Like everyone else in the world, I’ve been following the gulf oil spill story with interest. The whole business is unfortunate and generally terrible; it’s effect will likely be immeasurable; it’s already pretty much trashed the entire gulf coast regional economy, and it’ll take decades for the environment to recover, assuming it ever does completely. Honestly, the scale of the whole thing is too big to really wrap one’s head around.

Being emotional beings, many of us are looking for someone to blame for it; an “ass to kick”, as it were. However, getting that kind of simple resolution for something of this magnitude isn’t likely…this isn’t a spilled carton of milk; you can’t just blame it on the kid at the other end of lunch table and have the cafeteria lady give him a cloth to wipe it up. It’s just too big; there are too many people and entities with a hand in causing things, and a whole lot of people trying to work to fix it, and probably a whole lot more working to avoid the responsibility of doing so.

Given our limitations as imperfect humans and institutions, it’s safe to say that the way the world community is going about trying to fix the leak, contain the damage, and prevent futher occurences down the road could be more efficient and more effective. Howver, at the same time, I’d offer that given the immensity of the enterprise, and considering the limitations those in a position to do something are saddled with, the effort we’re getting is pretty much what we’re capable of (and will get better), and eventually hit on a multi-level, all-encompassing plan that will, over time, get things pointed back in the right direction. People, on a macro scale, to tend to rise to the occasion in the face of crisis, and I expect us to eventually do that here, once we get over ourselves a bit.

Having covered my general take on the issue, I really want to talk about a trend I’ve started noticing in the last week or so that’s really starting to make me uncomfortable: I’m encountering lots of chatter from all quarters in America laying the blame for this thing at the feet of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – the nation from whence the United States originally spawned, and it’s people.

Many Americans, it seems, are running with this crisis and making the leap toward blaming this crisis, which primarily affects the United States, on another sovreign nation. I’ve seen it in conversation, in stuff floating around on the internet in both uninformed and snarky forums, on television, and in national and international newspapers.

This leap, however, is the wrong leap to take.

I guess the confusion comes from the fact that the leaking well is operated by BP, a huge, nation-spanning multinational corporation with historic ties to the UK. Even if “BP” did stand for British Petroleum (it hasn’t in years – it’s either a meaningless acronym, or stands for the equally meaningless “Beyond Petroleum”), over the last 50 years, BP has gotten so large that it transcends national borders – it has an HQ in the UK, but it also has an equally large one in Texas and interests spanning the planet. According to the wikipedia entry*, BP is the fourth largest company in the world and probably has a larger annual cashflow than several members of the European Union. As such, despite keeping some of it’s offices in London, in reality, it doesn’t answer to national governments at all – it operates on another plane entirely**.

BP is NOT Britain, or even particularly British; it hasn’t been for a long time, though the confusion is understandable. Major media, people in general, and even President Obama have added to the confusion by referring to BP as “British Petroleum”, leading to the assumption that BP is an arm of the British government, or at least blessed by such. From there, it’s a simple matter of turning this whole situation into a transatlantic slap-fight between to historical allies based on a misunderstanding, and uninformed Americans boycotting British products and assaulting pre-teen girls on the street because they were wearing Miley Cyrus “designed” Union Jack t-shirts they bought at the local Wal-Mart.

I’d rather it not go there…the US and the UK have a long history of cooperation and cultural exchange, and despite those couple of wars in the late 18th early 19th centuries, we’ve all gotten on pretty well, and have historically supported each other; even through our various blunders, we’ve always had each other’s backs. Heck, we’re cooperating on a new series of Torchwood now; I don’t want to see that derailed.

Really, don’t go there. My kid owns that shirt I linked to above.

So, to summarize…I understand the need to get angry at somebody about the major disaster in the gulf. If you feel the need to blame somebody, aim it at the large multinational corporation who dropped the ball, not the really cool country it used to be named after that brings us things like Newcastle Brown, Top Gear, Harry Potter, and Doctor Who.***

This crisis, like almost everything else in the modern world, really isn’t about “nations” anyway. In the cases of ideology and commerce, political borders are pretty fluid; you’d think most of us would have figured that out by now.

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* – recognizing that the information on a publicly-editable article relating to a potentially controversial current event is quite likely to have issues with credibility

** – That big multinationals work this is way is part of why BP has been able to so successfully shirk much of its responsibility for cleaning up its mess (and being able to operate in such a way as to ignore regulations of various national governments, leading to substandard equipment and saftey practices which led to the disaster in the first place), but that’s another problem for another discussion.

*** – Feel free, however, to blame England, in a good-natured, friendly sort of way, for reality TV and blood pudding. Ew.