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Meditations - From Martin LeFevre in California

Fifty Million Gallons and Counting

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The scale of the disaster is visible from this satellite photograph.
(Image: NASA)

So far, fifty million gallons of oil have gushed forth from a mile down in the Gulf of Mexico. BP and its associates have opened a hole to hell, but the oil execs before Congress last week were only interested in media manipulation.

Their testimony before Congress was a world-class display of disingenuousness. Transocean CEO Steven Newman pointed the finger at BP, while BP President, Lamar McKay, blamed Transocean. With the costs for cleanup, and to fishing, tourism, and a hundred other fallouts from the spill becoming astronomical, McKay glibly repeated, “we are going to pay all legitimate claims.”

Halliburton, still reeling from its Iraq war profiteering infamy, chimed in with its own evasions. Tim Probert, Chief Safety and Environmental Officer at Halliburton, said, “every effort is made to complete a cement job with the highest levels of mechanical and hydraulic integrity.” Translation? Every effort is made to complete a snow job with the lowest levels of ethical and intellectual honesty.

The bastards haven’t even stopped the spill yet, and they’re jockeying for legal position. Meanwhile, the US Federal Government, the only entity that can light a fire under these miscreants, is guilty of its own malfeasance by not taking charge of the situation immediately to stop the gusher.

Robert Menedez, Democrat from New Jersey, unwittingly pointed the finger back at the US government as much as at the oil industry executives when he said, “I get the sense that you’re making things up as you go along.”

President Obama’s initial ‘I feel your pain’ BS finally gave way, after two weeks, to a few flashes of apparently genuine anger yesterday. But as the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico reaches genuinely apocalyptic proportions, one could almost feel Obama’s presidency sinking into the impending oil sands and wetlands.

In their concern with manipulating public perception more than taking charge of the catastrophe, there is complicity between the Obama Administration and the Three Roustabouts that appeared before Congress. After all, a few days ago Energy Secretary Steven Chu exclaimed, “things are looking up.”

That’s in perfect syncopation with the corporate side, with a BP spokesman expressing “increasing confidence that we can intervene directly” to stop the leak. Translation? Both the US government and the mega-giant oil company are promoting the line that BP potentially could stop the spill within weeks rather than months. We’re supposed to be mollified, if not gratified.

The ridiculous idea that ‘too big to fail’ corporations could become ‘environmentally friendly’ has produced this gusher in the Gulf, not just the "cozy relationship between oil companies and the agencies that allow them to drill,” as Obama said. Over the last ten years, the public has bought an increasingly slick line of commercials that polish the turd of what the transnationals are actually doing to the environment, while they continue laughing all the way to their banks.

The scale of the ecological disaster is so overwhelming that most people are recoiling from feeling it. That accounts in part for the lack of outrage over the ongoing catastrophe.

Is there a malevolent metaphysical purpose to the ongoing oil gusher in the Gulf, aimed at proving to the holdouts in the hills that resistance is futile, that the powers that be have won and will do exactly as they please with the Earth’s ‘resources?’

Perhaps so, but the fat lady hasn’t sung yet.

As the world-renowned oceanographer Sylvia Earle said, “the life in the ocean, from the surface all the way down to the bottom, is being rapidly degraded” by man’s activities. The oceans, which drive all the Earth’s cycles, “are valued only in terms of the assets we take out” of them. That can and must radically change, or humankind will soon face an irreversible tipping point.

Earle calls for “valuing of the gulf and ocean as a whole, living ecosystem,” where the animals and plants man is decimating “have some sanctity, some safety.”

Indigenous people have long understood that the Earth cannot be separated from humanity. Chief Seattle’s words in 1854 ring poignantly and painfully true:

“Humankind has not woven the web of life.
We are but one thread within it.
Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.
All things are bound together.
All things connect.”

Cry for the Earth, and scream holy hell.

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- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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