I saw the commercial once today already. Just that one instance on every for-profit network in America must have cost a pretty Billion.
I didn’t time it, perhaps if I looked it up on youtube or BBC? But there’s not much point. It was much longer than your usual commercial. A thirty second slot at the Super Bowl costs $3 million on to be broadcast one time on one network. Granted that’s in an exceptional circumstance. Typically, more people tune in to the Super Dooper Incredible Bowl to watch grown men hit each other and throw a ball around, than the number who would watch an inauguration or a state funeral of any president or ex-president.
“News Stories” are considered to be in-depth if they last a whole minute. So the jackass CEO of BP is promoting through a pictorial essay a wondrous scene where BP is sponsoring all these sharply dressed volunteers in pristine clothing (Yeah, right! you go traipsing through any corner of a bayou for ten minutes and see how clean and photogenic your clothes and face are going to be) setting booms, giving birds a bath, and I would swear to the Lord God who made us all that some of those pictures of grateful animals being rescued were recycled from other oil spills.
And not putting in images of those far more numerous animals that can’t be saved. Telling us to Be Patient, Be Positive, Be Polite, Be Proud, Better Pray, (ahem)
And no mention of the idea that BP is fighting not to minimize the ecological damage, but to keep their damned oil well going. Not to plug it, but to fix it so they can go merrily along syphoning oil from extremely dangerous places, syphoning money from everywhere, and those places that won’t let them name their own extremely small fees for pumping the oil out from under the third world sands of the Local Political Entity, pumping the “Defense” departments of every NATO country especially ours for Corporate Welfare in the form of Murder, Threats of Murder, and Endless Occupations, using the blood and money of the “disposable people”, those of us they only pander to in commercials like the current one, then relegating us to anonymity and irrelevance once they get their nasty Capitalo-Fascist way AGAIN.
I might be wrong, but God-Damn if I’d apologize for overstretching, I’m pretty sure this commercial is being locally tailored for other nations as well. The closest the Capitalo-Fascists at BP and the boardrooms of all their fellow travellers in the Oil and Coal and Defense and other shadow-government Corporations have ever gotten to giving a shit about the opinions of the people they’re robbing. And Killing.
They’re not just killing the animals and plants in the Gulf and everywhere else they’ll have an Oopsie! Moment.
The realization is growing that the oceans they’re casually discarding for their profit and nobody else’s, are an irreplaceable part of our food supply. As hough our species actually owned the food chain. Then there’s the breathable air and the rapidly already changing climate. The climate that brings us water for our other food supplies and air for us to breathe. Gone or Going Fast.
They’re paying buffoons to deny their role in Global Warming even as they’re making often hostile and warlike claims to the new oilfields they’ll gain by the melting of the polar ice cap.
We’ve fucked up the ecosystem so badly that we’ll get a bonus chance to do it again
And to get to that point, they’ve gone beyond a normal desire for self preservation, to embracing Self Destruction. It would be impossible for people with their resources, including engineers and other scientists, to NOT realize that they, too, will be taken out when they destroy the Earth. It wouldn’t Be Possible for them to actually believe the bullshit they’ve paid the low-life Liars at Fox News to propagate for them.
It could be a turning point, maybe. Exxon Valdez could have been a turning point. The stock market crashes each could have been a turning point. The non-existence of WMDs in the Oil Corporation Warz for Profitz could have been a turning point.
