I just purchased stock in BP. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Brilliant, right? Surely, any company with talismanic foresight for business planning is a shoe-in for our investment dollars. Any company that can allow an oil deluge to go on for three months has got a plan. Big plans. The PR debacle is the smoke, and the response effort is the mirror. I can’t wait to see my investment skyrocket in an afternoon delight of new capital ventures.
Of course, the price to be paid is high. Lord knows, we all love our seafood and we’re pretty much lost in a pre-New Testament quandary about what kind of meat is okay to eat now that our bottom dwellers are incapacitated, most likely to their inedible delight. It’s difficult to pay twice as much for shrimp, but I know that I must do my part in the economic recovery of our nation. So I purchase my overpriced cocktails with red, white and blue gleaming in every consumption.
And what a shame it is for the fishermen. What a travesty! Livelihoods lost in the blink of an eye. But at least there’s some jobs with BP cleaning up the spill. God bless capitalism!
It reminds me of the symbiotic brilliance of the fast food and fitness industries. Let’s face it, without Burger King and McDonald’s we’d have little need for Slim Fast and Weight Watchers.
Or the relationship between the mental health and pharmaceutical industries. Without the thousands of psychoses that our brilliant psychologists are discovering through the potent and unbiased scientific method, we’d have no need for the myriad drugs that clog the prescription shelves at our local pharmacy. Go agoraphobia! I always thought grandpa was just ornery, turns out he was suffering from acute stress disorder with remnants of cyclothymic and delusional disorders coupled with trichotillomania. No wonder why I still have my hair! He pulled out all of his! It’s not genetic! Let’s hear it for the DSM IV!*
Life never had such deep meaning until long, Latin-derived names were attributed to our woes. And the true meaning didn’t arrive until drug companies devised a delicious concoction to replace self-improvement. God bless instant gratification!
So in reality, BP is just following in the footsteps of its brethren. This clean-up effort is causing them to really dig deep into their pockets. But what they’re truly looking for is something big. It’s a nasty chess game, and it seems they’ve just sacrificed their queen to give the king a shot at the final blow. I can’t wait to see it!
Maybe this is an effort to depress the stock value, so forward-thinking chums like myself can snatch it all up, away from all them Middle Eastern what-have-yous and European neocolonials. Or maybe, they’re trying to destroy the Obama administration by making it appear impotent. That way, a more oil-friendly republican can take office in 2012 on the heals of America’s distrust for idiotic liberal policy. Small price to pay for the bigger picture. A few billion here to ensure the democrats lose office. There are trillions of dollars to be made in the energy industry. I’m glad I’ve got my bit of heaven.
We the people tend to only see the now, and our thoughts on the future are only relevant to what we see happening now. We don’t see what’s really going on, so we can’t see what’s really going to happen. Luckily for all of us, I recently purchased a hand-made Indonesian crystal ball from Walmart for 13 cents, and it told me that BP is going to rake it in big. Got rake? I sure as hell do.
Pay no attention to the liberal media’s idea that more government policy is needed to ensure safe oil drilling. Or the right-wing media telling us that liberal policy is what forced BP to drill in such deep water to begin with. Listen only to your inner Warren Buffett. What would Buffett do? Drink a margarita and eat a cheeseburger in paradise? Only after he was sure that he owned the tequila, the beef company and the royal park. So let’s start buying up BP stock. After all, we wouldn’t want our children growing up without cheeseburgers, shrimp cocktail, combustion engines and bipolar disorder. Would we?
* Narrative bomb! This grandfather passage does not reflect the author's feelings regarding his parents' fathers. In fact, he's bald and so it goes in his family.
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I've admired your satiric wit since I first read your opinions from the college newspaper your wrote for at the College of Chareston, and also the human aspect of your stories from the Central Virginian. Your stories always stood out from the rest because of their probative value into the human spirit, something which always seemed to find a way into your articles.
ReplyDeleteI know your approach is both to inform and to find humor, albeit ironic and accusatory in nature, but my concern from this article is the implied belief that psychiatric disorders are not really viable behavior disorders, or that the medications to treat them are somehow part of a complex self-propagating capitalist loop that feeds its own development. I do agree that the use of esoteric Latin naming is a very queer way of giving some kind of 'expert' status to what is essentially a description of behavior/s, and leads to a sort of technical exclusivity that doctors share among themselves. We naturally tend to accept the validity of things so named, even though a name for something doesn't necessarily predicate that what is named is actually namable, or in fact real.
Above all, though, my reaction to this blog content is that I find the author is perhaps a little too cynical about the various political and scientific paradigms that have evolved over centuries. Perhaps association with an organization that promises to effect the evolution of such things would be well served? I'm thinking politically about the Tea Party, for example. Or the writing of a novel to explore, through interactive characterizations, the issues that appear to absorb the author's predilections?
All in all, a stimulating compilation of ideas knitted together with an ascerbic wit which DaveRoch is known for.
That is quite an analysis, Paul, and I appreciate your taking the time to delve into the philosophy of the piece. At the risk of breaking my own rule of never explaining what I write, I would have to say that this piece is not intended to be read as satire, but as a farce, as it hopes to reveal an absurd ridiculousness of reality. Cynicism is a construct of the absurdness of the reality in which modern society has created for itself. As long we continue to deify ourselves through the mythical "objectivism" ethos, blinded by our good intentions and veiled from the unintended consequences which are the true footprints of our deeds, until we can transcend our senses and our wants and needs, we will be slaves to them, and we will further perpetuate the absurd farce that we all accept in the name of civilization.
ReplyDeleteAs far as psychiatric disorders go, we all got a disorder. We're all messed up. Put a name on it, make a drug for it, create a nation of zombies if you like. We all have some chemical imbalance, some are more obvious than others. Some manifest themselves in ways we can see and feel with obvious intensity, and some lay dormant and affect the subconscious. We'll never be able to prove this unless we attach everyone to a permanent chemoanalysis machine to detect the fluctuations in the thousands of compounds that create life for us. Some disorders appear more real than others, but they are all real. it's what makes us human. our flaws are what we should celebrate, not hinder or obscure or hide behind or mitigate. If we were allowed to live as we really are, it would be chaos. We formalize our lives for societal acceptance. Chaos, however visually unappealing, is only the physical appearance of disorder, like a jungle, hiding the perfect balance of life which is subtle and beneath the harrowing mist of chaos. We fear chaos, because of its physical appearance. But chaos is the only way to be naturally human, as nature is physically chaotic.
Affiliation with any organization is moot. I'd rather join the circus and change my name to Fluffy and learn how to jump through fiery hoops. On the subject of a novel, if I could be a thorn in Ayn Rand's heel, it would make me giggle like a schoolgirl.