Gulf psychology: My own private oil spill
Image via Wikipedia
Soon after Jimmy Carter took office in 1977, the press got whiff of a rumor that the 39th president was personally handing out court times for the White House tennis court. He soon got a reputation, earned or not, for being a micro-manager who failed to see the big picture. Dan Ackroyd of “Saturday Night Live” was merciless: He parodied the cardigan-wearing executive’s radio chats with the American people, in which he adroitly fielded questions on everything from knotty plumbing problems to bad acid trips.
Nobody wants their president to be a micro-manager. It’s not plausible that any leader of such a complex nation could have all the answers, with Xs and Os. On the other hand, in times of crisis people want a few Xs and Os—not ideals and morals and abstractions. Last night we learned from Obama that his energy chief has a Nobel Prize, and we heard some lofty rhetoric about the importance of alternative energy sources for the future. We heard about how irresponsible BP is, and how a new sheriff at MMS is going to make things right. What we didn’t hear is how a particular Navy submariner is going to dive down and stop the goop from spewing. That’s really all people care about right now.
New York Times columnist David Brooks picked up on this in his commentary after the speech. He compared Obama’s speech to wartime radio broadcasts of FDR, who urged citizens to get out their world maps as he walked them through concrete strategies he had planned for particular locations in the war effort. FDR was very capable of lofty rhetoric when that’s what he needed, but he also knew when to can the rhetoric and unfold the game plan.
Brooks is an intuitive cognitive psychologist. One of the most robust ideas to come out of psychology labs in recent years is what’s called “personal geography.” In broad paraphrase, this means that we see our world not literally but through the lens of our emotions, so that things at a distance are cool abstractions and vague generalities; things that are close have immediacy and power. That’s why a jet airplane crashing in our neighborhood is so much more upsetting than the same jet crashing on the other side of the country. Conversely, talking coolly and abstractly about an event makes it seem not urgent but theoretical and unthreatening.
Obama got elected in large part because of his brilliant rhetoric, his sweeping promises and broad vision. Nobody wants their candidate to talk realistically about the nitty-gritty and day-to-day details of actually enacting such a vision. Obama is no doubt right that we need to think about the Gulf oil spill through the perspective of our overall energy needs—but long-range perspective is not what Americans want from their president right now. This isn’t an energy problem to the shrimpers of Louisiana; it’s a survival problem. And Obama’s challenge is to make it a survival problem for all of us. Now is the time for war maps and concrete strategies and getting down in the muck—anything that makes this distant Gulf oil spill part of every citizen’s personal geography.
Post Your Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment
T/S Members
Log in with your True/Slant account.
Gulf psychology: My own private oil spill – Wray Herbert – Full ……
I found your entry interesting do I’ve added a Trackback to it on my weblog
…
Mr. Herbert,
You wrote: “Now is the time for war maps and concrete strategies and getting down in the muck—anything that makes this distant Gulf oil spill part of every citizen’s personal geography.”
I do not believe that the problem is that this issue is not on the personal geography of every American. I am quite sure everyone understands the importance of what is going on. The really big problem is that the maps and strategies needed to solve the problem do not exist. No oil rig that has been put in such deep waters before has ever fallen over. No oil well this big has ever flowed at these rates at these depths. No one knows what the hell they are doing. This includes BP, the Federal Government, and everyone else on the planet.
Imagine that we could end the leak by sending astronauts to Mars to bring back some magic rock that would seal the leak. Great. Now what? We have only the vaguest of outlines of how to get to Mars. Not only has no one ever gone there, no one has even tried to go there. No has gotten out of Earth’s orbit for almost 40 years, and then only half a dozen times.
The problem is not that people fail to grasp the significance of events, that they view the leak in an overly abstract or distant fasion, the problem is that there nothing that any can actually do to influence events – at least not now.
Personal geography has little to do with the realities of this event. BP does not want to plug the well. They want to contain it in conjunction with drilling “relief” wells to capture production from this reservoir. This well may eventually be sealed, but it will be to facilitate exploiting the Mississippi Canyon field. The Feds want the bad press to end, so are unwilling to admit the possibility of ongoing catastrophe. There has been a lot of talk about transparency, but it was merely obfuscation. Everyone wants this disaster “fixed”. That won’t happen. It will be mitigated and incorporated into our national psyche as just another American mega-disaster.
[...] Gulf psychology: My own private oil spill Filed in Uncategorized « Middleburg florida zip code Billy morrissette » [...]