The New Dead Sea, this Fourth of July ... by gimleteye

In the New Dead Sea, no one is punished and lying is mandatory behavior. I would much rather read the story of oil executives and lobbyists being dragged behind skimmer ships in harnesses through the oil slicks gathered in the Gulf of Mexico than "gee, here is a glimmer of hope" in a 1000 foot tanker that will not make a dent in the Gulf yet makes headlines because there is no good news to report. No one notes the calamity of a ship converted to an oil skimmer because it is more profitable to clean water than transport what contaminated it.

That dissonance is multiplying within the national psyche, and the pollsters know it. Americans are battered by three years of recession and nine years of war. You only have to drag your heel through the sand to find on a layer underneath the tar streaks of persistent malaise. In Florida, chatter about a double-dip recession controversy is drowned out by a steady drip. There is a growing sense and an accurate one, that nothing we do is going to make a difference to Gulf coast tourism economies and coastal communities fortified by commercial fisheries. One oil well blowout, five thousand feet under the surface of the Gulf, and it is all gone. This news will take a years to unfold, because even though it is logical that few tourists and no fish will populate places gone toxic, many people will just have to see it with their own eyes.

This lack of resolve and absence of wisdom is a national disease our forefathers would not have recognized. They were readers and thinkers who didn't have a 24/7 news cycle slathering themselves like oil. Today's lawyers and jurists, by contrast, are like alchemists in a tizzy, preoccupied with mixing formulas based on arcane ingredients and potions and arguing their efficacy relative to precedent and the laws of the land, as though they could recreate the taste and visionaries of 18th century Virginia. Then, too, the complexities of a post-industrial, global economy are fundamentally different influences than those propelling from the Declaration of Independence to the US Constitution. We are hard-wired to get through to the next day, free, never mind threats in the future. Beyond the New Dead Sea, we cannot agree on a direction for the economy or the environment to be more than the work product of a 15th century cartographer from Spain. It should make you wonder, this Fourth of July.