(Perfection Is A) Moving Target

There was a time when Mother Nature was worshipped. There was a time when those supernatural and otherworldly forces that influenced our human ways of life were celebrated, venerated. In Greek culture, the earth was essentially deified as Gaia, or the Mother Titan, and considered to be as alive and even sentient as human beings. It has been some time, however, since we as a species have viewed Mother Nature as anything more than what Kevin de Luca has called a “storehouse of resources” for the advancement—and, alongside technology, the “perfection”—of humankind

There was also, in Greek culture, a god of the sun, Helios. Today, the annual summer solstice ignites celebration of the sun, from Stonehenge in Salisbury, England to the site of the grand Sphinx at Giza in Egypt to the Temple of the Sun at Machu Picchu in Peru and beyond. Today, many participated in such celebrations. The irony remains that, while many persist to worship the sun, many likewise profane it in the wake of increasing global warming. A further irony continues to rest in the wake of the BP oil spill, whereby Oceanus, the Greek world-ocean god, is daily being desecrated, devastated and defiled.

The tragic fact of the matter is that the oil spill is far too large, far too overwhelming and thus far too much a moving target to contain amidst whirling ocean currents and changing tides. As such, it is also far too great for many of us to even fathom, and this despite the multiple updates everyday about the millions of gallons gushing into Gulf waters. And yet the summer solstice and 62^nd day of the oil spill is a unique day on which to pause for reflection. I say this, not because previous days are inadequate for doing so, but because the summer solstice is so named because it occurs on the day on which the sun “stands still.” The Latin words sol (sun) and sistere (stand still) comprise the word “solstice,” indicating a time at which the sun pauses at the uppermost mark of its arc before continuing its declination.

So while the twice-a-year solstices are predictable and identifiable, the present oil spill and its potential solution are not. Yet, amidst the tragedy, the comedy that attempts to frame the spill continues to provide essential moments of pause, or “ways to get a little catharsis out of the maddening affair” as is written in this Huffington Post article. This video is but one of the myriad correctives that re-frame comically the disaster.

How we frame our view of the oil spill is certainly important. Indeed, as Kenneth Burke notes, a tragic frame of approaching this catastrophe would envisage it as an unfortunate sacrifice made in the pursuit of human perfection, a hurdle to overcome on the path to progress. A comic frame, however, enables us to make it fathomable and even tolerable until it can be changed. It recognizes while censuring human error, but always implicates humans in such events and their correction. The comic frame finds a way to laugh and live on; the tragic frame cannot stop crying and so joins Louisiana in the only path it sees left: prayer.

So it is that we should continue to put the pressure on BP to plug the leak and clean up the mess they have made. We should also keep Obama on the chopping block so long as this disaster continues. To be sure, we can look at the following political cartoon and laugh. But to look at this image through a comic frame in order to better understand why a disaster such as the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was allowed to happen, we may wish to consider our own, individual habits and actions—we may wish, in the interest of understanding the risks we are willing to take in order to preserve our ways of life, to move the target.

Photo Credits: Michael Ramirez