As Bob Dylan wrote 48 years ago, "Ramblin' through this world, I've met lots of funny men / Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen". And some will rob you with trillions of gallons of oil.
This is a crime in slow-motion. A crime that has killed nobody yet except for the unfortunate men on the oil platform when it exploded. Unlike a run of the mill mine disaster, unfortunately, the damage is not contained to a few blue-collar grunts; when a coal mine collapses, it doesn't spew tons of coal into the sky for weeks.
BP. British Petroleum, formerly known as AI, or Anglo-Iranian, has an interesting history. Anglo-Iranian took the oil from Iran and sent it to the Anglos. Very straightforward. Iranians had 100% of the oil. England got 90% of the profits. Free Market, bitches!
When an obstinate Iranian named Mohammed Mossadegh was elected by the Iranian people to demand a 50/50 profit sharing scheme with England, he was duly overthrown by Anglo-Iranian oil money and CIA-hired thugs. But I'm getting off track.
BP now is drilling for oil off the coast of the United States. (Didn't we win the Revolution?) Well, it turns out there was an accident. The well exploded. And it's at the bottom of the ocean. And here's where capitalism comes in.
Capitalism demanded that we create technology to drill for oil on the floor of the ocean. But it did NOT demand that we create technology to stop a leak on the floor of the ocean. It also does NOT demand that BP spare no expense in stopping the leak as quickly as possible; instead it demands that BP stop the leak as cheaply as possible.
Again, no civilians have been killed yet by this crime; nobody flew a plane into a building here. But the eventual toll may well be catastrophic. More oil spills into the Gulf every day. That oil washes ashore. When that happens, two things occur.
Firstly, the oil will kill most living things. Secondly it will seep into the groundwater. With all living things dead, the local economy collapses, foreclosures accelerate, etc. etc. etc.
With everything dead in the marshes near the coast, what will happen during hurricane season? Imagine Hurricane Katrina. Now imagine Hurricane Katrina with no marshes to slow its approach, all the while carrying not just wind and water, but trillions of gallons of oil.
Next time, New Orleans will not only drown, it will burn.
This is (I hope) a worst-case scenario. But what is the best-case scenario? However you slice it, it is going to cost this nation billions. Oil spills ain't free. Free market, indeed.
Senate candidate Rand Paul's critique of the 1964 Civil Rights Act has caused quite the furor these past few days. It got me thinking about the gap between theory and practice, and the unflattering things that said gap says about our society.
First, for Paul's critique. Paul, and most libertarians, feel that the Civil Rights Act should not have applied to private businesses. All civilized people believe that public institutions (i.e. schools) that receive government funding should not be allowed to discriminate. But what about private businesses?
Paul says that the government has absolutely no right to tell private businesses who they must serve. He says that in a free country, bigotry is allowed. He says that a store owner should have the freedom to post a sign out front reading "No Negroes" or "No Jews" or "No people over 6 feet tall" or anything else. And in theory, he's absolutely right.
Let's take a relatively benign example. What about gyms that only allow women to join. Is that unconstitutional? Well, technically, under the Civil Rights Act, it is. And doesn't it seem a bit ridiculous that the federal government would intervene in such a case? Of course it does.
Now let's take a more realistic example. Let's say the owner of a chain of restaurants refuses to serve black folks. Should that be legal? According to Rand Paul, it should be legal, however distasteful it may be.
And here's Paul's explanation of how such bigotry would be prevented from spreading like the cancer that it is: if one restaurant owner refuses to serve blacks, citizens (black and white alike) would boycott that racist businessman and therefore drive him out of business, thereby disincentivizing such bigotry. Makes sense, right? In theory.
But what about practice? What can we look to for an example of practice? Well, unfortunately, we have plenty of case studies. We need simply look at how private businesses operated before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, when bigotry was legal.
When private businesses could serve or refuse to serve citizens at their own discretion, how did they behave? Were bigots weeded out by the immutable moral force of the free market? Were racists boycotted? Did white people boycott "white only" businesses? Did businesses who served everyone fair better than those that did not?
No. When private businesses were free to decide who they would serve, the huge majority of them chose not to serve blacks. What did this look like in practice?
If a black family was driving through the South to visit relatives, the adults would carry empty jars with them? Why? So that their children could urinate into them, since they knew very well that attempting to use a bathroom at any private business would lead to humiliation if not violence.
We gave private businessmen a chance to do the right thing. They failed to do so until they were forced to do so by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It is of course very unfortunate that it took the full force of the federal government to ensure that black folks would have access to toilets, beds, and cheeseburgers, but it did.
The only reason to second-guess this law now would be the assumption that people no longer harbor the bigotries they did 50 years ago. Is this a safe assumption? In large part, it is. How do I know this? Well, take a look at our president, for starters.
