As a child, I had a friend who outgrew imagination based games. Having lost his keys to The Land of Make Believe, he no longer wanted to pretend anything, much less anything ridiculous. His reality bored me as much as my dreams bored him. One day, sitting in his tree-house, after having another idea shot down, I declared that nothing was impossible.
Nathan had a ready-made answer: “How about squeezing toothpaste back into the tube?”
He was right. Some things are impossible. Like hanging out in a treehouse with such a boring kid.
But, since that date, I’ve come to terms with the uncomfortable, entropic truth of Humpty Dumpty. Some things break and can never be put back together again. Not by all the King’s horses and not by all the King’s men. It’s broken. It stays that way.
You can only accept that and, if you’re lucky, laugh at it. Gallows humour is never the most helpful response but it is, sometimes, the only possible one.
This oil spill might be one of those moments.
Is there any other sensible reaction to this?
Is there any wonder that jokes about the spill are more common than solutions? God knows, every solution I hear sounds like a joke. They all stretch the credulity of this science fiction fan. Chemical dispersements? Giant underwater domes? Fleets of fucking robots? It all sounds culled from some retro-futuristic advertisement. We don’t even have a really good robot vacuum yet and we’re supposed to believe that we have robots that can clean up this mess? This looks a bit more intense than cat hair.
Simple fact: We have the capability to create science fiction scale disasters but not the capability to create science fiction scale solutions. We can blow things up, blow them up real good, but we can’t put them back together. We can’t squeeze this burbling, black genie back into the bottle. The bottle is made out of the genie.
pic nicked from here
Cleaning up the mess, doing damage-control while we try to think of some sort of solution, is about to become a massive industry. A bad industry because it won’t actually build anything. It’ll just be another huge, unprofitable monster that will make money for people lucky enough to get the government cash but providing nothing except -hopefully- environmental status quo. Fortunes will vanish into this. Fortunes that might have been better spent on other things. Imaginary fortunes.
At best, there might be some eco-disaster tourism dollars to be had.
pic nicked from here
Will that build anything? Outside of some despicable hotels, crass merchandise and some re-purposed tour buses? Maybe some souvenir shops. A bit more spectacle. Another circus without bread.
At least, sales of Dawn Dishwashing Soap should be up.
And Dawn, like so many of our products, is packaged in plastic. Plastic is made from oil. Just about everything in our society involves oil at one stage or another. Oil, for all its bad reputation, is the most important thing we have. Without it, we don’t have much. Our whole civilization runs on it.
What I wonder about this spill is if it really is an environmental disaster. All that oil would have, somehow, made its way into the environment. It would have taken longer and we would have made money and products in the meantime but, whether burned, dumped or used as fertilizer, it would have all ended up somewhere. Maybe this “disaster” is actually less damaging to to the planet than using the stuff would have been. Maybe this just cuts out the middleman of consumption.
I don’t know.
If that is the case, then this is not the environmental disaster. We are the environmental disaster. This is not an accident, this is our lives revealed with a brutal honesty. It is consumption without spin, capitalism without advert and society without the lie. This is our heart laid bare. And it doesn’t look like the stylized Valentines Day vulva. It looks like an ugly, throbbing muscle. Pumping, pumping, pumping. Our black blood. Being spilled out of the ocean floor.
Will they visit you in the hospital?
It’s certainly wasteful but it may be environmentally neutral or even better than normal. That bears some thinking about. I have no idea how to measure such things. This might be more of a public relations disaster than ecological. Like Oz, our land of make-believe works because we don’t see the man behind the curtain. This is a glimpse that we cannot ignore. Part of the curtain is torn. The mystery that powers make-believe is gone.
It’s hard to see the man in the moon when you know about crater damage. It’s even harder when you know that when looking at random patterns, your brain will organize them into a familiar shape. Like my childhood friend, I could never see the man in the moon. But when I look at that plume of gushing oil, it becomes a magic mirror. I can see a face. It’s ours.
And we look like Humpty Dumpty.
