A Lamp Unto the Nations
I don’t think I’ve written anything much about the Gulf Oil spill, because a) it’s depressing but only interesting if you’re not full up on bitter comedy, and I am; and b) actually there is no b. I think we’re living through America’s Chernobyl, the event where the country becomes outright pathetic in everyone else’s eyes, and maybe even, to a point, in our own. Chernobyl wasn’t just scary and tragic, it was also ridiculous. Every remaining pretension of the Soviet state scattered on a wind of incompetence and demonstrable dishonesty. For a very long time, the federal government voice-doubled BP’s lies about the scale of the disaster. The disaster itself has united the entire Rogue’s Gallery of American cronyism. Goldman-Sachs. Halliburton. So far, Blackwater/Xe is on the outside looking in, so far as we know, but things change.
And the USSR may win this one on points given that, at some point, Chernobyl did stop leaking.
There can’t be three foreigners not in the employ of Rupert Murdoch who, today, can read about the “American model of democratic capitalism” without sniggering. This is a country whose elites can cry real tears about the pensions of Britons while regarding the pensions of American autoworkers as the next thing to a crime. While there is a real principle at stake in the difference, it’s not one you’re supposed to voice: Concern for British pensions is a way to keep powerful and connected people unaccountable for their actions; Auto worker pensions can only cost such people money.
Comment by Barry —
June 17, 2010 @ 8:48 am
“…while regarding the pensions of American autoworkers as the next thing to a crime.”
I noticed the deafening howls from the right about autoworkers getting pensions (which, IIRC, were trimmed), while noticing that very few on the right had a problem with Wall Streeters keeping the fruits of their frauds.
One of my explanations of the USA to foreigners is that we are a very class-based society; it’s just that we’re a ‘kiss up, kick down’ system, where the shat-upon console themselves with some ‘plop down’ upon their lowers.
Comment by dhex —
June 17, 2010 @ 8:56 am
though i like the cut of your dreams, mr. henley, i doubt the bp thing is going to reduce confidence in the u.s. government. depending on whom is wearing the boot, it’s always harder faster better more, etc.
Comment by ajay —
June 17, 2010 @ 10:16 am
I think we’re living through America’s Chernobyl, the event where the country becomes outright pathetic in everyone else’s eyes, and maybe even, to a point, in our own.
I thought that was Katrina? Yes, mucky beaches and oily shrimp are bad, but Katrina had actual US people left to drown.
Comment by abb1 —
June 17, 2010 @ 10:26 am
Yes, in a sense Katrina is more similar. The usual source of Soviet calamities (and Katrina) was pokhuism – Russian for don’t-give-a-fuckism. BP was trying to save a few bucks, that’s different. Slightly different.
Comment by Nicholas Weininger —
June 17, 2010 @ 10:34 am
There’s an interesting exercise in bitterness: thinking about Soviet moments in recent American history.
The first one I remember clearly as such was the press conference in 1999 during the Kosovo war where Jamie somebody-or-other, the NATO spokesman, defended the proposition that a Serbian TV station was totally a legitimate military target, and the 16 people killed there got what they deserved for disseminating government propaganda, and if Serbian TV had just given equal time to NATO propaganda instead they wouldn’t have gotten bombed.
The squalid effrontery of it made me (literally Joe Biden, as IOZ has taken to saying) feel sick to my stomach. Little did I know how much squalid effrontery was coming. My stomach has toughened up, though, for better or worse.
Pingback by Pension Outrage —
June 17, 2010 @ 11:22 am
[...] Jim Henley notes an odd juxtaposition in American conservative thought: This is a country whose elites can cry real tears about the pensions of Britons while regarding the pensions of American autoworkers as the next thing to a crime. While there is a real principle at stake in the difference, it’s not one you’re supposed to voice: Concern for British pensions is a way to keep powerful and connected people unaccountable for their actions; Auto worker pensions can only cost such people money. [...]
Comment by fyodor —
June 17, 2010 @ 6:07 pm
There’s a cautionary tale for ya!
Comment by ajay —
June 18, 2010 @ 11:11 am
7: largely irrelevant because that’s not the way pension funds work.
Comment by mpowell —
June 19, 2010 @ 11:37 am
I just wish that all the anger currently being directed against Obama/BP could be more profitably directed towards real regulatory reform in energy policy and drilling. What we are going to get is Obama ’showing emotion’, congressional grandstanding an a drilling moratorium for 6 months. And then it will be back to business as usual. I’m not blaming anyone here since outrage is consistently directed towards crony capitalism. But a lot of Americans are pissed off about this but will later fail to demand the kind of actions that will reduce the probability of it occurring again.