You have to feel sorry for anybody who sits in the White House. It’s a trap. You can’t go out for pizza; you can’t take a walk; you can’t put the place up for sale and move. Bush found that out when Katrina landed on him five years ago.
The City of New Orleans had spread out into lowlands that no one in his right mind would have built a house on during its first couple of centuries. But it had gotten crowded and poorer people had moved out where land was cheaper—and far less safe.
Whooooosh. Everything was gone. Somehow it became Washington’s job to move tens of thousands of people out of the way of a massive (and entirely predictable) natural disaster overnight—in moments. This while New Orleans police and rescue personnel were going AWOL in great numbers to rescue their own families, and mayor was holed up in the upper stories of a hotel.
Everybody hates Washington—until the floods come. Reminds one of Kipling’s poem dedicated to “Tommy” the soldier. Despise him, keep him away—“until the guns begin to shoot. Then it’s Tommy, savior of your country!” In this country, it’s why can’t Washington do the impossible—yesterday or even the day before.
Now it’s Obama’s turn. I watched on ABC News as Obama knelt down on a Louisiana beach and vowed to do something, to stay with you. And do what—send several million gallons of gushing oil into outer space?
Then the cameras switched to some civilians in diners and on the street. Did they believe him? The headshakes were eloquent. Of course they didn’t and, unless Obama is far less sane than I think he is, he didn’t believe himself.
What are you going to DO about millions of gallons of oil pouring out into water one mile straight down? Realistically? Kneel down and the beach, get some squishy, oily mud on your fingers and vow to hang in. No other real options.
Churchill made one of his heroic World War II speeches, knowing that the British Army basically didn’t have enough rifles for each soldier to have one. He had to kneel down on the beach and sound brave. “We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them in the hills” and so forth.
Then he put his hand over the mike and muttered, “We will hit them over the head with beer bottles as they crawl ashore. That’s all we have left to work with”.
He didn’t have to reach a mile down to the ocean bottom in order to do it. (Roosevelt found a couple of million World War I rifles and rushed them to England.) Obama’s got a tougher problem to deal with. No one’s got a beer bottle with a long enough neck for an undersea oil spill.
As I say, everybody should pause a moment to feel sorry for a president, Democrat or Republican. You come to Washington trailing clouds of campaign glory. You are going to reform education, reform health care, end war, put the economy back on track—and the war goes on; people too selfish to join a pool to pay for universal health care prove intractable, and the economic problems are absolutely terrifying in their complexity.
Maybe he made the right calls, maybe he didn’t—but the fact is they are still shooting in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the consequences to us of a European collapse are unthinkable. Nothing is truly cured. Our biggest curse—total dependence on Arab enemies for our fuel—seems unsolvable. So he tries to drill for more (just like Bush) … .
Pop goes the whole rig, pipe and oil deposit. A whole mile down. One more disaster to solve—with beer bottles; it’s all he’s got to work with.
Showing posts with label Gulf Oil Spill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gulf Oil Spill. Show all posts
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Friday, May 28, 2010
Is Washington Reading The RIGHT Books?
Well, it’s official. What we are blowing off in the Gulf is now the biggest oil spill in American history. We see it beginning to clog up the fisheries and wild life preserves along the Louisiana coast, it is threatening to take a ride on the Gulf Stream and wreck a few beaches on the Atlantic side. Nobody seems to have a handle on how to stop it.
Obama has just ordered a halt to all deep sea drilling—and without it our dependence on our Arab friends (in places terrorists come from) is increasingly total. It would be like finding, in the throes of World War II, that we were dependent on the Axis for our ammunition.
Oh, goodness gracious, would we work to find a substitute! (We got caught in such a bind during the Civil War when none-too-friendly England was in a position to cut off our munitions and threatened to do so. The South would have won instantly.)
You would think being at the mercy of a few mercurial Arab states would inspire us to start serious work at finding a substitute for petroleum. (No! I don’t necessarily think building more windmills or growing more corn is going to do it. Got a windmill that will propel your car?)
I mean finding a substitute for petroleum itself. Something that burns in an eight cylinder engine just as effectively as gasoline. After all, the Germans came up with a recipe for synthetic oil during the Second World War. They had very little fuel.
So they came up with something that would fly an airplane engine that burned 100 octane gas with great efficiency. Where is that recipe? As I’ve written before, it was brought to Washington after the war—but never translated. I don’t think anyone in Washington even remembers that such a thing exists. Or perhaps “existED is the more apt word.
