The nut of today’s lesson pertains to BP’s generous grant to the LSU School of the Coast and Environment — a $500 million chunk to pay for studies on dispersant usage in the Gulf of Mexico and the grim toll it exacts on marine life. Somehow, the oil giant had never managed to get a hold of the University in the long years prior to the Deepwater Horizon spill, when it was still drilling throughout the Gulf to the cadence of Sarah Palin’s gibberish party slogans like an army of Haliburton contractors wired on Ritalin.Dean Christopher D’Elia seemed more or less aware of his tenuous position as the recipient of a BP grant. The mere mention of the company’s two-letter name is now enough to evoke heart-rending shrieks and fits of brutal anger from charter captains and commercial fishermen in the Gulf coastal region. In a Times-Picayune article dated May 24, D’Elia preempted a defense of sorts — one that he is sure will dispel any traces of skepticism about the college’s ulterior motives, and its possible role as BP’s personal PR representatives.
Just imagine: our very own School of the Coast and Environment, reduced to a gang of hired thugs paid to disseminate crude lies three years down the road about the “ironically beneficial effects that the cocktail of dispersants and oil plumes have had on our study’s sample of coral reefs.”
Indeed. I can almost imagine the typeface.
“It’s wonderful,” an ecstatic D’Elia will be quoted by Daily Reveille correspondents in June, 2013. “The massive underwater plumes now serve as camoflauge for schools of previously endangered fish; additionally, our scientists found that the mix of dispersants served as a ‘natural fertilizer’ to blooming reefs.” Ye gods, I will not be able to cope with propaganda of that order. I can hardly stomach the thought of our newspaper being “pressured to be mouthpieces for BP,” as Dean D’Elia so aptly spoke.
That is one take on the grant — naturally it is a dour forecast, no doubt colored by an inborn cynicism that pervades all my opinions concerning old white men receiving lump sums of money from oil conglomerates that would not bat an eyelash at staining the whole Atlantic a deep and shiny black with some of Deepwater Horizon’s finest — no, that will be all right, and the money will flow right in.But Dean D’Elia seems like a decent enough guy, at least going by the general tone of his comments to the reporters on nola.com, and he probably did nothing to merit this cruel and unusual fate — a shameful profile of ridicule by a mean-spirited opinion-editorial writer for The Daily Reveille.Yes, in reality, it makes perfect sense that BP would pay the flagship University in a state whose commerce it has sabotaged and whose populace it has demoralized for an “impartial study” on the ruinous consequences its spilled oil has wreaked on sea-faring wildlife.
Yeah … it is as about as sane a defense policy as standing trial on felony drug-dealing charges and wiring $10,000 to the DEA’s office for a “full and unbiased probe into the case” that will exonerate you for sure, and fix your negative image among the community as an “untrustable disrepute” and neighborhood junkie.So really, the whole story leaves me with a deeply-rooted but totally unverifiable suspicion about the true nature of this grant. Maybe British Petroleum CEO Tony Hayward will call up Dean Christopher D’Elia one of these days and congratulate him, laughingly, on taking the grant — or stop by the University to crack open a few brewskies and swap war stories on the roof of Howe-Russell annex.
And there will be one refrain that will reverberate in D’Elia’s ears throughout that whole, decadent weekend — as Tony leans in close, the terrible odor of gin on his breath, and whispers a dark and haunting Pink Floyd lyric into D’Elia’s ear: “And did we tell you the name of the game, boy? We call it riding the gravy train.” 
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Contact Trevor Fanning at [email protected]