THE REAL DISH ON THE GULF SPILL

       The spill in the Gulf reminds me of my roommate the summer after I graduated from college.  He put on a show of being enlightened but in the end fell into the usual macho postures.  One of them was insisting on cooking dinner — mainly because that way, everyone else in the house would have to do the dishes.
    See, doing the dishes was demeaning, womanly.  Cooking was manly for all the reasons that our most famous chefs tend to be men — you dominate people by making them eat what you've created.  And you really dominate them by making them clean up after you.  Sure enough, if someone else wanted to cook, this guy would magically disappear, or somehow get out of doing the dishes.  I never forgot it.
    And that's kind of what the spill in the Gulf is like.  It's real manly to go in and, uh, erect a rig and, uh, drill.  But even thinking about cleaning up after a spill?   That's woman's work.  It's passive, subservient.  You're not making something, you're just cleaning up after someone else's mess.  There's no glory in that.  Like so much of woman's work, it's thankless.  But, as we now know so well, it's got to be done.
      Another example of this dynamic is the invasion of Iraq.  Again, boys with their toys: they love to go in and blow up stuff with their missiles and planes and tanks, but put in zero thought about what to do in the aftermath — the doing-the-dishes part.  The woman's work.  Sure enough, it's a disaster, and just as surely, there is no glory in cleaning up after it.  It's just a shitty job that someone responsible has got to do.
    We've got to learn to do the dishes.  Otherwise, the mess is going to kill us.

Comments

[Andrew McMillen]

Great metaphor, Michael. I hadn't thought of it like that.

[Michael Azerrad]

Or, going further back, it's like little kids knocking down piles of blocks. It's much more fun to do that than to put the blocks back in their box. It's hard to believe that grown adults would revert to such infantile behavior, but apparently people lose all sense of responsibility when so much power and greed are involved.