My beloved NPR has done it again, this time failing to call petroleum-industry spokespeople and analysts on so-called “rig migration.” The first I heard of this mysterious behavior was on last week’s Morning Edition when a petro-analyst claimed that the danger in the current moratorium on offshore drilling is that oil rigs will “migrate” from the Gulf to South America and the North Sea.

Immediately, images popped into my head of massive rigs with comically googly eyes and squiggly mouths sticking out their unctuous tongues and hauling ass out the Gulf.

The only things that don’t seem to be migrating in the Gulf these days are oil-coated seabirds. The inability to follow your instincts in this case implies that you have them, that you’re a sentient creature with some measure of volition. Last I checked that category does not include oil rigs.

I hate to break it to the dewy-eyed public radio reporters who want so deeply to believe ala Peter Pan; I really do hate to smash their fiercely imaginative view of the world. But I must. OIL RIGS DON’T MIGRATE. Oil rigs, you see, are owned by very, very rich corporations like BP and TransOcean. They move around when the inordinately compensated leaders of these companies command their underlings to move them. When industry-friendly voices say things like “migrate” they are trying to make the cynical, nature-killing, job-destroying decisions big companies make sound like some kind of natural phenomenon. It is sort of like calling the job losses from massive outsourcing “deciduous.”

This is just another way in which industries erode language–like despotic governments before them–in order to hide responsibility for what they do. It’s not surprising that they do; it is disappointing that our media choose not to confront them.

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In other news, the Washington Post reports that census takers are getting a hostile and sometimes violent response from many Americans who want nothing to do with the federal government, and some of whom simply think census workers are agents of Obama.

To this I say: splendid! Not for the census workers, of course. But the civic ignorance of the people who refuse to be counted will hurt them when it comes to apportionment of representation in Congress and distribution of some public funds since those are based on census data. The anti-gubmint extremists get what they want, namely left alone, and the rest of us don’t have to pay for them or feel their wrath on the floor of the House. They have chosen to be disenfranchised, and since they are against participation in public life by doctrine, they have no reason, now, to complain when things don’t go their way.

I get the feeling, though, that they will complain nonetheless . . .

–T.S. deHaviland

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