Mourning for the World

by Antonio Dias

Obama as our Gorbachev:

It was one thing to know this was true, another living through it. We knew George Bush was a dolt, that Cheney is evil. It was so easy to blame it all on stupidity and fear. Now we have to swallow the defeat of the bright and the clever, the constitutionally unflappable, confident, capable, the can-doers, the eighty-hours a week-ers with time to play hoops and throw a party on the weekend.

They can’t fix this. They’re in the early stages of a rising awareness that all the audacity and all the right degrees won’t help them. Calling a meeting, working up a contingency plan, nothing….

They thought inexorable was what they brought to the “game.” Now they begin to see that inexorable are the consequences of seeing life as a game. It’s the shock, the stunned, cold recognition of the gunshot. The surprise, the scramble to find a “positive” spin, to underplay how bad it all is, until all at once, it’s perfectly clear. This one can’t be talked away.

That asteroid, you know, the one reflected in the reptilian eye on the Discovery Channel. It landed just south of the Gulf. It might have helped form the series of domes that later held all the dead bodies from phyto-plankton to leviathans trapped in dead zones of hydrogen sulfide generated/generating pockets of sea, accumulating to make oil. The oil all that cleverness and ambition discovered and talked us all into the “need” to pull it out of its grave.

It’s coming out now. The open question, whether it’s doing more harm pouring out of a shattered sea-floor than it would have caused captured, refined, transported, and burned for all that the “necessities” the clever had consigned it?

Buckshot or soft-point, both can be deadly. The concentrated and inexorable damage being done to the heart of our beating ocean. – Why did it take this to make it clear this particular body of water held such a vital role? Its Gyre, the source of the world’s ocean’s circulation, the nursery for giant Tuna and who knows what else?

What had been so deeply buried, concentrations of hydro-carbons, the results of some ancient and immense die-off, bodies entombed anaerobically defying their re-integration into life’s cycles on their death, hidden away deep, to slowly re-integrate into rock or be subsumed and incinerated under a future continent’s volcanic edge; all that is now pouring, gushing, seeping, rising, spreading, and killing, killing, killing wherever it goes.

The reflex of confidence that led to accepting the risks as if they were nothing is now shown to be blindness and lack of imagination. As inexorability takes over, the wound continues to pump out – not spent life’s blood, though once that was what it had been, but poison and the catalyst for unknown reactions  potentially leading to a fresh oleogenic age. What more fitting end for the time of oleopyric excess than to trigger a new oleogenic event.

Lost in all the noise surrounding the end of our oil-age has been a new understanding of the conditions that generated the oil in the first place. Dead zones, anaerobic seas choked with hydrogen sulfide spewing from its de-oxygenated metabolism, trapping and killing and preserving in ooze the lives of its time so they could be transformed in geologic deposits so we could search them out and drain them so eagerly so as to trigger the same mechanisms that originally caused them to be formed to return and repeat the process.

The sea, the Ocean, they have been our constants! They have drawn the powerful and the status-ed among us to her shores always. Tiberius at Capri floated in his pool gazing out on a clear horizon. His depravities, his boundless power, the power of Rome itself and all its predecessors had not blemished his view. “August at the Vineyard,” or “Valentine’s Day at Hilton Head,” overlooking Lake Como, or poised on St. Bart; our own Caesars have rested with the same assurances. Whatever they’d done, condoned, allowed, glossed-over, winked at, colluded, or conspired in, their view always remained the same clear, clean blue.

Those days may be coming to an end. Their playgrounds lie along the route of the Gyre and its tributaries, exposed. The air samples along the Gulf Coast already show a rise in hydrogen sulfide. Tar balls and tendrils of oil reach out towards Florida.

This has been going on for decades in the Niger. No one cared – that’s what Africa has been good for ever since Prince Henry began a leap-frog down its west coast five hundred years ago. The damage was done, the benefits passed on as dividends, the vacations remained unspoiled, spotless. The ocean, pricked below the belly of West Africa, bled into open sea diluting the destruction, blending the damage into the wholesale destruction done every day everywhere.

Not this time. Not only is this happening “Along Our Shores!” even if this “Third Coast” weren’t along America’s third world side, home to its poorest, blackest, the “Old South,” the gimcrack of retirement settlements and shrimp-shacks and bayous; far from the “Heartland” or the concentrations of wealth and power that cash in on “The Heartland’s” sentimentalization. Not only is this happening here, but it is destroying this unique body of water enclosed, engulfed along with the Caribbean, at the heart of world’s ocean. This area, incubator to currents and giants, holds itself away from the cold deep abyss as a shallow cradle for life protected.

This is where the genius of the market in all its invisible-hand wisdom decided, not only to drill the deepest off-shore well, but to do so with absolutely no regard for how it might deal with a “problem,” should one arise. –  What is the ratio of blow-outs to problem-free wells world-wide? The celebrated ejaculatory Gushers of old seemed common enough ashore, when untapped reservoirs were pricked in the past….

Will this topple the machine? Probably not. But it should kill the last embers of enthusiasm for it promises, for the belief in and respect for its authorities as they slowly awaken to their appalling ignorance and paralyzing incompetence at facing the inexorable results of their follies.

Make no mistake. This has not been an accident. Let’s be totally clear, this is not a call for a “conspiracy” either! Accidents are unforeseen calamities, collisions with reality too fast to avoid or comprehend. This has been the most recent example of the machine doing exactly what it does. It was the result of an arrogant and willfully blind way of being and acting, thrashing against very clear and visible limits, working to its fullest capacity to do nothing but lead to disaster. At this level, and coming from such a position of hubris, pleas of intentionality, that this was unintended, can have no sway, just as the pleas of a killer’s intent have no sway in a law-court. These are no more than cries of surprise at being caught-out when the perpetrators had always felt secure. Not secure that they were blameless, doing good; only secure that they were unreachable, that the consequences of their actions would only fall on others.

Those days are over. Our Gorbachev is fulfilling his promise. We’re way beyond loss-of-innocence. We’re now into an era where only the most insane can retain any belief in this system. Take heart, or further chill, in the sure knowledge that insanity has been the machine’s greatest success. There will be many willing and ready to “fight-on” in the cause of progress. But let us know who they are and why they persist. Let’s have no more belated innocence as we mourn for our world.