A BALLET AT SEA

On days like this, I am so grateful to still be in possession of my conscience.

I received an email from a friend counseling me, "Do NOT boycott BP," because, as his logic went, "this is minus-IQ thinking. If they go under, who will pay for ten years of clean up? Right, us, the tax payer."

His solution? "I say find a BP station and fill up. After they repair my beach then go ahead and Boycott them."

This startling recommendation followed a discovery I made about a month ago that BP had hired PR flaks—er, "bloggers" to report on the progress of the cleanup effort. One of the writers, Paula Kolmar, who is obviously a fan of science fiction and fantasy, wrote the following about the clean up efforts as if she were describing the epic travails of Odysseus:

"Watching the captains weave the long black boom as seamlessly as a professional ballet troupe performs an intricate dance," Kolmar writes, was "a ballet at sea as mesmerising as any performance in a concert hall, and worthy of an audience in its own right."

In this oddly American life: one person advises to give BP — the 4th largest corporation in the world more money; while another Hemingway-to-be says the fight to contain oil gushing into the Gulf is 'a ballet at sea."

How the latter author can sleep at night mystifies me, but then, Hemingway or not, she is probably far wealthier than I.

And all she had to do to earn that cash was to check her conscience at the door.