It seems our schools aren’t the only place where no one reads. They don’t seem to do a whole lot of it at the Pentagon, the White House or Congress. I’ve written before how, during Vietnam, no one in charge seemed to have ever read the official evaluation of strategic bombing during WWII. (If they had, they never would have imagined they could lick North Vietnam with bombs.)
They bombed—more tons that we dropped on Europe or Japan throughout the big war. They accomplished nothing beyond killing a few people. Nobody read the report on what bombing could actually accomplish—and what it could not do.
No one in the State Department ever read DeGaulle’s “Memoirs” after they were translated. If they had, they never would have been surprised—shocked, I mean, SHOCKED—when De Gaulle threw us and NATO out of Paris in the 1960s.
I hear about each president that he busies himself reading about what past presidents wrote and thought about life. Interesting and sometimes useful. But how much time do you think either Bush or Obama spent poring over intelligence reports on the backgrounds of people running the training camps in Yemen or Pakistan?
Has anybody got any kind of a fix on the nuclear armed, saber rattling North Koreans? I’d be reading intensely on what it would take for us to stop them if they pulled another 1950 on us. That time they pinned us into a tiny little corner of southeastern Korea.
Who’s reading up on the Chinese military? What are its real capabilities. What kind of weapon systems are they building? Stuff aimed at Tibet and the western wastes—or stuff that could carry them all the way to Hawaii. In how many years?
What’s our backup plan if we ever lost our bases in Britain? What do we plan to do if Canada splits into warring factions? Does it spill over into Vermont and New York? Do we live without the St. Lawrence Seaway? Whom do we back? What’s the price of neutrality?
Again, what can we use as an alternative to petroleum that can actually run my Buick or my wife’s Dodge Caravan? Those are the matters we should be reading about—and trying to figure out.
It’s not just Johnny who doesn’t read.
Obama has just ordered a halt to all deep sea drilling—and without it our dependence on our Arab friends (in places terrorists come from) is increasingly total. It would be like finding, in the throes of World War II, that we were dependent on the Axis for our ammunition.
Oh, goodness gracious, would we work to find a substitute! (We got caught in such a bind during the Civil War when none-too-friendly England was in a position to cut off our munitions and threatened to do so. The South would have won instantly.)
You would think being at the mercy of a few mercurial Arab states would inspire us to start serious work at finding a substitute for petroleum. (No! I don’t necessarily think building more windmills or growing more corn is going to do it. Got a windmill that will propel your car?)
I mean finding a substitute for petroleum itself. Something that burns in an eight cylinder engine just as effectively as gasoline. After all, the Germans came up with a recipe for synthetic oil during the Second World War. They had very little fuel.
So they came up with something that would fly an airplane engine that burned 100 octane gas with great efficiency. Where is that recipe? As I’ve written before, it was brought to Washington after the war—but never translated. I don’t think anyone in Washington even remembers that such a thing exists. Or perhaps “existED is the more apt word.
It seems our schools aren’t the only place where no one reads. They don’t seem to do a whole lot of it at the Pentagon, the White House or Congress. I’ve written before how, during Vietnam, no one in charge seemed to have ever read the official evaluation of strategic bombing during WWII. (If they had, they never would have imagined they could lick North Vietnam with bombs.)
They bombed—more tons that we dropped on Europe or Japan throughout the big war. They accomplished nothing beyond killing a few people. Nobody read the report on what bombing could actually accomplish—and what it could not do.
No one in the State Department ever read DeGaulle’s “Memoirs” after they were translated. If they had, they never would have been surprised—shocked, I mean, SHOCKED—when De Gaulle threw us and NATO out of Paris in the 1960s.
I hear about each president that he busies himself reading about what past presidents wrote and thought about life. Interesting and sometimes useful. But how much time do you think either Bush or Obama spent poring over intelligence reports on the backgrounds of people running the training camps in Yemen or Pakistan?
Has anybody got any kind of a fix on the nuclear armed, saber rattling North Koreans? I’d be reading intensely on what it would take for us to stop them if they pulled another 1950 on us. That time they pinned us into a tiny little corner of southeastern Korea.
Who’s reading up on the Chinese military? What are its real capabilities. What kind of weapon systems are they building? Stuff aimed at Tibet and the western wastes—or stuff that could carry them all the way to Hawaii. In how many years?
What’s our backup plan if we ever lost our bases in Britain? What do we plan to do if Canada splits into warring factions? Does it spill over into Vermont and New York? Do we live without the St. Lawrence Seaway? Whom do we back? What’s the price of neutrality?
Again, what can we use as an alternative to petroleum that can actually run my Buick or my wife’s Dodge Caravan? Those are the matters we should be reading about—and trying to figure out.
It’s not just Johnny who doesn’t read.
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