PLEASE: I DID NOT write this. I'm simply showing it here as a quote:

There is, you have to admit, a sort of savage grace, a tragic and terrible
beauty, to the BP oil spill.

Like any good apocalyptic vision of self-wrought hell, the greatest
environmental disaster in U.S. history has its inherent poetry. You see
that creeping ooze of black, that ungodly wall of unstoppable darkness as
it slowly, inexorably invades the relatively healthy, pristine waters
adjacent, and you can't help but appreciate the brutal majesty, the
fantastic, reeking horror of this new manifestation of black death we have
brought upon ourselves, as it spreads like a fast cancer into the liquid
womb of Mother Nature herself.

Really, it's not just the incredible photographs of the spill that are, in
turns, heartbreaking, stunning, otherworldly and downright Satanic in
their abject revulsion. It's not just the statistics that tell us how many
millions of gallons might ultimately be spilled, or the stunned scientists
who can only hypothesize how this unprecedented catastrophe might affect
the fragile food chain and distress the ocean's ecosystems at the very
root level.

It's not even the endless, heartrending tales of livelihoods lost,
industries destroyed, coastlines ravaged or wildlife killed. The fact is,
any one of these aspects alone is enough to poison your soul for as long
as you wish to wallow in that murky state of fatalism and doom. It is
nothing but bleak.

I think the most disturbingly satisfying thrill of this entire event --
and it is, in a way, a perverse thrill -- comes from understanding, at a
very core level, our shared responsibility, our co-creation of the foul
demon currently unleashed.

What a thing we have created. What an extraordinary horror our rapacious
need for cheap, endless energy hath unleashed; it's a monster of a scale
and proportion we can barely even fathom.

Because if you're honest, no matter where you stand, no matter your
politics, religion, income or mode of transport, you see this beast of
creeping death and you understand: That is us. The spill may be many
things, but more than anything else it is a giant, horrifying mirror.

Do you wish to try and deflect it? Lay responsibility elsewhere? Really?
We can't quite blame an "act of God," as we would for some sort of
hurricane or tsunami inflicted upon meager humankind by an angry deity,
punishing us all for being too war-like, violent or perhaps naïve
enough to want to enjoy the sunshine for five goddamn minutes before He
decided He'd better kill some people lest we forget who's in charge.

We cannot blame evil terrorists, some cluster of swarthy foreigners who
hate our shopping malls and secretly envy our Porsche Cayenne's. Nor can
we blame the spill on some sort of nefarious conspiracy, a secret act
wrought by devious agents in black helicopters designed to destabilize the
U.N. and induce universal mind control -- unless, of course, you're
getting a little desperate and don't get outside much, in which case, you
absolutely can.

Finally (and a bit shockingly), I'm not hearing Pat Robertson or any of
his cretinous cult of apocalypticans blame the gays, or voodoo, or anal
sex, or reality TV for what's happening in the Gulf. Oil is, after all,
completely non-denominational. It mocks all religions equally -- except,
of course, the only one that really matters: capitalism.

This is how you know this is one of the more universally damning disasters
of our time: No one really seems to know how to process it, much less
react. The GOP is backtracking like terrified hyenas from Sarah "Queen of
Duh" Palin's "drill baby, drill" mantra/ass tattoo, as suddenly the
incessant Republican wail for more oil exploration, more drilling, more
tax cuts for oil conglomerates don't just reek of the usual inbred
cronyism; they reek of death and destruction the likes of which the
country has never seen.

On the other hand, hardcore lefties are going mad with desire that the
disaster will lead to the immediate imprisonment of every BP employee
worldwide, as if BP is somehow any different than any other oil titan
raping the planet right now (hi, Alberta's oilsands). Hardcore lefties
would also appreciate it if Obama would use the disaster as a surefire
excuse to instantly change the entire course of energy history by
immediately shutting down all 48,000 oil wells in the Gulf and hand every
American a bicycle and a solar panel. See? All better.

Sure. As if oil wasn't woven like oxygen into every single aspect of
American life, as if fully 30 percent of domestic transportation fuel
didn't come from the gulf, as if shutting down a fraction of those wells
wouldn't re-devastate the economy, as if petroleum and coal weren't
powering the very energy plants that deliver the electricity that charges
the iPhones that allows everyone to Tweet their angry complaints through
all the various energy-sucking server farms the size of a small country.

Truly, BP is behaving no better or worse than any other corporate spawn of
Satan would in a similar situation. What's more, if you don't think every
oil company on earth is right now kneeling before Beelzebub in gratitude
that it wasn't one of their own wells that exploded, you haven't been
paying attention.

That said, after all is said and done, it's gloomily nice to think our
darkest disaster in a generation could somehow ultimately improve our
attitudes, change our behavior, lighten our violent treatment of the
planet. As someone recently noted, the BP spill isn't Obama's Katrina,
it's actually Big Oil's Chernobyl. Meaning: a disaster so appalling and
devastating it might very well alter the industry and change the course of
our energy policy forever.