Drilling For Dudgeon

It is Day 60 of the BP oil crisis and President Obama still stands accused of maintaining levels of vexation insufficient to cap the well. Early efforts undertaken with a frowny face and lips pressed tightly together did not appear to stem the flow. Nearly everyone is certain that it will require nothing less than a serious fit of pique to get a handle on this problem, and many complain that Obama is falling short.

As is often the case, the American people have shown themselves ahead of their leaders in demanding action, as evidenced by the speed with which they clicked on the Facebook button "I bet we can find 1,000,000 people who think BP should just quit dicking around and plug the hole." Emotion is running high.

In recognition, Mr. Obama recently made a trip to the State of Dudgeon, on whose shores he was photographed kicking at snark balls, but it is clear that more pissiness is called for. With that in mind, Mr. Obama fired the head of the Minerals Management Service for gross negligence and corruption that began in the previous administration and may have continued into his own while he was busy frowning at the economy and the health care industry. Stated the National Republican Senatorial Committee: "This finger-pointing follows a deliberate pattern by the White House to deny responsibility for anything that takes place on President Obama's watch."

The White House responded with a statement of regret for the recent elevated sunspot activity. Obama himself declared "in case you were wondering who's responsible, I take responsibility. The buck stops with me," provoking Sarah Palin, checking in from Planet Huh, to retort that "the fundamental problem at the core of this crisis is a lack of responsibility. There's a culture of buck-passing at the heart of this administration."

As the oil continues to gush, many call for increased umbrage and question the efficacy of simple exasperation. Speaking to this issue, an interviewer asked Obama whether this wasn't a time to "kick some butt" rather than be calm and collected, a deportment that has so far failed to end the crisis. In response, Mr. Obama said: "I'm going to push back hard on this. Because I think that this is just an idea that got in folks' heads and the media's run with it...A month ago, I was meeting with fishermen down there...and I don't sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar. We talk to these folks because they potentially had the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick. Right? So, you know, this is not theater."

Headlines caught the gist ("OBAMA SAYS ASS") and pundits

immediately accused him of theatrics, suggesting his temperament was unsuitable for the job. Republicans pounded him for failing to step up as a leader. Mr. Obama side-stepped this controversy, prompting complaints about his aloofness, and extended a moratorium on new drilling for six months, which Republicans immediately condemned as being an egregious act of taking charge. Obama responded by calling for renewed efforts to plan for the post-oil age, infuriating Republican counterparts. "We are doing more than anyone to get to the post-oil age," a spokesman said, "by running through all the oil as fast as we possibly can."

Across the pond, Britons have faulted the President for failure to maintain a more diplomatic level of detachment. A Conservative peer, Lord Tebbit, called the American response "a crude, bigoted, xenophobic display of partisan, political, presidential petulance." Meanwhile, the crisis of appropriate comportment has also snared the CEO of BP, who had been roundly castigated for his demeanor after saying: "I'm sorry...there's no one who wants this over more than I do. I'd like my life back." Puzzled by the uproar, he amended his statement to: "This is great. I'm having the time of my life," which also fell short of public expectations, and he remains hunched in his closet, confused.

Mr. Obama took his case for cooperation in a proposed energy bill to Republicans in a closed-door luncheon. He was met by solid opposition on all points, including choice of appetizer, and afterwards, Republican Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas was quoted as saying "he needs to take a Valium before he comes in and talks to Republicans. He's pretty thin-skinned."

Geologists studying the issue have not been able to agree on the size of the President's reservoir of wrath, noting that despite eruptions of temper and efforts to measure the flow of snits, much of it remains below the surface. Republicans warn that they may need to provoke additional releases of rage before they will be able to slam the cap on him completely.

Chicken Head: A Drama In Three Acts

The ants that arrived in April are still here, by the way. After allowing them to feel at home for a few weeks, hoping they'd disinvite themselves, we finally brought out the big guns. First we polished up the counters. Then we cleaned the cabinets. Then we pulled out the drawers and took everything out and cleaned that. The ants kept coming back, so we sprayed them with Windex. They kept coming, so we bought ant traps. That didn't work, so we mashed them with tiny hammers. That didn't work, so we poured little pots of boiling oil on them. That didn't work, so we killed some and put their heads on tiny little pikes all over the kitchen. No matter what we did, they kept coming back and coming back, like The Eagles.

Which reminds me of BP and its oil gusher.

First they fluttered their hands and hoped it would heal itself. Then they poured golf balls and plastic into the hole. Then they tried to smother it with mud. Then they cut the pipe off and scrubbed it up so it flowed more abundantly. Then they dropped a house on it, an idea that still had traction from the Wicked Witch of the East incident. Then they tried mopping up oil on the shoreline with live pelicans. Then they announced that plugging the leak might take a while. August, maybe. Or something like August. Like, maybe, never. By early June, they had finally succeeded in stemming the flow of hope.

Which reminds me of the New Carissa.

