The Wizards of Ozymandias

On April 20, 2010, a major oil spill occurred at a British Petroleum facility in the Gulf of Mexico, causing severe damage along the coastlines. On June 16, 2010, the company’s chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg, responded to the problems caused to people along the Gulf Coast by publicly declaring “we care about the small people.”1

Corporate-state systems have long employed the mantra “do it for the children” to propagandize on behalf of public acceptance of increased politicization of their lives. The chairman of BP may have expanded on this idea in asserting that “we care about the small people” in their corporate policies. When I first saw this report, I thought that the chairman might have just seen The Wizard of Oz, and was commenting on the Munchkins!

While a BP official tried to pass off the remark as only “a slip in translation,” the “slip” may have been more Freudian than purely linguistic. Perhaps his comment reflected—at an unconscious level—the innate division that separates institutional from human purposes. That distinction was not lost on some Gulf area residents, one of whom stated “BP does not care about us . . . . We are the nickel-and-dime folks of this world.” Another commented “We are not small people. We’re human beings. They’re no greater than us. We don’t bow down to them. We don’t pray to them.”2

By their very nature, institutions have always regarded those subject to their will as “small people,” as “children” whose interests are to be looked after by more dominant systems. Members of the aristocracy used to toss “nickels-and-dimes” to the common folk, as their carriages rolled through the streets. The means of transportation have greatly changed, but the same hierarchical mindset remains.

3Daily Finance, June 15, 2010.

4www.msnbc.com/id/37739658/ns/disaster_in_the_gulf/t/bp-boss-sorry-about-small-people-remark/

• 1T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men, 1925.
• 2Bretigne Shaffer, “Mere Anarchy Loosed Upon the World,” in Why Peace, Marc Guttman, ed. (Marc Guttman: East Lyme, Conn., 2012), pp. 118–26, at 124.
• 3When I first decided to chronicle the collapse of Western Civilization, I assumed I would have a sufficient amount of time to observe and comment upon the transformations taking place. I shared T.S. Eliot’s sentiment that: “This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.” Surely a vibrant culture that took centuries to develop would have to experience a prolonged demise. I could not imagine that its downfall would be as precipitous as it has proven to be. Because of the complexities involved, it is difficult to identify a specific date or period when the descent began. Suffice it to say that the process was well underway by the time Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize!
• 4If there is one period in Western history that I think reflects what we have become, it would be the French Revolution. What could be a more fitting symbol for that period of collective madness, destruction, and inhumanity than the guillotine, ever busy searching for new victims? Whatever visions of mankind in society have been offered by the numerous creators of Western Civilization are being lost as the culture, itself, disappears into history’s “black hole.” My oldest daughter, Bretigne, may have most succinctly encapsulated the changes occurring during her lifetime when she wrote: “I don’t know who the people around me are anymore.”