I’m beginning to warm to the idea of waterboarding, as long as the water is wild and oil-soaked and the subjects are BP executives and corrupt regulatory overseers.

I’m not even kidding.

Oyster loaf? But I hardly know her!

UPDATE: It’s unthinkable, isn’t it? I can’t believe I live in a moment in time where there will be no Gulf oysters in New Orleans. I’d envision there would be no New Orleans before I’d envision this.

I post so rarely, and this needed a response. This, this…every meal I’ve had in NO involved oysters, I have no other words.

I’ve never been to New Orleans, but it’s always been that place that any day now, I’m going to up and get there and eat all that good food and listen to all that good music and maybe get to be friends with a bunch of those good people and…and…and now it looks like the city I’ve dreamed about since I was a little girl is never ever going to be the same.

And the gulf coast with all it’s beauty and wildness and the folks whose family histories go so far back their DNA practically sprang from the marshes will never get to live the way their ancestors did.

When I hear those of you who know the region grieving for its loss, it burns me further that I didn’t get there before it was destroyed, and now will never know what you do about the place.

Did you hear today that people in Great Britain are pissed because we’re harshing on BP? Yeah, that’s what I read. What a clueless bunch.

I live in Houston.
Grew up on oysters from Matagorda and Lavaca Bays.
It has been ages since I have eaten raw oysters from here.
I prefer aot raw and the cold-water oysters just work for me.

C

I’m all for oil boarding BP execs. It’s like water boarding but without the water – just light sweet crude – until they fucking drown

And the gulf coast with all it’s beauty and wildness and the folks whose family histories go so far back their DNA practically sprang from the marshes will never get to live the way their ancestors did.

And thank God for that. There’s a reason they used to call it “sold down the river”.

I hate to see the oil spill but I’m not going all romantic about the people who live in the Deep South. I’ve lived around them too long. I know how they think.

Do you watch Treme? That scene in the last ep, where Goodman’s character is doing another YouTube video, and he says something like, “From here on out it’s all just an attempt to fake replicate what used to be.”

That is what you’re saying, amirite?

I grew up on cold water oysters, Wellfleet mostly, and am a huge fan. But it’s a different experience. Like, I said, oysters in New Orleans are an ingredient in a recipe, not the only kind I like to eat.

That said, fried Gulf oysters are way better than other ones.

Do you watch Treme? That scene in the last ep, where Goodman’s character is doing another YouTube video, and he says something like, “From here on out it’s all just an attempt to fake replicate what used to be.”

Yeah, but I don’t buy that either. I lived in Austin back in the early 90s. All the people there said I should have been there five years earlier, THAT was the Golden Age. And people said the same thing five years before that. I lived in Brooklyn when it transitioned from frontier to destination and you know that a lot of people thought it was ruined when it got a restaurant scene.

New Orleans is different post-Katrina, obviously, and Treme is a note-perfect take on that, but for all its seemingly eternal history, it too changes. Katrina changed it violently, but out of the destruction a different, new New Orleans was taking shape. Not just a replica, but something that has a character and feel of its own. Not better, but it’s still a work in progress. Just as it was when Storyville disappeared. And after Betsy. The people who keep the flame, like Goodman’s character in Treme idealize the past for good and noble reasons. But cities, by their very nature, seem to evolve and change. And I’m sure that 5 years from now, oysters or no oysters, people in New Orleans will be saying that you should have been there in the early part of 2010, when everyone seem to be working on the side of the angels and HBO stars were everywhere.

That makes a lot of sense, but if the marshes die (are murdered, I would say) what is left of New Orleans?

I hope you are right that something worthy will continue, that maybe there will still be splendid Indians in the darkness.

Other swell ideas for BP management and board members:

http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/articles/2004/9/10/52274.html

You will have Gulf oysters again someday – you’ll just have to wait a few years. Or decades, whatever – nature doesn’t work on human time. I say this not to give a pass and forgive what has happened… oh no, most certainly not.

Good Morning and Welcome, Jay B,

as one of the more TBogg-dependent kids, I am pleasantly relieved to find your 2 good posts. thank you, looking forward to reading

as to the subject at hand – I have been fortunate to have known and spent plenty of time with a longtime (think slaves and rum) New Orleans family – there is no way to properly, succinctly speak to this nightmare
so, here

From a “natural” sense, it’s far from a sure thing that oysters will return. The largest oyster bed in the world was once in New York harbor. Pollution and overharvesting killed it off. Not to mention, as the Lam article suggests, oyster farming is largely a family-run, generational business, if it takes decades for oysters to rebound — who will be left to build the market back up?

Sure it’s all possible. Maybe the damage is overstated (but I think it’s obvious that we should assume it’s for at least a generation) But the entire seafood industry in the Gulf will most likely collapse. The fish and shellfish that survive will have crippling levels of toxicity. Ironically, oysters would be one natural way of helping to remove toxins from the ocean, once the gusher is stopped and clean up starts — but that is all just in the unknown future.

Here’s a sobering thought. 200,000 gallons of oil spilled in Buzzard’s Bay Massachusetts back in 1969 according to this Boston Globe article — 200,000 gallons is probably about 15 minutes worth of what we’re seeing in the Gulf — and it is still affecting the marshes and wildlife in Falmouth.

The article states that it was a different kind of oil and that no two spills are the same, but it doesn’t take a wizard to add the exponentially more massive spill happening right now as being exponentially worse for a MUCH larger area.

Maybe one week after the Deepwater Horizon, my first thought was to compare it as worse than the Valdez disaster. One week later, my thought was Chernobyl.

