June | 2010 | The Omnipotent Poobah Speaks!

It’s been 40+ days and nights since the doomed Deepwater Horizon ark begot The Big Ooze™. BP has exhausted enough of its supply of lame-arsed ‘emergency fixes’ they’re hiring The Big Dick’s™ former PR Czarina so poor BP CEO, Tony Howard, can get “his life back”.

There is no way to describe the revolting arrogance of Howard and his enablers in and out of the private sector. He may want his life back, but thousands of fishermen, resort operators, and just plain folk along the Gulf coast would like their way of life back. Like the botched messes left behind the Exxon Valdez spill, Katrina, and dozens of other failures it’s unlikely to happen in their lifetimes.

Pols and pundits are likening Mr. Brownie’s Boss’s screwing of the pooch named Katrina to The Messiah’s inability to walk on oil. There are similarities and differences, but the path of both disasters was paved with equal incompetence.

Bush the Lesser ran afoul of an unpreventable – though not, as he claimed, unpredictable – natural disaster and grandiosely failed to handle the aftermath with even a smidgen of credibility. The O-Man ran afoul of a preventable man-made disaster that he can now do little about. They are both the victims and perpetrators of the cascading failures of America to make marginally intelligent decisions for several decades.

The electorate consistently votes for the pencil-thin moustache with the best pickup line. Once elected, those suave and de-boner pols go about appeasing the free market Gods at any and all costs, including loss of life or environmental disaster on a global scale. We have outsourced our governance to a cabal of ruthless thugs who would sell thousands of people’s lives to “get their life back” – along with that hefty campaign contribution or quarterly bonus.

The problem of government is not its size and the insistence that the private sector is any better is writ large in dripping oil lights in the dark Gulf sky if only we care to look.

Whether you believe in it or not, the concept of global warming is perhaps the best metaphor. Generations of bad decision making, incompetent risk taking, corporate thuggery, and Le Grande Ineptitude has brought us to a place where there is no way to reverse the process and no way to fix it either.

We’re simply along for a dark ride into a dangerous and unknown future suspended in varying degrees of denial.