Posted on by Pat Coakley

Beyond Knowing

President Obama has returned to the Gulf today.  His famously “calm” nature is reported to be roiling beneath the surface.  If BP has readied 55 million dollars worth of TV advertising to try and salvage their corporate name before this well is capped, I believe even Ghandi himself might consider violence.

Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist in charge of “The Manhattan Project” during World War II  was quoted after the war and the use of his project’s mission: the creation of the atomic bomb, that he and the scientists who had worked with him on the project “in some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish–the physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” (PBS-American Experience)

Far be it from me to establish “sin” boundaries, but if pressed for a contemporary study guide?

Watch the 24/7 live web cam of the ocean floor in the Gulf spewing its own mushroom cloud of oil.

As my blogger friend and artist, Don Diddams said in a comment on another of my posts about this subject: “It is as if the very center of the earth is bleeding.”

©Pat Coakley 2010

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9 Replies to “Beyond Knowing”

  1. This is a stunning image, Pat, beautiful and full of electricity, yet somehow apocalyptic. The Oppenheimer quote is fitting. Regardless of our inability to define the “boundaries” of sin, the sense of sin in what has happened is palpable — and insecapable.

    1. I saw HD video footage for the first time yesterday of this spill. HD footage after 50 days? Honestly, I am speechless.

  2. Wow! What a dramatic and moving photo. And I can’t even comment on the oil gushing out of the center of the earth. The whole thing makes me sick.

    1. Carol. This photo illustration began on a lovely day with my grand niece in Boston at the Aquarium in Boston with no thoughts of oil spills in my viewfinder.

  3. This photo represents the Aquarium of Doom. Dante’s Seaferno.
    I’m sickened, horrified and some days feeling we will never learn.

  4. Great image and I think that it reflects (no pun intended) the topic of the oil leak well.

    I watched with some despair, not only the live feeds of the leak but also the various nincompoop talking heads on the TV crapping on about how Obama was displaying enough anger or that he was dressed to well when he was at the shore looking at the damage.

    So then what do I see the next day?

    Obama on the TV saying that he’d fire the BP C.E.O if he worked for him. Poor old Obama. He’s not allowed by an idiotic group of nitwits to even be calm and collected. So instead, he has to mouth some silly things that some oxygen bandit PR person has told him will please the lowest common deminator of the electorate.

    I think those TV types should keep all the brainless yelling and shouting to those totally unrealistic shows that they foist on us.

    Arrrrggggh!

    A pox on them!

  5. ooops! I made a typo. I meant to say, ” various nincompoop talking heads on the TV crapping on about how Obama WASN’T displaying enough anger”

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