A friend of mine remarked on Facebook the other day that she is now officially depressed over the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. I expect this feeling is hitting a lot of people right about now, 52 days into the disaster, as attempt after attempt by BP to cap the spill has failed or has had minimal success and more and more horrifying pictures of oil-soaked wildlife pop up on the news. I understand this because I reached the point of depression over the spill weeks ago.
No, I don't claim to be more empathetic or sensitive to these matters than everybody else. It's just that my job involves watching financial news networks for seven hours a day. For seven hours a day. FOR SEVEN HOURS A DAY. For seven hours every work day for much of the past seven weeks or so I have listened to a legion of pampered and puffy doyens and doyennes of the "free market" bloviate and blather about what the spill means to BP's bottom line or whether it's right for the government to pressure BP to pay claims and clean up the mess or whether the disaster is because of regulators instead of the company's error. Absolutely, the regulators deserve a good deal of the blame, but mainly because they've been bought over the years by the oil industry. In the wake of this catastrophe, the notion that doing away with any regulation of the oil industry instead of improving it is insanity.
Hearing this market-fundamentalist bullshit for seven hours a day while reading sober and depressing news stories from a variety of sources, seeing the latest horrific pictures of oil-soaked marshes and wildlife and watching the live feed of BP's spill cam is enough to make a man want to tattoo the entire "Communist Manifesto" on his body using only heated paperclips and the ink from a Bic pen. As if the spill weren't depressing enough, there are still people with power and influence who absolutely refuse to acknowledge the reality of this disaster, that it is not just another thing to spin.
