BP, mon amour
Why do millions of gallons of spilled oil have to spoil your reputation?
There are two sides to every story,
If ever a company has been unfairly maligned, it is you, with your sunny designer logo and your focus-grouped nickname, “Beyond Petroleum.’’ One might think your core business isn’t wresting black sludge from the bowels of the earth, but rather hanging out laundry on sunny days. There you are in the Gulf of Mexico, innocently trying to pull British thermal units (why are they called British thermal units, by the way?) from the briny deep to help us to cool our houses and warm our homes, and what thanks do you get? None!
Accidents happen; I understand that. While it is true that the parade of foreign-born geologists you initially trotted out to pooh-pooh the notion of an environmental catastrophe failed to capture the public’s imagination, you’re back on the good foot now. I love your TV spots and your full-page newspaper ads, starring your very sincere-looking claims adjusters and cleanup aides vowing to “make it right.’’
Good move, my friends. 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.
Do these clowns know how hard it is to find oil? Sure, “Texas tea’’ bubbled out of the ground for Jed Clampett, but that was 50 years ago. Do they have any idea how many dictators
You have to hand it to the Americans. When they blow people up and despoil someone’s land forever, it’s very sad and all but hardly the end of the world. The Yanks massacred 3,000 people outright at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, then “compensated’’ half a million affected citizens, for an average of $550 apiece. Two years ago, a spokesman for
Here’s the good news. You’re not on the front page half as often as you used to be. You’re still spewing 25,000 barrels a day into US waters, but the country has moved on to other concerns — e.g., the precooked Elena Kagan hearings and the pressing question of whether to install 3-D TV sets in one’s home. Call it spill fatigue. Deprived of a shiny new “angle’’ — the fish are dead, the pelicans gone, the coastline destroyed — what else can the media report?
You’ve convinced the press that you will have successfully drilled your relief well by August, and that’s only 30 million more gallons of spilled oil away. By July Fourth, the men and women who manage America’s newsrooms will have repaired to their unspoiled beaches in the Hamptons or on Martha’s Vineyard. The tribulations of the oystermen on Florida’s Redneck Riviera will be the furthest thing from their minds.
Someday we will look back on these days and smile. Mel Brooks discovered the lighter side of Adolf Hitler less than 25 years after the end of World War II. Soon, we too will guffaw at the suggestion that anyone ever ate shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico, or paddled a kayak through the marshes — what marshes? — of the Mississippi River Delta. Times change, and we change with them.
Godspeed, my friends. And thank you for drilling.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 
