I have tried to avoid nostalgia as hard as I am driven towards it. With all the sentiments of our youth so readily available on I tunes and YouTube and other places so easily acquired by the click of a mouse or a bat of the eye, I am driving like so many others in that golden gear heading South. Driving South in the comfort of my past, to my past, we miss the landscape of the present. But the present for now, in the golden gear of nostalgia is Godzilla, King of the Monsters, as a slow furious leak in the gulf ocean floor.
The black ooze from the depths that can't be controlled, which relentlessly rises past containment domes, foils top kills, is the legacy of the monster that arose out of the Sea of Japan due to the nuclear age in its radioactive rage. It marched over Islands and destroyed fisherman and farmers as it strode through the various stages of civilization to the city. The city, the aloof enabler of the destruction and pillage of the environment but the culmination of all our thoughts and aspirations, our arts and artifacts, our penultimate light against the superstitions of our dark past, is where this monster must go.
This black ooze that comes now, that hovers gaining breadth and width in the middle of the sea, will come first to the fisherman and than the farmer. It will blacken the Islands and cross the channels then it will burn our eyes with its toxic fire into our cluttered streets and corners all the while we stare in horror at our inability to stop it. Then the Japanese army with flamethrowers, missile launchers and green tanks, and now BP with their engineers and Red Adairs , with a five story containment dome and robotic pipe fitters, can't stop Godzilla's march or that of the oily ooze from 10,000 leagues beneath the sea.
Both the ooze and Godzilla are the simple products of our arrogance and ignorance. Both are of the earth. One is the pressured remains of a lost world and the other the waking son of grieving mother earth. These two simple themes repeat and replay in all forms of drama throughout our history. So here we go again, arrogant in our relentless greed for more oil and ignorant to its effects.
How does this end? Badly for those in its path, but there will be some secret weapon that will save the rest of us. But in that weapon is the seed of greater destruction so it can only be used once, just this time. Maybe we can break the cycle of ignorance and arrogance and find a weapon that we can use more than once. A weapon rooted in nostalgia but still present in all of us. We just need the shock and awe of the king of the Monsters to bring it out: knowledge and respect
