Capitalism has been lured down a dark alley and mugged. Set upon and jumped. In a shocking and dismaying move, BP has caved to communist, nanny-state pressure and agreed to set aside $20 billion for damage compensation. Thank God for Texas Republican Rep. Joe Barton, and his courageous championing of the embattled oil company:
Barton is uniquely positioned to comment on this travesty as he is the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, the committee that has jurisdiction over:
It's beautiful and refreshing to hear a politician speak out about an issue there's no way he's ever been lobbied about involving people there's no way he's ever golfed with.
And while he is now being publicly disavowed by a number of high-ranking Republicans, incapable of appreciating the fact that while BP has the money to put towards fixing a large problem it obviously caused, it really shouldn't because that's just mean, there are others willing to stand by him. Rep. Michele Bachmann, speaking at the Heritage Foundation (which doesn't at all sound sneakily racist) referred to the fund as "extortion."
Thank you, Barton and Bachmann, for being brave enough to call a spade a spade. Or an avoidable catastrophe an "unfortunate accident." Or reparation "extortion". If we don't put a stop to this, what next? Corporations being held responsible for deaths they've caused? Children being told they have to clean up their own messes? Let's forestall the arrival of this nightmare world by apologizing to BP, refusing its money, and accepting the fact that the oceans have had their day.
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Is it just me, or is Tony Hayward as medically groundbreaking as he is dizzyingly handsome and convincingly sincere?
Allow me to explain. If you've watched the helpful video I embedded in a sophisticated manner on this page, you won't need the background. I won't, alas, be able to summarize events as pithily and good-looking-ly as Tony Hayward, but here goes: some workers who were tasked with cleaning up a few meagre drops of oil from Louisiana's beaches complained of various symptoms including faintness, nausea, and nasal irritation. Tony Hayward, clearly profoundly sorry about all of this, politely suggested that these workers had come down with food poisoning.
CNN, in the person of someone who was not, unaccountably, Anderson Cooper, asked a medical specialist whether the symptoms experienced by these workers could be explained by food poisoning. No, said the medical specialist. It doesn't sound like food poisoning at all, said the medical specialist. It sounds likes something respiratory, said the medical "specialist". See what a pair of quotation marks can do?
"He's once again trying to smarmily sidestep all responsibility for anything by concocting a totally inadequate and insulting explanation", one might say. "He's in a condescending and unconvincing manner endeavouring to con the public while making no effort to protect those who are cleaning up the mess his company made", one might think.
BUT WAIT. Allow those capital letters to give you pause. What if...what IF Tony's explanation points to something even more worrisome. What IF we do not know all there is to know about the symptoms and effects of food poisoning. What IF food poisoning, with the cunning intelligence of an oil company CEO, has devised a way to attack the respiratory system?
I don't think this suggestion is unreasonable. Not one bit. Because, you see, we don't know what BP has been feeding these people, and from what I can tell, BP can get their hands on some pretty crazy shit.
Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.
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Why we owe BP a big, fat Catastrophy:
1) Wet threats. It's so easy in this day and age to focus on the cataclysms that will reach us by way of the land. Earthquakes...landslides...Wolf Blitzer...Every now and again we need to be reminded that the large parts of this earth that are watery can also kill us. Who knows what will happen when the oil leak brings about aquatic genocide? Marine biologists? Maybe. I prefer to speculate without the benefit of knowledge. Perhaps the oil and the other exciting chemicals that have been poured into the water to stop the oil will result in marine devastation, or perhaps they will create the conditions necessary for a new kind of life to emerge. An angry kind of life. A kind of life fueled by hate and bent on revenge.
2) Incompetent threats. It's so easy in this day and age to believe that multinationals are evil, because they seem to do so many things that are straight-up evil. But in our concentration on their obvious evilness, aren't we ignoring another, potentially even more worrisome thing about them? I'm referring, of course, to their incompetence. Yes, they are evil. But evil alone would not bring about such delicious, madcap "uh-ohs." Incompetence brings to the table the necessary unpredictability, the spirit of impertinent devilry, that makes evil seem almost mundane. Yes, BP wields a sickening amount of power. Yes, the people who run it appear to be hideous and bad. But how much more unnerving is it to realize that they also DON'T SEEM TO KNOW WHAT THEY'RE DOING? They are not evil geniuses who conspires to run the world according to their malign appetites; they are an evil "guy who sat next to you in social studies who was kind of a jerk" who conspires to run the world but isn't really all that bright. They are hugely powerful; they are probably evil; they are not very bright. That is one disasterrific trifecta.
BP has given us more novel and exciting things to worry about, but I can't enumerate them here as I feel moved to catastrophize NOW. Thank you, British Petroleum, and Haliburton, and the other company I can't remember the name of, for making catastrophizing feel brand-new again.
Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.
POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough.
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