I’m in no way knowledgeable about the science and technology issues involved here, but the little I’ve read that was purely solution-oriented (with no over- or undertones of politics, policy, whose fault, etc.) suggested that this is a disaster that is technologically unprecedented because of the ocean depth of the breached well.

I followed a link earlier to boston.com’s Big Picture gallery of oiled bird photos – http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/06/caught_in_the_oil.html if you want to go, warning, they’re heartbreaking and horrifying – and also took a look at the comments. A fair proportion of the commenters I read were voicing outraged theories of blame, ranging from fat-ass US consumers, to BP execs not really wanting the well capped or else they’d have used nukes by now.

But it seems more likely to me that we’re actually in a situation that we don’t know how to fix. Not that the well never will be capped – but at present no one knows how to do it. It’s trial-and-error improvisation and innovation time.

I’m not sure the Prez’s show of anger at BP does much to further the effort, though psychologically it’s as understandable as the Big Picture comments. But this is a situation where – right now – yelling at each other does no good. We have to call on our capacities for scientific and technical reasoning, coordination and cooperation. It’s the only approach that will work. Save the blame for later, when the well’s capped.

I say Bozo or perhaps Charley’s are my favorites if they are still there. I like Deanies in Bucktown also. I believe Landries has a place on the West-End.

But this is a situation where – right now – yelling at each other does no good. We have to call on our capacities for scientific and technical reasoning, coordination and cooperation. It’s the only approach that will work. Save the blame for later, when the well’s capped.

I disagree strongly. Both from a realistic and long-term point of view. Obama getting angry is simply understandable. However, there is literally no reason that we have to take BP at their word. We may have no choice than to trust they have to solve the problem, but this very much IS a moment for politics. If not now, when? At what point will we “point fingers”. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but the world-historical catastrophe called the Bush Administration has gotten a free pass from Obama because he didn’t want to point fingers, didn’t want to look back.

This is the way we ALWAYS choose to do it. Let the corporate/political perp off the hook, wait for the blue ribbon commission 10 years later to assess blame at which point it barely matters at all and nothing gets done and nothing happens.

Blame is vitally important here. It’s not the government’s fault (well, past the MMC and maybe their shortsighted energy policy). It’s the oil industry’s greed, their carelessness, their callous disregard for safety and regulations that is squarely at fault. I don’t understand why people are afraid of being angry and casting blame at targets that richly deserve it.

Call on people who can think through the problem and fix it. But don’t ever forget for one single second who is at fault. Things will never change if they aren’t held responsible.

Suddenly, that experience has transformed from a standing date when I’m in town, to a wistful, nostalgic memory of a time that will never return.

Boy, am I getting sick of that happening.

I feel for the fishermen and others who will lose their way of life. But I would ask each of them: “Who did you vote for in 2000 and 2004?” Cheney & Co. got rid of the requirement for an acoustic shutoff because it would cost the oil giants $500k per rig. Elections have consequences – in this case, 8 years of Bush/Cheney cost these people their livelihoods. True, Obama should have reinstated the regulation on Day 1, but remember who wiped it out in the first place. Vote GOP at your peril.

Yep. That has tempered my sympathy considerably (and yeah, I’m a mean-spirited old sociopath, but that’s how I feel about ti). This is precisely what these folks voted for. Now they have it. They should be glad the government policies they supported have yielded such monumental results.

The sad part is there is no Democratic party to take advantage of it and use it as a teachable moment. We have the button-down Corporatist party and the party-like-its-Somalia Corporatist party. These folks voted by and large to shut down the bomb disposal squad while a bomb waited in their neighborhood.

In my view, Jay, it’s a question of immediacy and timing. As I see it, the absolute primary necessity, which comes before everything else, is to get the well capped, concurrent with as much oil containment as possible. I think that any action that delays or interferes with capping the well is immediately, physically dangerous, very possibly in ways and on a scale we don’t yet understand.

Here’s my fear: that highly publicized threatening by prominent politicians has a tendency to cascade down to the technical people in the field. It’s the boss yells at man, man yells at wife, wife smacks kid, kid kicks cat progression. If, for instance, top BP managers in charge of solving this disaster feel sufficiently pressured by (say) the President, is there any chance of their trying to show that they’re on top of things by firing engineers at the well site? Or of letting it be known that such firing may be imminent? Do complex problems get solved most expeditiously by people who don’t know from day to day if they’ll still be on the job tomorrow? If it’s true that this is an unprecedented technical situation, the failure to date of the people on-site can’t be taken as a sign of incompetence.

You see what I’m afraid of: the effect of high-level accountability battles on the people who are actually trying to design a solution and make it work. I may be influenced in this fear by being the daughter of an engineer who was on the technical staff of the old Bell Laboratories back in its glory days; my dad always emphasized that the key to the innovative greatness of the Labs lay in the atmosphere of creative teamwork and institutional support. And the point is NOT to shield people from pressure – the things I’ve seen about, for instance, the technical breakthroughs made by the British during WW2 implicitly make the same point. They were fighting for survival and knew it; but the British government knew how to set up a situation that promoted that same necessary teamwork.

My opinion is not – God knows! – that no blame should be laid on BP, not to mention the rest of the petroleum industry and their enablers. Of course they have to be made to pay (though with the talk going around about a bankruptcy/merger strategy, who can say how much they’ll ever pay?) As for the political angle, I fervently hope that SOMEHOW this awful disaster can be turned into high-pressure leverage against our suicidal energy policies. It will have to come from the grass roots, that pressure. Too many of our reps are in the industry’s pocket.