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Please pardon my prolonged absence, dear reader. There has been an air-tight cap fitted around my well of creativity; this usually aflicts me during times when the eternal spring of world calamities gushes and flows freely by way of war, oil spils, and international soccer tournaments. As James Joyce once said on literary constipation in these circumstances, "No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination."
Yes, there are many strange and vile forces at work presently...new manners of devilry that each seem to fully eclipse the last, and as the temperature rises so does the insanity...and the drinking pace.
There is a bloodthirsty oil company singlehandedly turning the Gulf of Mexico into a tar pit. The fact that it is (if only on the surface) a British company adds to the ire a lot of folks feel. But, I was wondering the other day what the fallout would be had this been an Arab-run company and how the rhetoric from the media would be different. This of course would never happen because the Arabs know better than to drill in that area (a paltry sum of oil compared to their reserves) and if they did, they would certainly know better than to be the face of the company themselves; that would fall in the lap of some poor stugotz from Texas or New Jersey. Sadly for the British, they are no longer skilled at subjugating "inferior peoples", so they must soldier on and run their companies themselves and face the music when the bodies start piling up. Not surprisingly, this has become yet another point of division in our country and even as much of it foams at the mouth--screaming and ranting about the government systematically taking over our lives--a lot has been made of the failure of the same government's agencies to effectively regulate the oil industry and their facilities. This makes me laugh, even if the screaming and ranting wasn't going on, because being angry at the government for not standing up to big oil is to live in the zenith of ignorance. Big oil, like tobacco, insurance companies, the banking industry, and defense research firms have been given--in some cases quite literally--a blank check and "da keys to da jeep". They operate outside conventional regulation because of the agreed upon importance of and the amount of money involved with what they do, which is systematically poison people, bankrupt them, or design new ways to turn our world into a flaming and nightmarish hellscape. The Supreme court has even agreed, in their divine wisom, that the dollars these companies raise and use to buy political influence carries the same weight and has the same rights of free speech as you and I have. Dollars have rights, money has free speech, bibble bubble boil and trouble, fair is foul and foul is fair.
This legal presupposition renders any real, concerted effort to regulate these industries impossible. The financial reform bill that is currently oozing its way through the sausage machine of the capitol building was largely watered down and de-clawed because of these wretched people. The biggie in this debate has been the trading of derivatives. You may remember them as the absurd formulas with no intrinsic value that completely de-leveraged the economy and stock market less than two years ago. As it turns out, the banks will still be able trade them at some level. What are we left with? Productive legislation aimed at protecting consumers spun to seem evil and anti-business that, in the end, is hacked away and becomes only beneficial to the machinations it was aiming to curtail. That is where we are in this dreadful, sweltering summer of 2010. Oh, and we also have a horrendous war of which the scope, leadership, and goals are totally lost. I think this is mostly because of the foolishly political nature of this war; all wars are political, but few are as absolutely political (and foolish) as the one in Afghanistan. The culture of the military and that of Washington politics have never been more at odds, each seeming equally out of touch and immature to the other. So, they bicker and call each other names while the pace of death quickens for our young soldiers, killed for "one of the biggest nothings in history" far before their time.
But all is not lost...as I write this Lindsay Lohan is preparing to spend three months in jail, the former mayor of Detroit has been indicted on four thousand counts of treachery, and the Tigers are only a half-game out of first place at the All Star break. They have a shoe-in for the AL Rookie of the Year playing outfield and arguably the game's best hitter playing first base. The pitching staff has out-performed their potential and we even saw a perfect game...sort of. Ironically, the umpire that blew the call and created the "sort of", Jim Joyce, was recently inducted into the Irish-American Baseball Hall of Fame (I didn't know there was one either), and the fact that the whole ordeal served as a model of how to handle bad luck, big mistakes, and bitter disappointment makes the induction seem strangely and beautifully poetic. T.S. Elliot wrote once, no doubt in a booze-fueled haze, that a man must "find a still point in a turning world".
Indeed.
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