A historic dump on American shores

"The unfolding disaster is not even prompting a reconsideration of the 75th annual Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival. “All systems are go,” said Lee Delaune, the festival’s director, sitting in his cluttered office in a historic house known as Cypress Manor. “We will honor the two industries as we always do,” Mr. Delaune said. “More so probably in grand style, because it’s our diamond jubilee. ' Louisiana is an oil state, though and through. A gushing leak off of its coast has not, apparently, changed that" — NYT

Watching this disaster unfold is providing me with one of those stranger-in-a-strange-land moments I get every now again (other reliables: gun control, Twinkies, WWF wrestling). Imagine the situation were reversed. If a company called American Petroleum were disgorging thousands of gallons of oil onto the coast of Normandy, the French would be hauling the Bastille back into fashion. If it reached the British coast, there would be uproar. Newspapers would spontaneously combust. Governments would fall. But such is America's obeisanse to oil companies that everyone is simply sitting back, gazing at the spill going: huh. Well ain't that something. Doesn't anyone care that a foreign company — British no less — has just taken a historic dump on America's beaches? A small boycott would be nice. What we get instead is Rand Paul saying Obama's (extremely mild) criticism of BP is "UnAmerican." Unfathomable. Hilarious even.