I will refresh your memory of this crappy movie without refreshing my own. The Julia Roberts character is a young law clerk who has stumbled on a terrible secret while fulfilling an academic exercise. A Supreme Court Justice has been assassinated. Why? America can only theorize as this fictional jurist was a solid conservative on a panel pretty evenly split and certain to be quickly replaced with another. Now, if he were the swing vote, everyone could understand why he was offed. Whatever the next case coming up, the culprit is whichever party stands to gain from this unexcused absence. QED. How the setting for these events, ostensibly America in the 90s, became a place where political murder was as routine as in Rome, or even on Romulus, we are not informed.  But the baddies are off after a galloping Julia who has discovered that corporate Black Hats were about to do something mean, like drill a nasty hole into the ground and release the black goo within upon the surface world. And the only thing that could stop them, in court anyhow, was the status of a certain indigenous pelican as an endangered species. The late judge, certified Rightwing wanker though he was, apparently had a soft spot for sea-birds or birds altogether. He threatened an upset decision favoring the pelican so he had to die, naturally. Never asked is whether the claims of the pelican to nest and feed undisturbed were clearly superior to our claim to the oil beneath? Also never considered is whether it was quite clear that the oil drilling would be a serious, or indeed even a NOTICEABLE encumbrance to the joyous, omnivorous life of the pelican?

Recently returned from a fact-finding excursion to the Gulf beaches last year soiled by a deep drilling platform spill, I might have some insights. First, although the Deep Horizon leak was in some measures the worst domestic oil spill in history I can attest that the pelican race is not extinct. The object of the brief was a particular breed of pelican. I cannot as yet identify one species from the next too readily but if the pelicans at large were feeling the strain of that oily eruption into their habitat, it sure didn’t show. They were doing what pelicans do; a lot of rather smug gliding punctuated by sudden graceless collapse into the sea and then a gargle, spit and repeat. The pelican is an especially media-friendly “victim” of oil spills. Ungainly at their best, once doused in oil they appear and are helplessly fragile and probably doomed since their usual method of cleaning themselves is to eat whatever is soiling them. They are large, slow to flee humans and have appeared in cartoon shows since the earliest days. If penguins or seals or polar bears are not available the pelican will do well enough. The truly menaced manatee suffers from aesthetics even a personal trainer could not cure so the pelican speaks for nature in the Gulf.

The pelicans abide. Surely that is after their numbers were decimated by the oil spill though, right? As far as the internets can reveal, the total for all identified oiled sea-birds (some rescued and released, most not) is in the few dozens which is less than die from aviation. I know that doesn’t seem possible but if you look at news footage of the day of all the pelicans or gulls video could capture you will see that it is the same sad sack repeated endlessly. His majestic sheening head and his futilely flapping wings are a pathetic sight to behold but as far as the race of pelicans is concerned this is a case of extreme bad luck or extremely poor diving. Most pelicans were able to resist the urge to dive into a stinking oil plume which, in any case, was not hospitable to fish.

