The latest on the never-ending Gulf disaster is that some 12,000 to 19,000 barrels of oil a day (not the 1000 barrels a day BP first reported) are spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and the subsequent failure of the blowout preventer. All efforts to plug the underwater well up to now have failed.
It doesn’t really matter who’s at fault or who’s in charge—whether it’s BP or the Obama administration—except in terms of money (who will pay what and how much) and politics (whether or not this catastrophe will stick like oil to Obama the way Katrina stuck to Bush). Despite everyone everywhere screaming “Fix it!” no one knows (as in possesses practical knowledge) how to fix it. Already the largest environmental disaster in American history, the gushing oil threatens to continue gushing another two months—right up until August, when a relief well that’s in the works is finally completed. Supposedly, that will do the trick. By that time large parts of the Gulf will be purple-black, and it’s anyone’s guess as to the nature and extent of the plume deep beneath the surface of the sea.
In “Our Fix-It Faith and the Oil Spill” in today’s New York Times, Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, says, “Americans have a lot of faith that over the long run technology will solve everything, a sense that somehow we’re going to find a way to fix it.” It seems fairly self-evident that most of us place great faith in technology. But whether or not our faith in technology is the same thing as a faith that we can fix most things is questionable. We like and know how to invent things—new and improved versions of everything from shampoo to laptops seem to pop up all the time. But where’s the evidence that we like and know how to fix things?
Before the computer age, we were actually a nation that liked fixing things—a nation, one might even say, composed of handy men and women. Most of the women fixed things by sewing and darning. Men, however, often spent hours tinkering away in basements and garages, spending their spare time fiddling around with old vacuum cleaners, broken lamps, toasters, and television sets, or trying to fix a toy train that wouldn’t stop derailing. They’d casually fix the noisy potty by deftly cleaning out the fill valve. Or they’d climb up on the roof to adjust the antenna until the reception finally stopped crackling. Fix-it types frequently started out working with their fathers, in construction or plumbing or electrical work. A lot of them started out as scrawny high-school kids who’d get hold of, say, a clunker Chevy with a leaky carburetor which they then would patiently take apart, carefully laying out the pieces on an old blanket on the garage floor. Afterwards, they’d slowly rebuild the thing into a purring piece of pride and joy.
Nowadays, handy men—and handymen—are an increasingly rare breed. When a toaster or a vacuum cleaner dies, forget it. Who knows a handyman? Without a second thought, we ship our broken stuff off to the dump. As for cars, mechanics are as likely as not to run a computer analysis to figure out what’s wrong, and then order a new (computer) part accordingly. The husbands and teenage boys who used to tinker? They’ve taken to hanging out on the computer. The only remaining people with real, practical, tinkering knowledge—electricians, plumbers, carpenters, construction workers, and yes, oil riggers—are a separate “class.” Yet they’re often the ones who really know the most about how something works, but are listened to the least. The power is “upstairs,” with the people on the computers.
While we may still shout, “Fix it!” when things go wrong, what we really mean is, “Make the problem go away.” We show little evidence in our society that we value practical knowlege—the hunch-filled, hands-on, tinkering approach necessary to fix things. Too bad for us we can’t just walk away from the leaking Gulf well, or better yet, toss it onto a landfill.
