What has happened in the Gulf, what continues to happen, is not Barack Obama's Katrina. Nor is it anyone else's. It's not Pearl Harbor, nor is it 9-11.
What it's most comparable to, in terms of American history, is the London Blitz.
(I don't like using AP or even linking to them, but the picture on this page, by the APs Charles Riedel, is becoming the Iwa Jima Flag-on-Mount-Sirabachi moment in this disaster, so I've thumbnailed it. Historians know that an earlier group's arrival on that mountain, with a smaller flag, was the real deal to the men fighting there, and the second flag was put up for show. Yet it's that one we remember. As we'll remember Riedel's Laughing Gull. I entirely agree with AOL's Matt Mendolson on that.)
For most Americans the Gulf is distant. This can be hard to believe but it's true. Even here in Atlanta, where I live, the impacts for now are slight. My neighbor won't be heading to Destin any time soon. Beyond that life remains normal.
This is how America was during the Blitz. It was something happening elsewhere and to other people. What most today have forgotten is that, for many Americans of that time, this was highly desirable. War was highly controversial.
What President Roosevelt did, what Barack Obama needs to do, was to mold public opinion, slowly, toward a war footing. The movies which appeared and were green-lighted in 1940 were not all propaganda pieces, as they would become in the succeeding years. But many did take the gathering darkness as their subtext. And in that era, movies were the dominant medium.
Today the Internet is the dominant medium. It is a medium that is very difficult to dominate. Anything with the taint of propaganda is taken with a grain of salt. Yet, as we see time-and-time again in the Middle East, propaganda gets through.
It gets through when the target is clear and the aim is simple. The Administration's problem lies in its targeting.
The oil is not the enemy. Even BP is not the enemy. The enemy is the system that makes this eternal search for oil necessary, and that makes it the path of least resistance for BP's profit.
I'm not naive enough to think that we can flip a switch and create a world of bullet trains and windmills. But I'm unwilling to accept the inevitability of oil, and all the bloodshed and destruction that entails.
What has people down right now is just this, the idea that we have no choice but to drill and fight, fight and drill, in order to continue our way of life. That's why the President's approval ratings are down so far, I believe, because his sights are set too low.
Raising those sights means creating a political environment in which an energy bill that moves incentives decisively from carbon to renewables is seen as patriotic, as a jobs bill, and as simple common sense, so that any opposition is seen as unpatriotic. In the face of Big Oil the President has been acting as Chamberlain at Munich, pushing back slowly hoping for "peace in our time."
He needs to become Churchill, not against BP but against the system that made this disaster inevitable.
Continue reading "The Blitz of the Gulf and the War Against Oil" »

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