Why Captain Hindsight matters

This week's South Park episode featured a character called Captain Hindsight, a superhero imbued with the power to confront major crises by telling those involved what they should have done in order to prevent each disaster in the first place. Captain Hindsight "The Hero of the Modern Age" flies to the scene of a catastrophe (he also has the power of flight, apparently, although it is of little consequence) and shouts at people the various ways they could have avoided their predicament.

It's a clever jab at modern punditry. (Captain Hindsight, is himself a "former TV reporter") But the joke can be read as a discounting of the need to hold responsible parties accountable for their actions, inactions, obfuscations, corruptions, and other nefarious activities rather than allow them to continually reoccur.

For example, yesterday we learned via the Oil Spill Commission Captain Hindsight Committee

National Oil Spill Commission investigators have found that the Halliburton cement used to seal the bottom of BP's wild Gulf well in April was unstable and was used despite multiple failed tests in the weeks leading up to the massive well blowout.

What's more, the commission investigators found Halliburton knew about the problems and used the cement mixture anyway.

The trouble with acts of criminal negligence on the scale of the Macondo blowout is that they are so large and so horrifying that we tend want to see them as uncontrollable acts of God rather than pinpoint the specific acts of malfeasance behind them. But if no one does this, if no one undertakes the necessary act of employing our the benefit of hindsight to locate the specific points of failure, then those points of failure become embedded institutional givens. And what we're left with is a perpetual cycle of nobody-could-have-predicteds where the best most victims of unpredictable events can expect each time is a new round of "We're sorry" commercials.



See also: A Photo of a Group of Soon-To-Be Dead People