A nasty infectious little meme has invaded coverage of the oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico: The “blame game”. The “blame game” meme characterizes any attempt to discover what caused the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and to hold accountable those people and organizations, as a petty “game” that should be avoided.
A Washington Post headline announced, Republicans reject ‘blame game’ on oil spill. The Telegraph featured an article called BP’s blame-game tightrope. The Street published an article entitled, Oil Spill and the Blame Game. Town Hall published an article with the title The Oil Spill Blame Game. Salon ran with the headline The Gulf oil spill blame game. The Moderate Voice published Blame game ramping up over Gulf oil spill. A Forbes article was titled The BP Oil Spill Blame Game. Discovery News chose to title an article Did God Cause the Oil Spill? The Psychology of the Blame Game.
A quick blog search reveals 8,450 recent articles containing the phrases “oil spill” and “blame game”.
The meme also popped up yesterday in separate speeches on the oil spill by two members of Congress. These members were from the same state, but from different political parties. Though they didn’t use the actual phrase “blame game”, the substance of the blame game meme was there: The idea that finding fault with anybody related to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is somehow a bad thing.
“I can tell you that we need to focus all our resources, there is plenty of blame to go around, in stopping this now, not another 30 days.” – Vern Buchanan, Florida Republican
“The time now is not for us to get involved in blaming someone.” – Alcee Hastings, Florida Democrat
The day before, Republican Senator George LeMieux, also of Florida, promoted the very same idea, that the time is not yet right for holding any party responsible for the oil spill: “The reason I come to the floor today is to make this point. There are those who are casting blame on British Petroleum. There are those who are casting blame on the government. There will be time for that.”
Earlier, I referred to this idea as an “infectious meme”. If it’s infectious, it’s important to consider the method of infection. Is the meme infectious because it happens to fit into politicians’ shared psychological tendencies for dealing with a crisis, or because methods of infecting politicians with the meme are being purposefully planned by people and organizations who find the No Blame Game to be convenient for them at this time?
Whichever is the case, the underlying premise of the blame game meme falls short. It claims that we need to make a choice between holding responsible parties accountable and dealing with the oil spill itself. In actuality, our government is plenty big enough to deal with both sorts of responsibilities at the same time. It does so all the time. Law enforcement officers don’t delay trying to find out who was responsible for a crime until the crime’s consequences are all sorted out. In the same way, the Executive Branch of our federal government can work to contain and mitigate the negative impacts of offshore drilling at the same time that Congress conducts oversight, investigations and passes legislation to prevent similar disasters in the future… unless the politicians who control these two branches of government are more interested in protecting generous political donors from the oil industry.
And the next step will be, as i said in a post a day or so ago, the U.S. taxpayer will be paying for the cost of the clean-up.