And While We're At It, Let's Think About Saving The Passenger Pigeon

Just one thought on the marine holocaust unfolding in the Gulf, for all those conventional wisdom parrots squawking about how we need to balance our fear of ecological disaster with the need to end our dependence on foreign oil: we had almost 40 years to get over that dependence. The President you love to laugh at had real plans in place to do it. Even as Saudi Arabia handed us our hat in 1973, even as we lined up for gasoline for hours, even as we watched the price go from 28 cents a gallon to the triple digits, we laughed at Carter's message that we needed to cut back on our demands. The sweater he donned to encourage turning down the thermostat became a symbol of political naivete and fodder for SNL. His agenda freaked Detroit and the oil companies, and didn't sound like fun at all to America. For a minute we had to think about buying fuel-efficient cars, but then, thank God, along came America's Id, and it was Morning Again, and all that boring conservation shit was happily jettisoned in the wake of a new government that made us feel good about greed and conspicuous consumption. And we never looked back.

Now, after the Detroit debacle driven by a short-sighted management plan based on forgetting the volatility of fuel, and years of a foreign policy based on pissing off and destabilizing the very places that provide that fuel, we get a disaster like this and suddenly weaning ourselves off the stuff becomes an issue. 40 years, bitches! You had 40 years, and now you want to think about it?

We are so fucking doomed.