The pelicans muddled through alright but they are not the whole story. The news has grown weary of the spill, and that long ago, but you do hear occasional estimates of “damages” in the legal sense. Fishermen have been sorely treated. Huge tracts of the Gulf were made off-limits to fishing during the spill and long after it was plugged. State and federal officials made these calls and they seem to have been powerfully biased in the direction of what they would call “caution”, that is to close fisheries. Aren’t there pretty accurate tests that can be run to detect petroleum or its related toxins in water and in fish? Yes, there certainly are but the officials justify their existence and expense accounts not from serving oysters on the half shell or hauling grouper from sea to plate. Their posts are PR above all. Even if they are sticklers for science-backed policies, and they are not, they still must contend with the fact that someone somewhere is going to get sick from eating the fish if the fish is on the market. Families with lawyers will be quick, and probably successful, in casting the blame and the precious liability onto the nearest deep pocket. This might be the government or, more likely it would mean BP but that entity, like its Green Power cousin, is so intertwined with the Obama Administration that it is fiscally a government department. So the fisheries close for political and legal, not toxicological reasons. Still they are closed. The couchbound fishermen are enticed back onto the water to do, what? Few can say but it is all part of the cleanup so it must be good. They are promised rich compensation for their labors, lost earnings and the hire of their boats. Yet today, you will not find an unconnected individual who took advantage of these offers and was paid per the agreement. No, you will not find him. But you will find estimates of “damages” that reach the stratosphere where spilled oil was never encountered; largely owing to lost catches and depressed markets. Once it was the poor man who ate fish because he could go out and catch it himself. Now that America has forgot how to fish and cultivates a sportsman’s catch-and-release culture for the few anglers that remain, fish has become an exotic entree commanding high margins. But, with all the closures and everything, people are hesitant to maybe eat some oil with their bluefin. That apprehension lingers exacerbating the demand dip from the national economy even now that fishing has resumed. Large measures of the “damages” realized here did not come from oil in the water at all but from a ham-handed over-reaction to the news event by Team Obama who wisely feared the media appearance of an oily pelican.

BP (Barack Petroleum) is still present and active in the Gulf. They have plumped the local economy with massive media buys that solicit damaged parties to submit claims as the number of claims is key to their own claim of having discharged their responsibilities. And they do hire the local fellows for important work. You may recall the scourge of the tarballs. These beasties were found as far away as the OPPOSITE coast of Florida! Certainly this is the mark of migrating oil that is traveling faster than a cruiseliner! As an old sea dog myself, I can tell you that tarballs like this are a permanent fact of shore life. We used to have fights with them; like snowball fights. And they are not so dreadful. The newsies zoom in on a couple of them making you think they are as large as club chairs but they are not. There is a permanent and natural seepage of oil off most coasts including California, the Atlantic and the Gulf. These natural secretions have been producing tarballs the size of eggs and accumulating in dozens, at most, since before man crawled. But policing these little beauties in a media-friendly fashion is much of what the BP billions in “remediation” are going to. When you have your toes in the sand and a drink in your hand and see a couple fellows in long pants, sleeves and with masks and gloves scooping a cup of sand here and there into a hazmat sack, this is what they are doing for about $9 an hour. While children frolic with their castle molds grown men use long-handled snow shovels to plunk a tablespoon of solidified motor oil into their hoard. The absurdity is further revealed when their supervisor in BP polo shirt detects another tarball or three and directs their attentions where a teenage couple lounges in near nudity, apparently unpoisoned.

One would think the market value of good news would be increasing, given its scarcity. That horrible disaster down south? In practical terms, it never happened. Or the electoral gunslingers might advise the President to declare victory and come home from the Gulf. BP has been publicly chastened. Maybe we could just stay clear of them for a couple years? But no, no and no again. The “clean-up” in the Gulf continues and it rages most earnestly where nothing was ever dirtied but where tourists and locals gather. The chief victim of the Deep Horizon blow out (other than those dozens killed in the explosion) was the Obama Administration and its squeaky-clean Green image. This one actually CAN be blamed on Bush, not Bush the man but Bush the media player. Barack’s handlers were not going to let THEIR guy be Katrinaed and they know quite well how it is done. No accusation of “inaction” will adhere to President Obama; you have my word on it, boss! So instead we have a never-ending pantomime like the boy in the bathroom who merely pretends to wash his hands. Whenever a pelican dives there is a collective gasp, fearing he might come up oozing and polluted, winking his sad eye…. S-O-S, S-O-S and harm himself as he struggles against those scrubbing him with Dawn liquid. We can’t have that. Good thing we DON’T have that but it is not good enough. We must continue raking the beaches like giant sandtraps. We must continue the moratorium on any further drilling. We must continue the support to the unoiled locals and continue the policies that harm their trade at a point where the total release from the oil spill is about the same as natural seepage over that time. It is all for the pelicans, you see.

Oh, and the dolphins. They’re cute, too.

 

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