It was announced this morning on NPR radio that the British Petroleum (BP, the corporation formerly known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company) oil "spill" was the biggest environmental disaster in history, surpassing the Exxon Valdez crack-up of March 1989.
But you have to really be a good, disciplined student of government and corporate propaganda to believe this obvious overstatement. Really, the biggest disaster in history?
Funny, because most moderate apologists are usually more critical of official facts in other matters. Take racism and colonialism. If I mention the unprecedented horrors of the African slave trade, forced migration, a multi-generational holocaust, cultural genocide, many moderate liberals will attempt the balance the historical record with the Jewish holocaust, the Armenian genocide, East Africa, My Lai, Stalin ... Rightly or wrongly, they will bring these other crimes in, unknowingly acknowledging a norm that would disturb keep a child up at night.
With BP's "spill" [spill? this is not an "oops" moment], our mainstream narrative is far less critical, which is surprising.
The narrative waxes articulately about fines against BP, lack of technology, corporate responsibility, criminal charges. Good points, all, but BP (formerly known as the rogue corporation which backed the coup against a democratically elected president in Iran, 1953) is merely a minor symptom of a larger chronic disease.
Because while the world's attention is on the Gulf, the wetlands, the bird refuges, the end of the fishing industry in an area just devastated by Hurricane Katrina, the air continues to be polluted, the climate continues to warm with carbon and methane emissions, the polar ice caps continue melting.
And where is the urgency for global smog alerts? Where is the play by play, up-to-the minute coverage on increased lung-choking particulates in the air? Where are the news agencies who have hired experts to look at the "spill" and confirm it's greater than what BP has suggested (BP, the corporation which with CIA support returned the ogre Shah of Iran to his country to cancel all democratic reforms and make lucrative deals)?
The narrative has been disciplined by the corporate line. The lawyers may also remember what happened to poor Oprah and her hamburger fiasco.
This bigger global catastrophe of what is benignly called Global Warming has become virtual background noise, barely noticed anymore, like the US war crimes in the Middle East, Guantanmo prison, its occupations of Afghanistan, drone bombing of Pakistan, pacification of Iraq, and always, always its utilization of Israel as its mercenary.
The larger threat that is arguably linked to many of our industrial-age ailments is overshadowed by the current militarization of the US/Mexican border, not because Nicaragua has threatened to invade, as Reagan once lied to beef up defense spending; and not because immigrants from Mexico are staging uprisings and pillaging their new homes, but rather because a sad majority of Americans have turned their wrath over or economic chaos on poor, migrant [brown] workers and not on the atrocious capitalist nation-state.
So while dust ups go on here and there, our lungs are slowly starved of oxygen, particulates will fill the air, our major corporations will leech toxins into their products, rain forests felled, honey bees grow extinct, ... and, yes, it IS a spill in the Gulf that has us in a convulsion.
If we could turn the persistent air pollution into an oil slick, it would cover much of the world, but we've been diverted to a horrendous accident in the Gulf but not nearly as catastrophic.
The Gulf is a spill of a microcosm - environmental damages, localities ill affected, wildlife killed, waters poisoned, lack of preparedness, a nation underprepared to deal with the Frankenstein monster of its own making, etc - of what is happening all over the world.
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