Many New York City buses currently carry advertisements on their sides for a new television series called Treme (“Tre-may”), named for an inner-city district of New Orleans.
The tag line – Won't bow, don't know how – is a defiant reference to that city and the unique spirit that followed the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
In 2008, driving from Florida to New Orleans, I saw first-hand the havoc the hurricane caused.
From Biloxi, past Gulfport, all the way into New Orleans, condemned houses stood alongside empty blocks and vacated supermarket lots.
Katrina hit hard. Three years after, recovery seemed in no hurry.
Then, on April 20 this year, an oil-drilling rig off the Louisiana coast blew up and sank. Eleven people were killed and about 160,000 litres of oil a day are now being pumped, unchallenged, into the sea.
The estimated financial cost of the spill has been estimated at $14 billion, a small chunk of the estimated $163 billion profit British Petroleum, the company that owns the errant oil well, made from 2001 to 2009.
There is, too, the human and environmental cost (beyond the 11 workers killed on the rig).
Louisiana's coast is on the brink of another disaster.
Won't bow, don't know how?
More like, won't have no say in it.
The local fishing industry, a significant contributor to kitchen tables in homes and restaurants across the country, may be crippled.
Lives will be upended including Thuong Nguyen, a Louisiana shrimp fisherman, for maybe the third time.
“I feel like I'm — fail,” Nguyen told The New York Times.
Of course, the blame game is already in play: It's BP's fault; It's George W. Bus's fault and that of his his oil-wet administration and connections; it's Obama's fault; it's our fault for needing oil.
The back-story does go deep, however. Thuong Nguyen's potential fate was probably not on the radar of the Minerals Management Service, an arm of the Interior Department that oversees drilling.
Based in Denver, MMS was under a spotlight two years ago, entangled in an ethics scandal that included allegations of financial self-dealing, accepting gifts from energy companies, cocaine use and sexual misconduct.
According to a New York Times report, “eight officials accepted gifts from energy companies whose value exceeded limits set by ethics rules — including golf, ski and paintball outings; meals and drinks; and tickets to a Toby Keith concert, a Houston Texans football game and a Colorado Rockies baseball game.
The investigation also concluded that several of the officials 'frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.'”
Two years after that story broke, as oil creeps up the Mississippi Delta, that's not something government officials will like to be reminded of.
Like the Wall Street crash in 2008 that pre-empted the Global Financial Crisis, it seems some government regulators have been taking a big time out.
As oil baron Daniel Plainview said in the film, There Will Be Blood: “I drink your milkshake.”
Indeed, they drank it up.
