Once upon a time we could put our dinner on a little TV tray and watch the news, and all for free. The halcyon days. The global village. Pretty soon we got more channels, cable, 24 hour news and a violent, pointless war with napalm and death. That wasn't much fun. Now we come to the Age of the BP Oil Spill, our Chernoble.
Want to see it? There's a camera on it 24/7. The country is up in arms--dinner is ruined. Poor Obama is not a wartime orator like Roosevelt; "A day that will live in infamy", or Churchill, "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall never surrender". He is the cool, articulate leader who patiently explains complex events to us, the antidote to the histrionic Tea Party rallys that look ominously like the book burnings of the Third Reich. Meanwhile, the chaps at BP take time out from lunch at Claridges to OK bland full page ads and soft corporate TV commercials telling us that everything's OK. No real words in them like death, chaos or pollution. This is the equivalent of the Luftwaffe taking ads in the Times apologizing for the destruction of London saying, "gosh, if only the English were not so darn obstinate". When will it end? Only CNN knows. Perhaps it's when the audience moves on to the next visual narcotic: Armenian Idol, Dancing with Dentists or the disasters sure to come. So, the oil spews on relentlessly. The pelicans still don't have lawyers, and the shrimpers are being paid off in chicken feed. And so we beat on, boats against the tide, pushing us backward, ever backward.
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