Yeah, I had noticed that the Gulf oil geyser seems to be doing approximately nothing to public opinion on environmental issues. I’m not sure what explains that other than we’re just deadened as a county, culture, and people. Something is definitely wrong with us.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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People are in denial. Until oil-soaked fish appears on their dinner plate, it might as well be happening on another planet. Sad reality of the situation.
The narrative around the oil spill revolves around “economic disaster”, “Gulf economy in shambles”, “corporate malfeasance by BP”, “regulator malfeasance by MMS” and lately “corporate/government malfeasance keeping reporters out of the affected areas”. When the narrative touches on the environmental impact at all it’s always in the language of job losses and expectations for future regulations on drilling, not on the actual disaster.
Despite being a giant environmental disaster, the story being played out is an economic/political one. I don’t know if that’s the national climate around the story or if its because “environmental issues” have become partisan issues associated with the Democratic Party and thus fall victim to the he said/she said “balanced” reporting that passes itself off as journalism. It could also be that BP’s executives inadvertently took the focus off the environmental disaster and made it a story about “BP’s lousy CEO Tony Hayward”.
Lots of stuff is going on with this story, and I don’t think it can be completely summed up with a simple “something is wrong with us”. I think it mostly comes down to media consolidation, corporate-friendly media, he said/she said journalism, and the general “out of sight out of mind” attitude that has been a general theme of folks in the US forever (If it isn’t happening in our backyard, it takes work to make us care. If it is happening in our backyard its the single most important thing going on in the entire world or that has ever happened in the entire world. And looking at US history, that’s been true since the founding of the Republic and isn’t really something new. It takes a lot of work to make people care about things that aren’t happening in their own backyard – which is why figures who can get people to pay attention are both so rare and have such an impact on our history.)
I think there is something very wrong with us, and the center of that is how we’ve turned everything into economics. The oil spill, climate change, immigration, social welfare, war, law — all are now discussed almost exclusively in terms of “what does it mean for the economy?” This obsession operates at every level. Used to be a house was basically a place to live in. Now it’s invariably describes as “the biggest investment most people make”. We use our equity to try and play the market, buy and sell houses based on ROI instead of our quality of life.
We think like desperately poor people instead of citizens of the richest country (for now) on the planet. Except, of course, when it comes to satisfying our own endless “needs”. I think the money think is a real change, and it’s been a long time coming, with help from relentless propaganda from every ideological group. I can only hope something comes along to remind us of what’s really valuable. We seem to have totally forgotten.
We’re trapped in the “free market” cage thinking that there is nothing of value you can’t put a price on. Well, except “national security” whose cost is unknown but well into the trillions.
Did you say, “national stupidity”?
The old theory on American politics is that it cycles through periods of punctuated equilibrium — that 90% of all political change in this country happens in brief moments when the conservative dam fails. The last such period was the 60s; before that, the 30s. We’re overdue. I just hope it doesn’t come in the form of populist reaction under the banner of the tea bag.
Ah, remember there’s nothing we can do about it.
The mighty Wurlitzer of environment V. economics has embellished itself into our collective consciousness. People view environmentalism as a luxury that can be dispensed with in times of economic hardship.
I would be more accurate to view environmental damage as negative externalities whose eventual cost is greater than their gain, but what’s unquestionable is that the cost is shared by us whereas the gain is almost entirely private. And that’s true despite the widespread belief that there are positive externalities associated with the activity. Regulated or outlawed acts, such as illegally dumping toxic waste, are outlawed or controlled to a certain degree because the negative externality outweighs the benefits, or is not externalized. Creating benefits of this type concomitantly creates a larger deficit for others.
To summarize — egregious acts of environmental destruction are costs born by those who don’t share in the benefits, or share in them minimally. It’s a little like someone ‘borrowing’ your credit card and charging it up to the hilt and then offering you a small portion of what they purchased in the process. And the more they charge, the worse off you become. The environment V. economics framing ignores the negative side of the externality along with the fact that someone else must pay it (that it’s externalized). And it also treats the private benefit side of the equation in isolation, ignoring the balance of payments issue and the fact that there is an unborn cost.
This is a classic case of framing since the perception of risk and benefit is almost entirely the result of how it’s framed. Moreover, rather than perceiving dangerous environmental activities as threatening and avoiding them, the default cognitive frame is to perceive environmentally damaging economic activity as a sort of sanctuary and environmentalism instead as risky, instead of the opposite. People tend to engage in risk-friendly strategies when they see their situation as declining, so the ironic outcome is that environmental damage creates desensitization to environmental risk and begets even more environmental damage.
