All of the frustration, sadness, anger and suffering that Gulf citizens are now enduring, whittled down to mere geometry.  A graphic that should have emblematized the facts, that should have indexed reality, seemed instead to mutely absorb it.

It was more than a little strange, seeing NOAA’S pie chart--introduced at the August 4th White House press briefing with a title befitting a Kids'-Summer-Reading-List, Where Did the Oil Go?--proffered as the government’s conclusion to the response phase of the BP oil disaster.  Yet there it was, wedges neatly demarcated in associative blues and brown, stolidly asserting its veridical nature, claiming the virtual disappearance of 75% of all 4.9 million barrels of oil.   It was indeed an Alice-in-Wonderland moment. What should have been a holistic (and honest) in-time assessment of the health of a region was, amazingly, reduced to a fossil fuel coming-of-age story.  The oil nearly personified, the people made parenthetical, Robert Gibbs even had a subtitle for the whole thing: "Where the oil is and the process it's been through." What a relief to know the oil, once a rowdy naif, is capable, even, of redemption.

Actually, children's fiction, which has long offered much more sophisticated (not to mention upbeat) morals regarding human agency than our consistently posturing figureheads, might be the better place to go for the lessons of this summer's tragedy.  Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat Comes Back reads as a veritable allegory of the oil disaster.  Left alone, their mother at the supermarket, on a day when there is 'work to be done,' young Conrad and Sally fall in with the louche cat, who wants nothing more than to eat cake in a bathtub he lets overflow (can you hear Tony Hayward's "I want my life back"?).  As readers will readily remember, the cat leaves an intractable pink mark in the tub, the attempted eradication of which serves as the ensuing plot.  A feline phalanx--little cats A-Z--is unleashed from The Cat's Hat, free to try just about anything, including a litany of 'junk-shot' junk--pop-guns, bats, and lawnmower--described in the story as a 'spot killing'--to stop the spreading pink stuff as it migrates from bathroom to mother's dress to the snowy landscape outside.  Most of the little cats' fixes, of course, don't work, because they're motivated merely by a conceptual system--in this case the alphabet--wholly disconnected from the reality of the spreading stain.  What does finally make the pernicious pink stuff disappear?  "Voom." Voom is basically propaganda: as The Cat manically opines, "it can clean up anything!"  But we know--this is part of Seuss's genius--that The Cat will come again to problematize the kids' world, that the Voom is a stop-gap measure, a kind of magical thinking.

Now, a true 'oil budget' outlining the oil still in the Gulf ecosystem would have been, of course, an indispensable tool for government agencies wanting to do the right thing.  But what we got was pseudo-science, detached from earthly context, and further degraded by the kiss of corporate cover-up.  Shirking the wisdom that comes from the local and the provisional, refusing to address the actual needs of a living earth, the government's tactic is part of a pattern of detachment that threatens to rob us (starting with Gulf citizens), of our very lives. And on the political front we are robbed of our problems, of the very events that enable us to improve our collective lot by responsibly engaging the present.  A political hedge, the report relies on our tacit agreement to ignore the sensuous world.  To submit to this request would be not only an historically unwise decision.  It would be the relinquishing of an historical existence.

Of course, one might counter, in the instance of the press conference, that public politicking is always leavened with the rhetorically expedient.  But our politics are increasingly devoid of the interest of 98% of American citizens, not to mention the concerns of future generations.  Given the long history of environmental and economic abuse suffered by the Gulf region, and with BP still in de facto control of the response, the press conference performance was an outrage.  (It was also a little transfixing, as false lights and dumb signs tend to be.)

Ultimately, the press conference was an allegory of political vitiation.  The rhetoric of ‘dispersal’ and atomization, of rendering ineffective through ‘breaking up,’ was eerie in its evocation of civic disenfranchisement.  Got an oil problem?  Deny It, Corexit, Pie chart it.  VOOM!  We are being subjected to a Xeno’s paradox of justice, so mind-numbingly inefficient as to be hollow.

The region we have further destroyed in this disaster is not simply some scientific variable forever amenable to our thoughtless adjustments: it is the very condition of our survival. Our capacity to abide the ongoing destruction of our fellow man and wildlife harms our capacity to be human.  It changes our essence just as surely as BP's pollution mutates our DNA.  And while our living earth was elided in the government's press conference, it is just as telling how the response itself, in light of the earlier rehearsal of What The Oil Did on Its Summer Vacation, was characterized.  Both Gibbs and Adm. Thad Allen referred to the response effort as having a 'life cycle.'  The BP cover-up—their ongoing denials,  management of those they have victimized, dictation of the methods used to respond to the disaster that privilege profit over health, commandeering of public land, and buy-out of oppositional voices in the Gulf, Gibbs and Allen unwittingly venture, is natural.  Like oil.  Welcome, say our government representatives, to the life cycle of biocide.  And the snake eats its tail.

Note: As I was finishing up this post I came across Dan Radmacher's re-telling of Dr. Seuss's story in light of the BP oil disaster.  You can find it here: www.roanoke.com/editorials/radmacher/wb/250806