The New Carissa was a ship that foundered off the southern coast of Oregon in 1999. There had been a storm coming up, and she had anchored off shore, if by "anchored" we mean bobbing a fifty-foot weight in a 100-foot sea. Folks were concerned. They tried to re-float her and get her going under her own power, but the local tug couldn't make it over the bar. A more substantial tug was held up in Astoria for four days, while the New Carissa continued to dig in closer to shore. Then she busted up and commenced to leak oil. Folks were concerned.

So they set her on fire. Using 36 shaped charges, 2280 liters of napalm, and 180 kg of plastic explosives, they succeeded in burning one tank for 33 hours, but the other remained unscathed. And then she busted in two. Folks were concerned.

Nearly a month later, they were able to tow just the bow section out to sea with the hope of sinking it into oblivion, but the tow line snapped, and half of the New Carissa poinked onto shore again 80 miles north in Waldport. Within a week it was re-towed out to sea and sunk in nearly two miles of water, where, whatever it is doing, we can't hear it (la la la la la). No one was taking any chances. They used a destroyer and a submarine equipped with 400 lbs of high explosives, 69 rounds of gunfire, and a torpedo to simultaneously sink the bow and serve as a stern warning (har) to the grounded section back in Coos Bay, which nevertheless continues to leak. Thousands of sea and shore birds were fatally oiled, including hundreds of murres, which I should not take personally, but I do.

Which reminds me of Lady and the chicken head.

Lady was my uncle's dog, a sweet girl, and I loved playing with her when we vacationed at the farm in North Dakota. She and I were following my uncle around one day when, without warning, he snatched up a chicken and lopped its head off. My four-year-old city heart was shocked and inconsolable, and Lady tried to cheer me up with the chicken head, missing the mark by quite a lot. So Uncle Cliff buried the head, but the next day Lady bounded up to me with the soiled head, which was then buried deeper. Every new day, Lady showed up with an increasingly grisly gift. By the end of the week, I was seeing that dog as just another bad-news bitch with a mouthful of garbage.

Which reminds me of Sarah Palin. Who recently blamed the BP oil fiasco on environmentalists.

Which I should not take personally, but I do.

Let's All Drive Down To The BP Protest

An appalling oil spill is underway in the Gulf of Mexico. You've probably heard. BP has taken ownership of the problem in the sense of agreeing that it is their installation that exploded, after the failure of an early attempt to alter their logo with sharpies and pin it on Brown & Root. There has been some effort to scatter blame among various widget manufacturers, but no one other than Rush Limbaugh has claimed this was anything but a massive screwup. Mr. Limbaugh suggested it was an act of sabotage on the part of environmental extremists, but this is widely held as absurd, inasmuch as they're all busy shooting polar bears and stitching them together to reflect more sunlight and cool the climate.

The Obama administration, for its part, has stepped up its scolding efforts. It's just like in the Fox show "24," when the computer geniuses are tapping madly at their keyboards for information that will be needed in the next ten seconds or a nuclear bomb will go off, and the CTU director, who is under the impression they're all updating their Facebook pages, interrupts them to say that they must work quickly, because millions of lives are at stake. There is much helpful frowning and then everyone's right back at it.

So far, BP has attempted to rectify the problem by stuffing the rupture with golf balls, so things seem to be well in hand. Also, people have been collecting hair and fur to sop up the oil on the beach. Pet groomers and barbers have sent off sacks of it. Given that hair is remarkably absorbent, it would seem to be even more efficient to scrub the beaches with intact mammals, which is why I'm suggesting that a squadron of Labrador retrievers that are already inclined to roll in something smelly be dispatched right away. When they're done rolling, they can go jump up on Rush Limbaugh. Two birds, and all that.

Once Mr. Limbaugh calmed down about the sabotage aspect, he suggested that the ocean will eventually take care of the problem, which is true, if we use the same sort of time frame in which the sun will take care of us in a few billion years. Currently, of course, the ocean is taking care of the oil spill the way Mr. Limbaugh's trousers are taking care of his fat ass.

The temptation, since mammals and balls seem to be the key to solving this wicked problem, is to propose that we try baling up BP executives and troll them in the Gulf to test them for absorbency. This would be emotionally satisfying, but it ignores our own complicity in this mess. Ever since we began sucking the cream out of Planet Twinkie, we have enjoyed how zippy it makes us. Not individually, of course, where we tend more towards torpor, but as a group. We are caught up in a lifestyle that we like to believe makes us happy, and are willing to stick our heads in the sand, ignoring the tarballs, about our immense destructiveness. But the fact remains that we as a species have irreparably changed our environment. Not even beavers come close. Beavers do dam up miles of streams and change them to a succession of ponds and canals. This creates a new niche in the ecosystem, and some things are destroyed, while other things move in to take advantage of the new scenery. Mr. Limbaugh, taking the long view, contends that a similar thing will happen when we've finished bollixing up everything. Eventually everything will settle out according to God's plan and his chosen people will prosper. I'm sure it's true.

It's what they've been preaching in the cockroach churches all along.