What’s so brilliant about Blitt’s New Yorker Oil Spill cover — in the identification we feel with the animals — is how much it reflects our own helplessness, focuses our rage, and fantasizes that we animals, too, might somehow sit in judgment over the big oil machine.
Continue Reading1. On one hand, you gotta think: what took so long?
Continue ReadingI’d say the post by MataHarley yesterday at Flopping Aces, a right-wing blog, was pretty courageous. Titled “BP Busing & Scam Photo Ops… the scandal that wasn’t,“ the author rips both the left and right for accusing Obama of staging last Friday’s photo op on the beach in Grand...
Continue ReadingIt's certainly not too late, but the wonky, pervasively tactical, and profoundly deliberate Obama is up against a tangible, highly-visible, publicly distressing, tenacious and unabating crisis that cannot be defeated or buried so much as it has to be shaped and managed.
Continue ReadingCertainly, having Obama physically getting his hands on the oil and touching the problem was a smart thing. The scene looks deceptively simple, but these things are never that easy and obvious to get right.
Continue ReadingIn this one self-protective gesture, BP CEO Tony Hayward totally gives himself away.
Continue ReadingThe usual response will be to clean up the worst of the mess and then make do with a bit less than you had before. But why settle for that? I'd like to think that the time is coming when, instead of getting back to not very...
Continue ReadingAs much as we can know about evils and catastrophe, it's the only the experience of actually seeing this kind of devastation that makes the fact real and felt.
Continue ReadingThe art of stopping or slowing down an oil spill turns out to be something of an ancient art.
Continue ReadingThese different sets of wings are all about what's gracious and what's disastrous in the Gulf between the United States and Mexico.
Continue ReadingBesides demanding a hard look at the line between collusion and cooperation, these stills also call for a blunt examination of how much BP is leveraging the crisis (and its central management of it) primarily to blunt, stall or mitigate perceptual damage to the corporation.
Continue ReadingWe tend to think of oil as having relatively low viscosity, largely because most of us encounter it once it has been refined and readied for consumption. But here we see it as the sludge that it becomes after floating about in the gulf for several days – a...
Continue ReadingSeems it's left to the visual media to attempt to and bring BP down to size.
Continue ReadingHow much does the fact we're witnessing the reaction of a group of women Senators distract from government's complicity in BP's defoliation of the Gulf?
Continue ReadingIt's one thing to be read about the impact of something you can't directly see. Having an actual picture changes everything. As the photos from the Gulf shift from pictures of concern and gestures of prevention to portraits of actual fallout - the signature image being the...
Continue Reading.... U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry used two words repeatedly today 'manage expectations'. "I know we are all hoping that this containment system will work. But, I want to remind everybody that this containment system is a first of its kind deployed in 5 thousand feet of...
Continue ReadingOn the Gulf Coast, besides a new devastation, a surfacing of the last.
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