A Coal Day in Hell

God works in Mysterious Ways

Right as they are on the brink of selling “Clean Coal Technology” to the American Public, Kingston Tennessee gets buried in 300 million tonnes of coal sludge. Its now in the watershed.

Have a nice fucking day, morons. Nothing like cadmium in your water cocktail with a nice fat lead stick to swizzle it and a sprinkle of mercury bits on the brown foam topping.

For the sake of a job, you have been poisoning yourselves, your children and grandchildren for a hundred years. How long will the denizens of Tennessee, West Virginia and Kentucky put up with Coal Mining not only for its irresponsible lack of environmental control, when will they figure out its just a bad overall idea, plain and simple?

Whether or not you believe in God, this is one of those moments where you have to think “Instant Karma” and think it a grand scale wake the fuck up call.

“Clean” coal is like saying “Dry” rain.

Proof of both is now soaking the Earth.

Of course, the “Wake the Fuck Up” disasters rarely do anything to awaken the ADD people programmed to buy whatever adjective is painted on whatever pig.

“Clean Coal” “Safe Nuclear Power” “Environmental Oil Pipelines” “Collateral Damage” War on Terror” “Light Cigarettes”



Sounds terrific, count me IN!!!!

Any Euphemism’ll Do Ya!

There STILL is no remotely feasible solution to what to do with nuclear waste. No matter where or how you store the stuff, it never goes away and always leaks out. Nature abhors a vacuum. When you stuff something toxic up one of her cracks, she is sure to spew it back on you, when and where you least expect it.

Still, no matter how many Fermis or Chernobyls happen, we are ready to go back to embracing the toxic tit to get off the oil bottle. That’s like a drunk swapping gin for morphine. Add coal to that equation and you get brown smack.

This is no different, this sludge spill.

Every time I hear someone speak the words “clean coal” I have to think to myself, “Well, thank you, the whole world just dropped an IQ point for having heard you speak.”

So, for a little while, we will be talking instead about the tragedy in Tennessee, as we did about the Exxon Valdez. For a short while, we will feel sorry for the inbred coal mining denizens of that town, and worrying about the other inbred mine-slaves downstream, and perhaps even caring for a millisecond about the ecosystem as bellied up sludgy fish rot on the banks.

Then we will blame faulty pocket linings and some drunken patsy for not sewing it up properly, and never admit the problem isn’t retention, its putting diarrhea in your pockets in the first place that is the bad idea.

But we will never worry about the greed, lies and avarice and our own inattentive complicity in the system that is fouling the only real God that can absolutely have an active impact on our existence. Earth.

Insanity. We are utterly insane as a species.

“What was I writing about? That was so 5 minutes ago, and look at the pretty pictures of clean coal on the telly! I’m voting for that. They must have something new going, or they wouldn’t say that, ya know? ‘Sides, coal is ‘Murrikan.’

Hey, they’re playing Prine on the country station, hush up. Wonder what he’s singing about? It sure sounds pretty!”

When I was a child my family would travel

Down to Western Kentucky where my parents were born

And there’s a backwards old town that’s often remembered

So many times that my memories are worn.

Chorus:

And daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County

Down by the Green River where Paradise lay

Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking

Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away

Well, sometimes we’d travel right down the Green River

To the abandoned old prison down by Airdrie Hill

Where the air smelled like snakes and we’d shoot with our pistols

But empty pop bottles was all we would kill.

Repeat Chorus:

Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel

And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land

Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken

Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.

Repeat Chorus:

When I die let my ashes float down the Green River

Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester dam

I’ll be halfway to Heaven with Paradise waitin’

Just five miles away from wherever I am.

Amen.