Poor Poor Pitiful BP
-with apologies to Warren Zevon
Well, we blew open the bottom of the seas
Plowing her depths for our ill-gotten grease
Now our caps won’t work and because of that wretched AC
Everyone on earth can witness our catastrophe
Poor poor pitiful BP
Poor poor pitiful BP
Oh, Anderson Cooper won’t let us be
Lord have mercy on BP
Woe woe is BP
Exploded our rig, eleven men perished
That wretched Anderson Cooper
Won’t let go of our blooper
Keeps showing the world the families they cherished
Poor poor pitiful BP
Poor poor pitiful BP
Oh, Anderson Cooper won’t let us be
Lord have mercy on BP
Woe woe is BP
Well, we got summoned to the Head of State in Washington
Told us plain what needed to be done
Well, he really worked us over good
Just like he said he would
Thought we’d bought all them politicians
Turned them into grateful patricians
President turned out to be unbought
Made us and our pet Texan Republican absolutely distraught
Poor poor pitiful BP
Poor poor pitiful BP
Oh, Barack Obama, have mercy on BP
After all we share an initial B
Well, we’ve slaughtered all the beings in the sea
Befouled their sands, ruined their feed
We’ve shattered the lives of all the families who fish
Maybe they can learn to bake knish
We’ve crippled their legacy, devastated it all
What the hell
Those Gulf people are just, you know, small
Poor poor pitiful BP
Poor poor pitiful BP
Oh, Anderson Cooper won’t let us be
Woe woe is BP
Barack Obama took away all our dividends
Said we have to make actual amends
Pilloried our Chairman, scourged him hard
Hoisted our Lord Tony on his petard
Poor poor poor BP
Poor poor pitiful BP
Barack Obama slandered us as our sacral industry’s villain
Suspended all our peers’ offshore drilling
Anderson Cooper won’t let us lie, steal, and cheat
Televises those small Gulf people, lets them bleat
Poor poor poor BP
Oh, Barack Obama won’t have mercy on BP
Poor poor pitiful BP
Oh, Anderson Cooper won’t let us be
What’s wrong with those small folk in Alabama?
What’s the problem with those small folk in Louisiana?
Why can’t our Chairman Tony sail his yacht in his Isle of Wight regatta?
What on earth is the matter?
Why won’t Barack Obama quit his impolitic chatter?
Why can’t we stop Anderson Cooper’s indecorous blather?
What is all this American hysteria?
We’ve been doing it for decades to Nigeria
Poor poor poor BP
Poor poor pitiful BP
Verily, are we not the lords of the sea?
Why, oh why won’t they trust us to correct this inconvenience?
We’ll burn the surface fuels, and below we’ll discharge untested chemical dispersants
Why, oh why won’t they trust us?
We solemnly pledge we won’t harm even one wee wittle walrus
Poor poor pitiful BP
Poor poor pitiful BP
Oh, Barack Obama and Anderson Cooper won’t let us be
Lord have mercy on BP
Woe woe is BP
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It feels righteous and fulfilling to calumniate one multinational company and its bungling leaders for the disaster that has been visited on the Gulf of Mexico. The truth is, though, we all committed this catastrophe. We wanted oil, we wanted it cheap, we didn’t care who produced and supplied it, we wanted the jobs its collection, manufacture, and distribution seem to produce, and we waste more of it by far than any concept of necessity can suggest we actually need.
We all did this. We did it individually, we did it together, and we did it knowingly. We conceived this cataclysm, we spawned it, and we’ve learned nothing from it. We’ve changed not one aspect of our attitudes nor one facet of our behaviors, and it’s unlikely we ever shall.
We want cheap oil. We don’t care, not truly, what this or any other of our unnecessary wants are doing to the only Earth, to all the other life forms with whom we share our bountiful world, or to The Divine who blesses, gifts, and repeatedly forgives us despite our terrible flaws, faults, and failures.
We can lampoon BP but it’s we who forged this devastation; and the reckoning upon ourselves, all other living beings, the sea beds, estuaries, marshlands, deep ocean, livelihoods fair and foul, and the only known habitable planet will be beyond measure.
In time, Earth will cleanse the calamity we’ve wrought. She’ll do this in her own course of order, in her own scheme of time. Eons.
She won’t dump into her seas industrial dispersants that someone thinks might be, could be, should be functional. No, if we force her to, and we are forcing her to, she surely will do what she’s done with numberless other unadaptable species left behind. She’ll take wing, make us sting, discontinue our kind.
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What the hell. Let’s fuel up. Rev them engines. Fuel, baby, fuel.