Macondo

As y'all know, I've been reading One Hundred Years of Solitude for this week's class, and I have to say, this book is so well written and intriguing that it does not disappoint.  Even if you haven't read Garcia Marquez, most literary nerds like myself know Macondo as the fictional setting of this epic novel much in the same way that folks who may not have read Faulkner still know about yoknapatawpha county.

One thing that I found out in class today that I had no idea of beforehand is that the oil well associated with the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that exploded and unleashed at least 4.9 MILLION barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico last summer is named the Macondo well.  Without giving away the amazing ending to Garcia Marquez's novel, I will say that it is an ill-fated name that begs devastation, and I just have to wonder who decided on this name.  Was it some well-read engineer being cheeky?  It turns out that my guess is pretty close.  A BP employee won the right to name the well as a result of winning a United Way fundraiser.

This brief news segment highlights a major issue about naming and points to the power that people who get to name things are able to exercise.  References to a white rock star are problematic for the community from where the name Crazy Horse originated because it is a spiritual name.  In our world today it doesn't feel so much as though words have lost their meaning, but that we have lost respect for words when there is such an unforeseeable clash of culture between a pop culture reference attached to an oil well and an entire Indian community.  Words do mean something, and when we act like everything is ironic and/or lacking in meaning, it not only exerts a neocolonial lack of awareness, it also sets us on a slippery slope toward bankrupting meaning from all areas of our lives.  

I'm intrigued at the intersection of the spiritual and the coincidental in the Macondo scenario.  Regardless, it is strange and has got me thinking.  In fact, it highlighted for me that I have no idea what has been going on with the clean up and quest for justice amidst the long-term destruction even though this happened only 20 miles from my hometown and is seriously affecting my home community.  I learned today that the trial started at the beginning of this month and now, I'm opening my last Abita in the fridge and reading up here if you'd like to join me: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/02/201222672657745221.html