Suspension Failure

Most people are familiar with the concept of suspension of disbelief in film, television and drama – which is to say, we all know that we’re not really looking through a magic archway into someone’s living room when a sitcom comes on, for example. And while not everyone cares enough about these media to know what a suspension failure (it’s sometimes called a “rupture”) is, just about all of us have felt one. It’s that moment when something about the work, either in the plot, the dialog, the setting, the performance, or some other factor is so wrong that it breaks through our ability to suspend our disbelief; it takes us out of thinking in terms of the story (“Wow, this guy is a jerk!”) and into thinking in terms of a work of art we are watching (“Wow, the author didn’t explain anything about why this guy would suddenly start acting like such a jerk. And the actor clearly isn’t familiar with the source material!”). Most often these occur when something so outrageous that even the internal logic of the setting cannot account for it appears on the screen; something so preposterous that you just can’t suspend your disbelief enough to stay with the story…

Consider for a moment if I started telling you the story of a major multinational oil company that was drilling for petroleum deposits in the Gulf of Mexico, and just to make them look like a collection of clowns I told you that they had complied a 600-page manual of procedures to follow in the event of a deep-water well blow-out, but only 1 page of it actually had anything to do with stopping the massive spillage of crude oil into the ocean. You probably wouldn’t believe me, but you might go along with it. Now suppose I added that the one page about stopping the horrible effects of the oil spewing out of the broken well just said “hire somebody who knows how to stop it.” You’d assume that I was not only making this up, but exaggerating for humorous effect. But if I told you that the whole 600-page travesty had not only been read by the relevant Federal authorities, but had been approved, you tell me this was nonsense and admonish me to stop making up such wild tales…

Unfortunately, if today’s testimony from the ongoing trialconcerning the BP disaster in 2010 is correct, I’m not making any of this up. The various oil companies drilling in the oceans off our coastlines have been fighting tooth and nail for fifty years to avoid any regulation, let alone safety and environmental protection regulations, that would impact their profits in the slightest – and they’ve spent huge sums of money electing representatives to Congress who would prevent such laws from being enacted, or at least make those measures impossible to enforce. At the same time, they have denounced anyone who would support such laws as anti-business, anti-American, environmental extremists, or any other epithet they could imagine. And they have succeeded so well that these standards a small child would call laughable weren’t even illegal – and nothing was done to prevent the inevitable disaster…

So let me be very clear about this: I’m not anti-business; I’m anti-idiot. I don’t blame the oil companies from taking advantage of laughable excuses for environmental protection laws in order to maximize prices; that’s their job. And I don’t really blame them for lobbying to get those laws onto the books; if such activities are legal and permissible then the companies haven’t done anything wrong there either. But if we want to have a country that is governed for the benefit of us, the people, and not by and for the oil industry for its own enrichment, then we need to start demanding accountability from the people in Washington who are supposed to be passing such laws and regulating such operations but apparently don’t because the current system works for them almost as well as it works for the oil companies themselves…

And if we don’t, I can almost guarantee you that this won’t be the last news story to come out of that industry that will defy your wildest imaginations…