Maritime Morning – Andrew Krystal

Obama spoke to America last night … because America is not happy.

People are angry in America. They’re angry because they are tired of being lied to: lied to with a false predicate for the Iraq war and WMD (remember that one?), lied to over Afghanistan, and lied to over the value of their homes and the rationality of the economic system. Think of the U.S. economy as one, big Bernie Madoff: a bright, shining, lie.

Canadians are used to being lied to as well. Except when were lied to, wars don’t usually break out and people don’t lose their houses, but were working on it. We might catch up someday.

For now, maybe all those conspiracy theorists whose romantic notions of order and structure, those who see the world as rationally driven by unseen governments and sinister forces should think again: the world is a messy, uncontrolled, unwieldy and greedy place. Just look no further than the Gulf of Mexico to see the sludge of man’s endeavors, the detritus of man’s labors.

What is spilling in the Gulf is the blood of our industrial economy, the logical gravity of playing the odds: Sooner or later all that deep drilling is going to be a problem. It’s an odds game. It’s bound to happen somewhere, and likely will happen again.

Thomas Homer Dixon titled one of his books The Ingenuity Gap, a reference to the gap between our problems and the capacity of man’s ingenuity to deal with the problems, and that that gap is getting wider.

My grandfather use to say that you can tie a knot with your tongue that you can’t undo with your teeth. But these aren’t just the lies that we tell ourselves when we go to bed at night. Mother Nature doesn’t care about our mendacity and our BS.

Mother Nature has its own cure for a species that just doesn’t get it.

And Obama, America’s new Messiah, is left to stare into a very small hole in the Gulf of Mexico; a hole only a few feet wide. A hole he can only scratch his chin and watch like a child over a broken glass, watching a bathtub drain.

The hole in the Gulf is an abyss … an abyss — now only a warning — that stretches into the long, dark night of our limitations.

That’s the Morning Memo.