Earlier today, I mentioned an essay by Hank Steuver, television critic for The Washington Post, about the so-called "Spillcam."
As he points out in his piece, it is hard to avoid watching the footage of the ongoing oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. It's everywhere.
I see it on CNN, billowing in miniature. It's available online. (NPR's Jean Cochran has been streaming it on one of her compute monitors since I arrived here this morning.) When the video seemed to go dark on NPR.org for a few minutes, editors and producers sent a flurry of concerned email messages to NPR's web staff.
What is so compelling about the footage? It is at once engrossing and horrifying and, well, pretty boring.
"Beneath the digital identification numbers imposed on the screen (with coordinates, the day's date, and a clock ticking away), it is always gray rock, yellow pipes, nasty plume," Steuver writes.
As we wait for something to happen -- for the plume to stop, for the "top kill" to start, the video becomes more fascinating. We wait.
Having watched the Spillcam for several hours now, I think it is remarkable how easy it is to lose sight of what it depicts. Thousands of gallons of oil are escaping, polluting a precious, important ecosystem, and we are transfixed by the spill's steady shape.
When we come to, realizing what is happening, and indeed what has happened, there is dread and depression and outrage.
Columnist Maureen Dowd, who calls it "the plume of doom -- a symbol of national impotence," says "we are trapped in a science-fiction nightmare we can't wake up from, possibly because of a dead battery in the control pod connected to a dead man's switch for the blowout preventer, whatever that means."
For the time being, at least, that nightmare continues in real time. You can watch the Spillcam here, at NPR.org.
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