But do we really want to put that assumption to the test? In fact, a huge part of the moral revolution that led to the election of Barack Hussein Obama lay in the 1964 Civil Rights Act; forcing white people to let black people sit next to them at the lunch counter was not quite as trivial as it seemed at the time; it was the foundation of an historical moral awakening.
In theory, the libertarians are right, but in practice libertarianism in businesses led to institutional racism on a scale seldom matched in the history of the world. In theory, free people do the right thing by each other. In practice, unfortunately, they rarely do.
Although I consider myself a rather jaded person, I still revel in my ability to be surprised by the shit certain people are willing to pull. I have recently been thunderstruck by how utterly propagandistic the mainstream news is.
I'm not talking about cable news. I'm talking about Nightly News with Brian Williams. That broadcast is as close as we come these days to a relatively detached telling of the facts.
Two events I'll mention here have recently made me feel like I was ten years younger, as if certain scales never fell from my eyes. The first was the coal mine disaster. The second was the failed truck bombing of Times Square.
First, for the coal mine. Upwards of 30 people were killed. The types of people who have no connection to the types of people who give us the "news". So 30 people were killed in a coal mine because the cost of making their workplace safe was far more than the government fine for failing to make the workplace safe.
Simple as that. Safety was more expensive than the fines for being unsafe. Case closed. The value of a human life, the cost of orphans and widowed wives, was reduced to an item on a spreadsheet. The government's fines were not enough of a deterrent.
And how was this reported? Most of the news was about the "tragedy", implying an unavoidable aspect. The follow-up reporting was about the victims, about how much Billy Bob loved God and his children. About how much Bobby Ray loved coal mining. About how much Danny Joe loved hunting and football.
THAT is propaganda. A crime is committed, and we are told that it was unavoidable and that the only thing we can do is patronize the dead as God-fearing freedom-lovers.
And forgive me for noticing that the Nightly News is owned by General Electric, which has a, how shall I say, vested interest in cheap coal.
Then we have the failed bombing in Times Square. I just saw an "expert" on the Nightly News tell me, and millions of others, that "the system worked". Let us count the ways that this is utter propaganda.
Firstly, an unmonitored man drove a truck bomb into Times Square in broad daylight. Secondly, he lit the bomb and walked away. Thirdly, he boarded an airplane the next day, despite being on the no-fly list.
The system worked? THAT is propaganda. The system most decidedly did NOT work. But, thankfully, neither did the bomb.
Let us pretend that the bomber in this case was not an idiot with firecrackers and gasoline. Let's pretend he knew what he was doing. Let's pretend it was Tim McVeigh who lit that fuse and walked away.
He drives a truck bomb unserveilled into the most public place in America. He lights the fuse. We walks away unmolested. The bomb goes off. 500 people are killed. In that scenario, would we say "the system worked"?
No. Yet this is exactly what happened, except that, thank God, the bomb-maker was incompetent. The system did NOT work. But neither did the bomb.
I'm not surprised that there is propaganda on the internet. I'm not surprised that there is propaganda on cable. But the network airwaves are common property. Everyone gets NBC. And when the lowest common denominator, the one common voice, is pure propaganda, it makes me think we'd be made wiser by boycotting all the "news".
People, we can start again
Adam and Eve if you want
But this time,
We'll respect God's word from the jump"
--Ghostface Killah, "No, No, No", 2007
People generally have two obsessions: the inescapable reality of death and the concomitant urge to be reborn. All deep thoughts, and all good art, are born in this crucible between the hammer of death and the anvil of the promise of rebirth.
But our obsession with rebirth is what makes us who we are. "Adam and Eve if we want". This is what we strive for.
All thinking people live their lives on two parallel tracks: one track consists of paperwork, grocery shopping, and so forth. The second track consists of indulgence in the unattainable, the irrational.
The urge to read books that can't make you richer or sexier, the urge to paint or write or photograph when there is no "rational" reason to do so.
Every sentient person realizes that his or her "life" is mostly crowded with errands, with bureaucracy, with formality. The challenge lays in reserving enough time and space to be human beings, rather than simply human doings.
And with variety being the spice of life, we owe it to ourselves to branch out when we seek our creative and artistic relief from the drudgery of W-2 forms and car insurance.
From Albert Einstein to Lil Wayne, there are endless sources of information. Khalil Gibran. Ghostface Killah.
"In much of your talking,
Thinking is half murdered
For thought is a bird of space
That in a cage of words
May indeed unfold its wings
But cannot fly"
--Khalil Gibran, "The Prophet", 1923
"Why's the sky blue?
Why is water wet?
Why did Judas rap to Romans
While Jesus slept?"
--Ghostface Killah, "The 7th Chamber, 1995
