 No
wonder so many Americans have come to dislike politics and
despise the political news media. Even to a relatively cynical
observer like me, there was something uniquely dispiriting about
the predictably shallow media response to the disastrous events
in the Gulf of Mexico.
The flames were barely extinguished, the search for 11 missing
and presumed dead oil rig workers abandoned, and the potentially
catastrophic consequences of hundreds of thousands of gallons of
toxic crude oil gushing into the ocean from a ruptured British
Petroleum wellhead becoming apparent when the crisis was turned
into politicized infotainment of a distinctly contemporary kind:
yet another chapter in a seemingly endless partisan melodrama
playing 24/7 on your favorite cable news network, come hell or
crude oil.
It's as if there's no such thing as a tragedy anymore, no common
cause capable of uniting Americans as a people, no escape from
the incessant and inane bickering that passes for political
discourse. Even amid an environmental disaster that could end up
killing untold numbers of birds and animals, despoiling the
coastlines of four or five states, decimating the Gulf fishing
industry, and with it an entire way of life, all that seemed to
matter to some people was who were the winners and losers in
Washington.
The good news is that there were even some indications that
media's incessant need for drama may have caused it to
exaggerate the potential gravity of the incident. According to a
carefully reported article by John M. Broder and Tom Zeller Jr.
in the New York Times, many experts remain hopeful that the
apocalyptic worst-case scenarios may not play out, particularly
if British Petroleum's efforts to stanch the leak over the next
couple of weeks work out.
"No one, not even the oil industry's most fervent apologists,"
they write, "is making light of this accident." Yet so far, the
Deepwater Horizon spill is "not yet close to the magnitude of
the Ixtoc I blowout in the Bay of Campeche in Mexico in 1979,
which spilled an estimated 140 million gallons of crude before
the gusher could be stopped." Nor were the Mexican accident's
aftereffects nearly as dire as some of those predicted for the
current spill. We must all pray that BP's cleanup efforts prove
adequate to the task.
Meanwhile, however, exactly what is the point of coverage asking
if an industrial accident on a British oil rig could become
"Obama's Katrina"? Yet the phrase was everywhere as the story
emerged -- in the Washington Post, ABC News, New York Times,
Associated Press, etc. True, both catastrophes affected the
Louisiana Gulf Coast. But that's it. Other parallels are
nonexistent.
What with the U.S. Coast Guard, the Navy and some 16 federal
agencies responding to the Deepwater Horizon disaster from the
very first day, it's hard to imagine what the White House might
have done differently. At least nobody's saying what it might
be. Unless, that is, you imagine President Obama donning a
frogman suit and diving a mile deep into the murky waters to
inspect and repair the ruptured pipes with his own hands.
Granted, Obama may come to find himself wishing he hadn't so
recently abandoned a campaign promise to restrict offshore
exploration -- a vow he'd originally based upon unacceptable
environmental dangers. However, the Deepwater Horizon well was
both approved and regulated according to policies enacted by
previous administrations. Nor is there much likelihood that
Republicans who spent the 2008 campaign chanting "Drill, baby,
drill" would be in any position to exploit such an opening.
Indeed, that's why my own initial response to Obama's reversal
was that it was a very shrewd move. The president was stealing a
GOP issue out from under their noses. As thousands of oil rigs
operated in the Gulf of Mexico, I remember thinking, weren't
environmental concerns kind of overblown?
But see, there I go, indulging in precisely the kind of shallow
partisan bickering this column set out to deplore; it's an easy
trap to fall into. No matter how low you go, however, it's
impossible to surpass Rush Limbaugh and the "fair and balanced"
jokers at Fox News. Limbaugh's opening gambit was to speculate
that "environmentalist wackos" had blown up the rig "to head off
more oil drilling." On "Fox News & Friends," the lovely but
shameless Dana Perino speculated aloud about "sabotage."
For the rationally consequent, however, the lessons aren't new.
First, like it or not, we're all in this together. The nation's
addiction to fossil fuels is exactly that: an expensive and
dangerous habit that's extremely hard to break. Second, for all
the chatter about "small government," private corporations are
often tempted to cut corners. Coast Guard cutters, Navy
fireboats, experts on winds, tides, ocean currents, birds,
saltwater fisheries, hydrocarbon chemistry, deep water
hydraulics and the like don't come cheap. And when catastrophe
looms, everybody looks to Uncle Sam.
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