June 4, 2010 New Orleans, Louisiana

I have to admit I brought some rage with me here to New Orleans. It’s been building up watching the news for the last 45 days now, as each night more oil gushes into the Gulf, and a parade of arrogant oil executives marches across the screen promising to clean up a mess that never had to happen, and never should have, here along the Gulf Coast. Working for a client down here, I headed down yesterday to Venice, one of several Ground Zero’s here from which the oil clean up is being staged. I came down earlier in the week with a range of fairly high level local government officials – I’d rather not say who I’m working for here so as not to cause any problems. We headed out to the staging area and found clean up workers, hired by BP, standing in lines to deal with a newly instituted system requiring two forms of picture ID and a BP issued badge to get into the site. Many were grumbling about the delays, and though our group got in, escorted by a Federal health official sent to meet us, my camera attracted immediate attention. Within seconds, a BP official approached and asked who we were with – politely, but firmly. Two more were to make the same approach over the next few minutes, and the first word of caution offered by our host was not to take any photos other than of the two trailers from which they were working themselves, administering health care to workers injured or sickened by the clean up. He didn’t want to see our camera confiscated, he said.

Until that minute I suppose, I hadn’t thought about what was really going on here, and who was really in charge. If you are looking for swarms of volunteers cleaning the beaches and marshes of oil, you won’t find the here in Louisiana. BP hires local fishermen to do the work. That’s as it should be – they are most affected by the disaster here. But what it means is that BP is still deciding who does what, when, where, and with what. They are in charge, and the federal government, along with the state and local law enforcement, works for them. If you needed another example of how Big Oil runs America, the oil spill here will provide it.

In teh afternoon I met up with two photographers who had chartered a small boat. They were heading out into the marsh to get pictures they said, and after some quick negotiation a travel companion and I got on for the ride. The caption – I’ll call him Don - fished for 27 years in these waters as a shrimper, and now as a charter boat captain taking small fishing parties out for speckled trout in the Gulf. He was taking a risk by taking us out, he said. If the police find us, they’ll run us off. It’s still unclear to me why, and under whose authority. We were’t disrupting any clean up – there wasn’t any that I saw. We weren’t destroying the boom left to float along the edges of the saw grass marsh, two-toned from the oil that had already come ashore and found its way in among the stalks.

With the photographers off in the grass, wading through oily water to get their shots, I spoke for awhile with Don. He told me how he used to shrimp but the regulations got too complicated, so after a few years trying unsuccessfully to make some onshore businesses thrive, he turned back to the fishing that he loves. May and June are his busy months, he said, so the oil could not have come onshore at a worse time. All but two of his clients booked for May cancelled. BP pays him $5,000 a month now just to make up for the lost revenue, about a third of what he would have made fishing last month. Still, I thought to myself, pretty good pay. I took out my notebook and asked Don to describe the impact of the oil, fully expecting at least some of the rage I’d brought down with me. But I was surprised by what I heard.

Don’s real worry is not the oil, but the fact that Obama is halting offsea drilling for 6 months. How can you penalize one airline, Don asked by way of example, because a plane belonging to someone else crashed? People here depend on that money, and on that work. Not just the workers themselves but the small mom and pop shops that sell the supplies and the meals and the materials that the men on those rigs need. Aren’t you worried about the marsh, I asked? Won’t this oil kill everything? The oil will eventually clean itself out, he said, and added that BP will bring people in to clean every stalk, literally, with rags “until it shines.” He says he’s seen them do it before.

I have to say it wasn’t what I was expecting. Here’s a man who lost his livelihood to oil, but who was hesitant to blast the company whose oil it was. He’s bothered by it – don’t get me wrong – and offered my favorite quote of the day, delivered with that slow southern drawl that no non-native Orleanean can do justice. “They can put a Tonka toy on the moon and play with it for a year, but they can’t fix this.” But there was no rage.

Apparently it is here, according to others I’ve spoken with. They say if this doesn’t get fixed soon, something will blow. But still – I expected…more. More anger. More frustration. More indignation at the destruction, gallon by gallon, of the Gulf Coast and the way of life of Plaquemines Parish, for one. But somehow the lack of outrage was more disquieting. We outside of Louisiana scream for the blood of BP. They’ll never get away with this, we say. But they will. Because as we’re screaming, we’re driving – guzzling that oil that we in America are all addicted to. And that’s why the oil execs on TV look so smug: they know it. The government knows it, and the fishermen here on the Gulf Coast know it too, even as their livelihood disappears in sludge. BP’s money will buy them a free pass – the money that passes from our hands, past our screaming mouths, and into their pockets.

Maybe, I thought, if Don’s not that bothered by it, I shouldn’t be either. Maybe none of us who don’t live here really understand this. Or maybe a company that made $6 billion in profits for the first quarter of this year can make their own reality, and get away with it, as long as we all keep filling up at the pumps.