Behold our dark, magnificent horror, By Mark Morford

[madokie]

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. ...


(Full URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/06/04/notes060410.DTL&nl=fix)

[JCMach1]

1. Giving the spill otherworldly qualities takes away from the fact that this is a completely

man made problem...

I find no beauty in stupidity and greed... Plus I think it is much easier to write this from your appt. in SF.

[ima_sinnic]

2. you need to read the rest of the article (nt)

[JCMach1]

3. I did...

still struck the wrong tone with me (not in terms of content)...

[madokie]

4. Kick

[ithinkmyliverhurts]

5. This article is pornographic . . .

a somewhat secular version of pornographic theological Calvinsism which sees a terrible, tragic beauty in God's creation of death and destruction (and dialogically derived salvation).

Horrible article.

Why can't we just say tragic? Why can't we just say ugly? To attach some sort of coherent, cathartic pleasure out of this is disturbing.

Poor rhetoric.