La vidéo qui nous hante

La vidéo qui nous hante

Hier 27 juin 2010, sur le site CNN.News, était mis en ligne un texte intéressant. L’auteur est Bob Greene, ancien journaliste du Chicago Tribune, qu’il quitta après qu’on ait fait grand bruit à propos d’une liaison à peine consommée (tous les détails sont disponibles) qu’il eut avec une jeune étudiante brillamment diplômée de 17 ans. Greene est devenu collaborateur épisodique de la chaîne CNN et surtout auteur de best-sellers qui ne renvoient pas à une littérature immortelle (Late Edition: A Love Story, Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War).

…Pourtant, son texte, centré autour de la vidéo sans fin qui montre au monde entier la fuite de pétrole au fond du Golfe du Mexique, mérite quelque attention. En voici quelques extraits, pour en apprécier l’humeur.

«It's beginning to feel like this has been with us forever.

»And harder for us to believe that one of these days, or months, or years, it will be gone.

»It's the live video feed from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. When BP engineers lowered those cameras in the first place, you can bet they never imagined that the resulting pictures would be watched by hundreds of millions of infuriated people around the world.

»They were for in-house use – to monitor the well, a well that was intended to be an uncontroversial source of enormous profit for the oil company. The cameras were like the security cameras that most corporations install around their office buildings. Just a little something so the bosses can keep their eye on things.

»Boy.

»No wonder the BP executives at first fought off requests that the television pictures from the Gulf floor be made available to the public. Think back to the early days of the spill. Experts were theorizing about how much oil was billowing, but BP had a little built-in breathing room. They were seeing how bad the leak was, but as long as the rest of the world wasn't, there was a chance to keep things relatively calm.

»Now?

»The ceaseless image of the oil spewing has become like an international night light – except without the comfort. It's always there. We can count on it, even though we'd prefer not to.

»It has become the logo of the disaster. It is a ghastly portrait in perpetual motion. Every time there is a dash of hope that the oil will stop gushing, something newly bad happens. In recent days, it was the temporary removal of the containment cap deep in the Gulf. The oil surged harder. And we, in our spare moments, watched.

»The television feed is like a heartbreaking mutation of those lava lamps from the 1960s and 1970s – those oddly shaped doodads with the colorful churn of liquid trapped inside, an undulating mixture hypnotic in its incessant and random kinetic swirl. The terrible difference, of course, is that the frantic churn from the oil pipe is not trapped. It is freely headed toward unwelcoming shores.

»We don't know what it sounds like. That's what is missing: a roar… […]

»The pictures that never pause have already, in their potent silence, begun to transform the way people think about drilling…»

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