Spill Here, Spill Now, Flack Always 0
Alex Beam in the Boston Globe pens a note to Buccaneer Petroleum. A nugget:
The next best thing to caring is advertising that you care.
Thank heavens no one remembers that you were once the British Persian Oil Company, a colonial oligopoly probably more responsible for the ongoing bloodbath in Central Asia than any other business or government in history. But why dwell on the negative, especially now?
Your critics temporarily hold the upper hand — the “little people,’’ the media sermonizers, the pusillanimous politicians who were hectoring you for handouts just a few months ago. This, too, shall pass. Like Americans everywhere, they need their overpowered cars, their grandiose, climate-controlled McMansions, and their scalding hot showers every day. A year from now, they’ll be begging you to drill more, deeper, farther from shore.
Windmills? How charming. Good for grinding flour, less useful for powering the most wasteful economy in the history of mankind.
Gallows humor keeps us from tears.