Thursday, June 10, 2010

Sorry if we're being crude old chap...

...but you see, we're a tad bit overwhelmed with Crude right now.

 Israel's macho victimhood is foolish – but Obama's bigotry is despicable 

At least on the other side of the Atlantic the conduct of President Obama over the great oil spill is explicable, even if despicable. The whole might of American wealth and technology is displayed as utterly unable to deal with the disastrous spill – so what more natural than a crude, bigoted, xenophobic display of partisan political presidential petulance against a multinational company? 

Perhaps it would be a prudent, prescient, and poignant proclamation to remind his lordship that the United Kingdom is ultimately, and utterly, dependent upon "the might of American wealth and technology".  In fact,  Great Britain has proven itself quite impotent since the greatest generation of American might saved their hindquarters and lifted them off their knees against a dominant German juggernaut.

With that in mind, I agree with his lordship on this point:

It would be unwise to think that BP’s run of expensive accidents is just bad luck, or even individual manegerial failure. It may be that the strategy, while no doubt both New and Modern, is inherently dangerous, as the management is no longer in control of actions for which it has to take responsibility.

 Indeed, sire.  However, I suspect they are no longer in control of the actions of which they must take responsibility because they don't possess the "technology" or "might" to perform the tasks to which they aspire to prosper from.  Therefore, that responsibility lies with those who possess the ingenuity and intestinal fortitude to perform such services....services so critical to the security of not just the allegiance which binds our sovereign nations, but to the globe in full.

It is time that our American friends were reminded that they sang a different tune when the American company Union Carbide killed many thousands of Indians at Bhopal. Not to mention when the American company Occidental killed 167 people on a North Sea oil rig in 1988.

No sir, you need not remind us of Union Carbide's debacle in Bhopal.  But might I remind you that Union Carbide's core competency was the creation of the efficient development of energy sources such as propane, the production of petrochemical products such as the plastics which secure the world's food supply, and as luck would have it, Union Carbide was the former and sole operator of America's primary gaseous diffusion plant in the humble peasant village of Paducah, Kentucky...the author's hometown.  Interestingly enough, that plant produced a disproportionate majority of the enriched uranium in our country.  A technology which not only fuels power plants that are critical to increasing energy needs around the world, Union Carbide's enriched uranium was used to build the nuclear arsenal which propelled both of our countries to super power status in the wake of that little skirmish you had with the Germans.

You know....the conflict in which we rescued your lordship's little, resource starved island.

And by resource starved, I infer natural, mental, and military.  I do so hate to keep reminding you, but it seems your lordship is under the delusion that her majesty's kingdom is capable of standing on it's own two arthritic legs without the crutch of American might and technology.

And perhaps it is time that we remind you of the debacle the East India Trading Compnay left in India....or the one England left more recently in Iran. 

The sun never sets on the British Empire, indeed, but only because the United States suspends the sun in the sky over that little rock in the Atlantic you call home.

So I humbly beg his lordship's forgiveness for our bigotry and xenophobia....although I'm somewhat confused about that sentiment.  I didn't realize the British were, in fact, a separate race from Americans.

As for crude, I don't apologize....you see, we have a monopoly on Crude.  With that monopoly comes inherent risk and danger, which we have chosen to accept.  While your "multinational" has continually reaped the rewards of the risk and danger we endure, unfortunately, you must bear that responsibility with us.  Otherwise, I would suggest you set up a Paypal account on your blog in order to help pay your heating bill this winter.

Cheerio!

5 comments:

Unknown said...

The best part of an American upset of England on Saturday would not be the win, but the fact that 90% of Americans couldn't give a shit less either way, and the English would know it.

Anonymous said...

Agreed.

Cousin Pat said...

Well said, well said.

If our President were involved in nationalist populism of the worst sort, as they claim, the press wouldn't have so much trouble taking pictures of the damage.

Sam said...

Bravo! Colbert had this on his show last night. I just sat there astonished as the quote from that snide asshole sat on the screen. I actually thought it was something from the Onion for a second or two, then I realized this guy actually said that. I'm still shaking my head in amazement.

Anonymous said...

First up, let me say I think this guy is a douche bag.

I agree wholeheartedly with all the people blowing raspberries at him.

I agree with the people who roll their eyes when greeny lefties say that "this is all of our faults" in a way that ends up equalizing the responsibility and letting BP and the politicians who messed up the regulatory process off the hook.

It is mostly their fault, and I hope heads roll.

I do have a "Yes, but" feeling about this, however.

I made life choices to live without a car, to build a life where all my basic needs could be met within walking and cycling distance.

I made a choice not to invest my money in companies with shitty environmental records.

I made a choice not to run up huge debts I could not pay off.

Some of these choices had my family and friends rolling their eyes at me and considering me unsuccessful or impoverished, this while they lived off student loans and credit cards.

It took me longer to do my degree, it will take me longer to do my grad work. I won't own my house until I can actually afford it.

I know lots of people like me, and people who have much more integrity than I do.

I feel angry that when we were making reality based choices that acknowledged that the possibility of this kind of armageddon was built into the wasteful choices of the mainstream, we were laughed at for our attempts to be ethical.

And now these beautiful creatures and places we wanted to protect are dying, and all those assh*les I know who still live fifty miles from their work, driving back and forth in air conditioned SUVs, are bitching about EVIL BP, the same way they called the Iraq war "just too bad", as if their ugly, wasteful choices had nothing to do with the death and destruction.

BP and the politicians are more responsible than the average person, but it pisses me off that if the President had asked for Americans to make the kinds of sacrifices that the Greatest Generation did during WW II, the rationing and the conservation, but this time to get off foreign oil, the fat assed majority would have ignored him or told him to suck it.

I bet all those ordinary brits who had their pensions invested in BP are freaking out.

They thought they were entitled to those pensions, and they didn't inquire too deeply into what sort of business practices were producing that rate of return.

Half the people freaking out about what is happening to the Gulf are totally implicated in its destruction, living wasteful, greedy lives with no thought of how unsustainable and murderous their particular "American Dreams" have been.

I bet if it were Americans with their pensions invested in Union Carbide or some evil mining company, the same self pitying whines would be coming out of those Americans if it looked as if they might lose the money and security they were buying for themselves at someone else's expense.

How many of the people bitching about these Brits have their own money invested in companies that my be just as bad, polluting rivers in Chile or funding wars in the Congo?

Bitch away, by all means, but before you start throwing stones, consider moving out of that glass house, right?

My sorrow about what is happening is leading me to consider my own life again, to see where I can cut and change things to opt even further out of the prevailing madness. This time, I figure I can't make my life smaller, I have to step up my game, earn some more, buy the house, and go off grid.

That will be a stretch for me, but I guess I'll do it.

I want BP held accountable, but I also want my mother-in-law to change how she lives. I don't want to hear her self-pitying sorrow about the Gulf if she's not going to stop wasting oil. She pisses me off as much as this British fucktard does.

BP and the politicians are responsible for this, but so are we.