Timothy Egan: How Failure Became an Option
[Timothy Egan, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, takes on the politics of the American West.]
Needing a break from the omnipresent BP oil cam, I went back and watched the spirit-resuscitating “Apollo 13.”
Oh, to revel in the days when we could fix anything with duct tape and American self-confidence! Sad to say, it looks like a time capsule.
This is the film about the crippled lunar flight of 1970 that gave us two of the most iconic lines of our culture: “Houston, we have a problem” and “failure is not an option.” Turns out, the first line is a slight variation of the actual spoken words, and the second sentence was not part of the historical transcript. But it is part of our self-image....
Watching BP’s hapless attempts to contain the nation’s worst oil spill — from blind reliance on a faulty blowout preventer to deployment of a useless 280,000-pound container dome to the bizarre top kill of golf balls and mud — I wondered what happened to American ingenuity. Yes, I know, they’re Brits. But it’s our spill, in our waters, from a well that was cemented by Halliburton, the Texas company that Dick Cheney ran before Big Oil moved into the White House....
...[C]onsider the consequence of a huge oil leak. If the crew of Apollo 13 had failed, they would have lost their lives. BP had only to look at Exxon. After the worst oil spill in American history, Exxon spent nearly two decades trying to game a legal system that should have brought them to within an inch of their corporate life.
In the end, Exxon prevailed. The Supreme Court of John Roberts, a compliant pet of the corporate world, ruled for Big Oil. The original jury award of $5 billion ended up being around $500 million — a few days’ earnings. Exxon flourished beyond its dreams, reporting in 2008 the largest annual profit for an American company in history....
What’s needed is the return of a basic law of nature, the one used by those Apollo heroes to get home: gravity.
Read entire article at NYT
Needing a break from the omnipresent BP oil cam, I went back and watched the spirit-resuscitating “Apollo 13.”
Oh, to revel in the days when we could fix anything with duct tape and American self-confidence! Sad to say, it looks like a time capsule.
This is the film about the crippled lunar flight of 1970 that gave us two of the most iconic lines of our culture: “Houston, we have a problem” and “failure is not an option.” Turns out, the first line is a slight variation of the actual spoken words, and the second sentence was not part of the historical transcript. But it is part of our self-image....
Watching BP’s hapless attempts to contain the nation’s worst oil spill — from blind reliance on a faulty blowout preventer to deployment of a useless 280,000-pound container dome to the bizarre top kill of golf balls and mud — I wondered what happened to American ingenuity. Yes, I know, they’re Brits. But it’s our spill, in our waters, from a well that was cemented by Halliburton, the Texas company that Dick Cheney ran before Big Oil moved into the White House....
...[C]onsider the consequence of a huge oil leak. If the crew of Apollo 13 had failed, they would have lost their lives. BP had only to look at Exxon. After the worst oil spill in American history, Exxon spent nearly two decades trying to game a legal system that should have brought them to within an inch of their corporate life.
In the end, Exxon prevailed. The Supreme Court of John Roberts, a compliant pet of the corporate world, ruled for Big Oil. The original jury award of $5 billion ended up being around $500 million — a few days’ earnings. Exxon flourished beyond its dreams, reporting in 2008 the largest annual profit for an American company in history....
What’s needed is the return of a basic law of nature, the one used by those Apollo heroes to get home: gravity.