anadarko stormy night

so i'm sitting here looking out the window at a hummingbird.

it hovers, moves in for some breakfast, backs out, takes another look, goes back in. and so on.

and i'm thinking, "what an amazing and startling and beautiful adaptation. fast yet maneuverable. delicate and absurdly strong. nature does some nice work, doesn't she?"

and then i think, "wouldn't it be neat to dump a couple barrels of oil on that hummingbird? and all the flowers in our yard, while we're at it? after that, we could set the whole scene on fire."

that would be fun.

if you're BP. or halliburton. or the aptly named anadarko. they love that kind of spirit-obliterating overkill. why dump one barrel of oil on a hummingbird when you can dump two?

or two billion?

i'd be a little vexed, however, if hell's oil hounds wouldn't at least let us take a few photos of our newly and gloriously besludged homestead while it was still smoldering. i mean, if you're going to go to all the trouble of despoiling and defiling and de-lifing an ecosystem, no matter how large or small, why not take a little pride in your work?

inexplicably, that's what's happening on the gulf coast. anadarko (one of the hosts of the gala in the gulf) is scuttling away from its friends like a crab off a rotting sea turtle. they're refusing to help pay for damages, insisting BP is the reason for the goo-covered season.

BP says it is disappointed by the announcement and will evaluate its options about what to do next. "They have failed to live up to their obligations," BP spokesman Mark Salt said in a statement.

if you can see the incongruity of BP scolding anyone for failing to live up to obligations, perhaps you can appreciate the irony of sending Salt to bemoan BP's wounds.

but back to the hummingbird.

you know what'd be really fun? if the bird fought back. not in a global warming kind of way, which is gradual and imperceptible and totally unsatisfactory, justice-wise.

but in a "carrie" kind of way, in which nature, drenched and demeaned and debauched one time too many, just. plain. snaps.

in our little dramedy, we'd cut to wide shots of countless deepwater oil rigs all over the globe. without fanfare, all of them are sucked down in violent whirlpools, disappearing without a trace.

next, we'd cut to mid-shots of oil executives, sitting in obscenely plush board rooms, sipping black pearl brandy, laughing about "the little people." they spontaneously combust (the brandy, however, is spared).

at this point, we cut to a long shot of a massive sandstorm enveloping the athabasca oil sands. the project sign is broken off and comes to rest on top of a dune. the project itself is buried, impenetrably, forever.

the music builds as we see a horrifying, extreme close-up of dick cheney. his face gets increasingly red as he reads rolling online reports of the demise of his favorite hobby (after war profiteering and torture). his head explodes.

outside cheney's window a hummingbird appears, hovers briefly, then turns and flies away, toward a panoramic wide shot of the wyoming mountains at sunset.

dissolve to a medium close-up of the hummingbird, accompanied by the sound of a symphony of strings, flying high over the earth, surveying the beginnings of the healing.

fade to a clean, gauzy white.

the end.

* * * * *

yes, the fantasy would be fun. a lot more fun than the reality we're getting instead.

apropos nothing, this evening i saw an eagle flying low over our neighborhood.

* * * * *

h/t to pete wung for the atlantic link.

drill this

as the oil washes ashore, there's silence.

not a word is heard from the "drill here, drill now" crowd, petrochemical lapdogs whose teeth drip oil but whose voices have gone quiet.

it wasn't that long ago that they couldn't stop running their mouths...

"offshore oil rigs are perfectly safe and environmentally friendly and if you don't support domestic drilling you're not a real american."

the people spewing big oil lies are predominantly republicans, but even the obama administration recently opened the door to increased drilling off the east coast. that plan has been quietly put on hold.

oil is still pouring into the gulf by the hundreds of thousands of gallons a day. the spill is currently larger than jamaica, and it may be months before the leak is stopped. and yet--somehow--the jackals still insist they should be allowed to keep drilling...

"I would urge that people don't make a long-term policy decision in the midst of an emotional kind of crisis," said Exxon President Lee Raymond.

raymond, it should be noted, is the kind of person who would caution against gun control while the columbine shootings were still going on, and against airport security on 9/11.

are you ready for the images of dead and dying animals covered with oil? the few individuals that will be saved are a sliver of a nanofraction of the number that have already been killed, those that will be killed, and those that will sink beneath the waves and never be seen. and lest we forget, 11 workers were killed when the rig exploded.

the spill is expected to surpass the ecological disaster caused by the exxon valdez. that catastrophe occurred 20 years ago, and it's predicted that it'll be another 10 years before the arctic environment fully recovers.

so, gulf coast, only 30 years to go. yay!

the fishermen whose livelihoods have been wiped out by the spill are now lining up to work for the company whose product is killing the fish and shrimp and crabs in the gulf. is it bad karma to suggest BP's new employees might consider sabotaging the company whenever they get the chance? you know, stealing office supplies, taking long lunch breaks, severing their global communications network?

yes, probably it is. so we'll not suggest it.

instead we'll suggest that exxon and bp and lee raymond and sarah palin and newt gingrich and mary landrieu and all their oil-drenched sycophants go somewhere and drill each other--while the grownups figure out how to undo the damage they're so eager to continue inflicting on the world.