Catastrophe shock. 9/11 – Iraq – Afghanistan – economic meltdown – global warming – Gulf oil spill etc. — and unemployment, foreclosure, and other personal struggles. There is a sense of helplessness and a pandemic of incompetence that folks haven’t the power to correct.
And then there’s the propagation of outright lies in the media that move faster that they can all be batted down. People don’t know what is true anymore and if concerned about that don’t know how to verify it.
And the religious institutions that once could hold moral accountability have degenerated into a moral morass (Catholicism) or are more interested in their power and privileges to do nothing (entrepreneurial fundamentalist and pentecostal evangelism).
I knew we were morally dead when Abu Graib did not produce an immediate impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. But got them re-elected.
Yup.
You’ve got it.
Precisely.
Thanks.
AG
Yup.
Media overkill is what is wrong with us.
Bet on it.
Too much information. Most of it about things that are way beyond our power to affect. And we give up.
Is this on purpose, this too-much-info thing?
I wonder. I really do.
Did a bunch of hottest-thing-ever big brains gather around a table somewhere sometime, say “So…how do we best control them?” and then construct the media system that now emphatically does control us, by info-overload if by no other tactic?
On purpose?
Is anything “on purpose?” Really?
We sleep.
We drift in a dream.
The mass media now provide the raw material for most of that dream for the vast majority of American people.
But…those who run the media also sleep.
Dreamers imposing their own dreams on the mass audience.
Hmmmm…
No wonder things are not working very well.
I will say it once again:
And when I say “Wake the fuck up” I am not whistling Dixie here.
Awaken from this particular dream. Awaken from this dreamworld that is imposed upon us from without by other dreamers. If we are going to dream…and for millennia the wisest among us have said that waking sleep is the fate of all but a very few human beings…let us at least dream things that are engendered by the reality that surrounds us instead of these second-hand dreams produced by people whose own dreams are those of control freaks.
Please.
Turn it off.
Walk away from the media with your brains in the air.
Lisa says in the comments above:
Perhaps some oil-soaked fish are what people actually need, Lisa. Except of course for the undeniable fact that the fish will appear on people’s plates and almost no one will taste the oil unless they are told to do so by the media.
I am told over and over again by leftiness blogger folks…”If we don’t watch the news, how will we know what’s going on? There are so many things going wrong now…how will we know what needs our attention?”
All I can say is that “watching the news” as it is presented by American mass media has given us nothing but false hopes. Clinton and Obama? No more able to “do” anything than were Nixon, Reagan and Bush I and II.
Sleepers all.
Consumers of the mass dream.
Dreamers all.
If we cannot awaken, Lord…please at the very least allow us to dream our own dreams rather than those of the hustler others who now drive Dreamworld America.
Please.
Once more:
Station WTFU signing off for the day.
Gotta go do something real now.
Wake the fuck up.
Later…
AG
I don’t accept the premise. Are you looking for more stories about cute baby turtles and cute baby fish ? (and actually, there are plenty of these) — health, safety, pollution, and resource issues are what always brings benefcial change on the environmental front. In spite of BP’s active attempts to control and suppress the news (which itself has been widely reported), I think people are aware and alarmed about how the oil disaster relates to these issues, and there is much news relating to it.
In policy, this translates to energy efficiency and new transportation policies such as high=speed rail and local rapid transit/light rail. This is a major opportunity to institute such policy changes, and Obama appeared to be committed to them even before this catastrophe. The environment is the greatest economic issue in the widest sense of the word, but also in an everyday sense. Gulf oil workers see it as a jobs vs enviornment issue, but I think people in the Gulf region are getting a tough wakeup call right now. As usual, the good old USA, land of cheap gas, is way behind, but change has got to come. Not to mention social volatility of most of the regions that have oil.
Not a word from the sleepers.
Three rehearsals/performances later…all of music the end aim of which is to to awaken the sleeping human within us…I can only echo the Divine Bard:
Or…the admonition “Wake the fuck up!!!” by any other name smells as sweet.
And (on the evidence) as fearsome.
But that’s all with which we are left.
Wake the fuck up or go down dirty.
Your choice, now.
WTFU.
Turn the shit off.
In your own mind.
PLEASE!!!
You be bettah off.
Bet on it.
I am.
Later…
AG