There are signs that the media and our ADD president are on the verge of losing interest altogether. The World Cup and our rapidly approaching midterm elections are just too juicy to overlook. And then, of course, there was Michael Jackson’s death anniversary.

Odd to see no one coming to our aid. Besides affecting the lives and livelihoods of Gulf residents – not to mention wildlife – badly, the spill can also be classified as a global environmental emergency. Whenever there has been such an emergency abroad, the U.S. has usually been the first to arrive. We were always quick to offer humanitarian aid to the stricken whether we were invited or not. Earthquakes in Turkey and Haiti; tsunamis in East Asia; famine in Africa; etc. Often our considerable contribution had to be disguised - our sacks of emergency foodstuffs re-labeled - to look like it’s not coming from us but from some NGO (as not to offend the people filling their bellies with our own home-grown grains).

On May 3rd, 2008, Cyclone Nargis hit shore in Myanmar and devastated the densely populated, rice-farming delta of the Irrawaddy Division. It was the worst natural disaster in Burmese history. The ruling junta’s version of our Jones Act prohibited the country from accepting foreign aid – this, despite 200,000 dead or missing and millions displaced. We continued to beg and bribe officials and they eventually relented and allowed some of us in.

No such efforts are being made here. The nations of the vaunted ’global community’ seem to be just standing around, clucking their tongues and shaking their heads. Where are the Russians, the Chinese, the Venezuelans, Brazil? Where is the Middle East? Europe? Where is The Sierra Club? PETA? Nothing to say? Where is the UN to bash down our doors and fix this thing (which, as is becoming increasingly clear, we can’t handle ourselves).

“Yes, we can!” indeed! Since Obama has been in office, we haven’t been able to do anything, except to make things worse. Whether due to incompetence or by design, it doesn’t matter anymore. We’re going to hell in a hand basket. While the rest of the world just stands around watching.

I once saw an Indian film “Bandit Queen” (Shekhar Kapur) in which a woman was publicly beaten to within an inch of her life. The town’s people just stood around and watched. It sent a chill through my heart.

Could this be the legacy of Ameica's fall from grace: Nobody helping anyone? Every man out for himself?