June 12, 2010

Leadership Spill

Some evidences of the oil spill are finally beginning to arrive on the shores of Gulf Coast states, and politicians at all levels are beginning to toss about incendiary words about how outraged they are by the current situation.

When did we as a people start to care more about our leaders showing outrage than about doing something constructive? Our leaders have plenty of outrage and sound bites, but sensible and decisive actions are in short supply. I suppose that when our nation decided that caring about issues was more important than being principled about them, we implicitly decided that actually doing something about issues mattered far less than our emotional response to issues. It's more important to care about things nowadays than to actually do anything. Add to that our age's exacerbation of the natural human dislike of criticism, and we've created the perfect excuses for doing nothing. We care about the issue, so it doesn't matter that we are doing nothing constructive about it. We care about the issue so much that we'll do misleading or pointless studies, just to make sure that we do nothing wrong. To be doubly sure, we'll do extra studies in order to be sure that we also don't give the appearance of doing something wrong. Then we'll do a third set of studies in order to go out of our way to appease people who will be loudly and vocally offended (people can be that way about anything nowadays, and they'll be listened to.) Finally, someone inevitably, despite all these precautions, will be very, very offended indeed, and we'll have to grant said offended person some concessions the offended person has on the top of their political agenda.

Meanwhile, as such pressures keep our major governmental institutions paralyzed, the resposiblity to actually do something, "incapable of being abolished," (like the Declaration of Independence says about legislative powers,) has returned to the people and their local governments. Thankfully, these two groups are doing things. They may turn out to be the wrong things - or, more likely, it may turn out that in the real world, actions actually taken are less appealing than actions studied on paper. I do not want to go so far as to say that it is better to do things even if they deteriorate a situation, for that is clearly absurd. However, it is equally clear that doing nothing when something ought to be done is also wrong. The actions of these local officials may have unintended consequences, and these efforts may be mismanaged or ill-conceived, in whole or in part. They might, however, be well-thought out, or at least the best response we can generate to an unprecedented situation. For the courage to at least take action, despite the risks of criticism and the risks of unintended consequences and the risks of the actions proving ineffective, we should salute the people and local leaders of Gulf Coast states. They're proving better leaders than those in Washington.

But, you may say, at least our leaders in Washington are committed to haranguing BP, and are devoted to extorting it of cash for as long as public opinion holds against it. Is not such demagoguery, blackmail, and diverting attention from the leaders' refusal to take decisive action, the mark of true national leadership nowadays?

But, you may further say, shouldn't BP be held accountable, and shouldn't we be angry at it for taking so long to solve its own problem? This is a problem no one has ever had before, and if we wish to solve it at all, we cannot skip past the trial and error, and yes, studies. We sometimes repeat the story of Edison's hundreds of light bulb filament materials without quite realizing that it was possible he might've had to go through millions, or in fact that he might've needed to try a completely different design or approach to the problem, or that it might've been insoluble with current technology. Screaming at executives or grumbling when work has to be stopped and restarted will not get the problem solved. Our national leaders would do better to start ordering naval resources to aid in cleaning or containing the most threatening spills rather than alternately demand solutions and compensations.

Finally, I find I am disturbed by the coverage of the event. We hear a great deal in the press about the greed of large coprorations, and BP is being held up as public enemy number one at this time. Yet when the press mentions researchers carping about the levels of cooperation they're getting from BP, or hear the demands of researchers for hundreds of millions of dollars from BP, the researchers are assumed by the press to be impartial observers. Didn't postmodernism debunk this already? Haven't we already established that scientists are just as capable as everyone else of being biased and greedy? Why does no one decry the greed and opportunism of these ambulance-chasing scientists? Why do our newspapers not look on these requests with skepticism, and throw in suspicous verbiage, and challenge their every statement? Perhaps it is because, as in the global warming debate, the scientists are producing data that supports the press' story of titanic disaster caused by greedy companies. I wonder if in a decade or so we'll have a leak of emails showing that scientists hid how good the situation truly is?

Perhaps I am being too hard on the scientists, though. They are, after all, only following where our national government has lead us. If it's okay for the national government to kick BP while it's down, why shouldn't everyone else? All the scientists want is their fair share of the pie. Nowadays, if meteors were to fall from the sky, there'd be a large corporation that would somehow be responsible for whatever real and imaginary damages occurred, and it'd be forced to pay exorbitant compensation and fund ludicrously large grants so researchers could study the meteor impacts, and the entire industry would have to submit to increased regulations that would ensure that the sky would never fall again.