Damn the Realists

I don’t find the Katrina and the Gulf of Mexico oil blow-out to be a good analogy as used by people who are saying the Gulf is Obama’s Katrina. Katrina was a natural disaster compounded by conditions dictated by an essentially racist society not too unlike the earthquake in Haiti but certainly nothing at all like the oil gurgling out of the broken well head which is a manmade disaster compounded by an election system that is corrupt beyond redemption for it was certainly BP’s contributions to Obama’s campaign funds that led Obama to essentially bypass common sense safety procedures and the law to ramrod BP’s license to drill in the Gulf of Mexico through. Which no doubt everyone involved felt was the sensible and “realist” approach for it is beyond question that the U.S. needs oil not only to maintain our diminishing life style but oil to keep the machinery of empire building up and running as well. That’s the realist view. BP thought it was the realist view to forego routine maintenance on the safety mechanism that failed, after all, it was far too time consuming and costly when there was oil to be sucked from the womb of Mother Earth.

The real tragedy for BP of course is the loss of all that crude. When BP implemented its first ridiculous attempt to plug the oil well I noticed that the main theme of this attempt was that they could pump the crude up to a waiting ship. In other words the main thrust was to get the oil, not to stop the leak. Now that they have supposedly had more success plugging the well by pumping mud and other debris down it one wonders why they didn’t do this in the first place. The answer being they wanted to see if they could continue to get the oil first even as the oil continued to empty into a fragile environment. But you see the realists who hold the patent on reality knew that their needs were more important than the destruction now beginning. And the destruction will be devastating because the oil will kill everything with the toxic dispersant making matters only worse. In any oil cleanup only 8 percent of the oil is ever actually removed.

It’s the goddamned realists like Obama who allow the other goddamned realists like the owners of BP to run their half-assed operations that will lead to loss of unique habitats and animal life in those areas affected and it is sickening beyond belief. But these are the realists who in reality are short sighted and obtuse to the point where reality just bends around them like gravity warping space around a celestial object. The one overriding and prevailing feature of realists is that they are simpletons. They live in a one dimensional universe where there is no up and down which is why they are always confusing the two. To realists the best solution to any problem is the simplest, kill it. It’s the damned realists who tell us that we cannot expect anything better from our leaders except that which we now see. It’s the realists who tell us we must accept the death of thousands of people in order to have a half imagined and mythical “slight difference” between the two facades of the same hydra-headed animal, behold the Republican and Democratic Parties who are realists all. Especially when it comes to waging and funding war.

The realists are the people who tell you that “sometimes you just need to trust your government” and that murdering people, though regrettable, is part of life. The realists will tell you that one shouldn’t overreact to your government murdering millions of people because murdering millions of people is normal for governments, that’s what governments do. It’s all quite nasty of course but one must keep one’s foot in reality after all, and it’s merely a matter of keeping the correct perspective. Better them than us.

The odd thing is I cannot help but note how much better off reality would be without the realists.