Well, Shit.

So the oil spill is happening, and is essentially terrible. It almost seems futile to shift into a full-blown rant at this point, because no amount of outcry can possibly do this thing justice. It will invariably fall short in relation to the sheer magnitude of what is happening.

Instead, I just wanted to post a really useful article I found on the New York Times website:

Oil Spill Tracker

Above is a small screencap of the live videofeed of the oil leaking into the Gulf. Experts estimates range widely as to how much oil has been spilled already, but even the most conservative estimates are astonishing, devastating, gut-wrenching…

Speaking of conservative things: A few of them are acting crazier than usual, whether that means rising to the defense of a multi-billion-dollar generating corporation when it’s asked to compensate those affected, or whining that the dissemination of information is the biggest problem with the oil spill, these boys are in rare form.

In particular, they’re giving President Obama a hard time for pursuing energy reform at this time, saying he is politicizing the issue. There are two ways to respond to this:

First is the nicer: to pursue energy policy reforms now is a logical response to a catastrophic failure linked directly to the issue of energy consumption in the United States; to ignore the underlying causes of the issue would truly be the worst possible response.

Second is the more childish one: Republicans used the tragic loss of human life on September 11, 2001 to justify the pursuit policy goals of their own which had been waiting in the wings for years. Now its our turn.

I don’t really like the second response, and the larger part of me doesn’t want to believe that everyone is quote so callous, but trudging up the moral high road gets more tiresome with every trek, and you never seem to meet very many people along the way.

One of my favorite film quotes of all time comes from Steve Buscemi’s character in the 2001 film Bandits:

You know the problem with being smart? You always know what will happen next. It ruins the suspense.

Let’s pair that with a fantastic Will-Smith-One-Liner from 2004’s I, Robot:

You know, somehow, “I told you so” just doesn’t quite say it.

I’ll leave you to draw the parallel yourself.

One comment

  1. clearly the best will smith line from that movie is:

    “Converse, circa 2004!”

    but it doesn’t seem to help in this situation.

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