LAST night I put an oyster on my Seder plate.
While I didn’t particularly want to put something traif atop that most kosher of dishes, this Passover falls on the first anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. And since BP
, the leaseholder of the failed well, seems intent with its new television ads on making us forget about the spill, I felt that something drastic was in order to help us remember. Combining the memorial powers of the Seder plate with the canary-in-the-coal-mine nature of the oyster seemed a good way to keep the disaster — and BP’s promises to clean up its mess — in mind.
At Passover, Paul Greneberg makes startling and effective use (effective because it is startling?) of a metaphor in an op-ed about the BP oil spill at The Times. At the end of the piece he suggests another effective shocker—placing a bowl of oil at the table along with the water for finger washing.