WHAT'S IN A NAME?

....That which we call light crude would by any other name smell as sweet! with many apologies to Mr. Shakespeare, poet and playwright, but clearly a name is very, very important.

It would not be appropriate to call a Home for the Elderly "Auschwitz" or even "Guantanamo" no matter what one's private opinion might be of such a place; so which wag decided to call the deep-sea oil field in the Gulf of Mexico which has been plagued by the BP disaster, "Macondo"?

"Macondo" as you may, or may not, know is the mythical town in Colombia conjured up by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his classic novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude". Macondo is a town that experiences several generations of human beings, which blossoms in the jungle, enjoys a technology boom and then nature unequivocally strangles the town. It is  in essence a microcosm of a "Banana Republic" whose greatest triumph is the introduction of the epitome of the technology of the era, an impressive but irrelevant railroad. The whole endeavor is doomed from the start.

The story would surely have been familiar to whomsoever the executive was who came up with the infamous and unlucky nomenclature for this disastrous project. How could the name have ever been approved?

When will the suits ever learn that life imitates art!