When I heard that oil was going to hit the Loop Current and head for Key West and possibly various spots on the East Coast of the United States, I cheered.

Not because I’m a big fan of oil spills. Honest, I’m not.

I cheered because, finally, people would give a crap.

’Til the oil spill heavily affects anyplace other than here, nobody is going to care. Why? Because, in their heart of hearts, the rest of the nation sees our state as a toothless whore, bending over for the petrochemical industry at three bucks a lay. And when you see a three-dollar whore being beaten and set on fire, sure, maybe you head over with a fire extinguisher — but a big part of you is convinced that she probably did something to deserve it.

That’s the dark truth to all of this that has remained largely unspoken. Half our trouble whenever we have a crisis down here is because we do such a bang-up job of loudly proclaiming our collective ignorance every chance we get. Contrary to popular opinion, those proclamations don’t go unnoticed.

When our governor takes a cheap shot on national television at volcano monitoring, people notice. They associate that with us — not him. It’s apparently a Louisiana value, they reason, to believe that preparing for disasters is a stupid waste of federal money.

We also have the woeful misfortune of being one of the states most likely to jump on the anti-evolution school bandwagon first chance we get. Again, the people who care about things like oil spills also tend to be people who’ve gone to school, and don’t buy into the notion that the Earth is 4,000 years old, or that dinosaurs and humans cohabitated.

If anything, they look at us and see our misfortune as proof that bending over for industry is a good way to ensure you’ll get screwed. They may pay lip service to the notion that our fate is unfortunate, but until some other, less “guilty” state is injured, they won’t really care.

Which is why, as I said, I was so relieved once our problem became everyone else’s, too. About the only part of Louisiana anyone other than Louisianans care about would be the French Quarter.

Once it was clear, post-Katrina, that the Quarter was largely spared, the rest became largely moot to the rest of the world. They didn’t care about Katrina’s devastation so much because they felt bad for New Orleans as that they felt gleefully good about President George W. Bush’s abysmal handling of the entire fiasco.

Sure, it’s easy to get in a tizzy about how evil BP is. They’re like the guy who drugs your girlfriend, rapes her, and then just kind of looks at you as you beat him to a pulp.

They’ve showed they just don’t give a rat’s ass about safety or maintenance or anything other than the bottom line numerous times, and each time they get caught, they pay lip service to the notion of corporate accountability — and then sit there, doing as little as they’re legally forced to do, showing a toddler’s or old person’s deep-seated conviction that if you ignore something long enough, it’ll go away.

The nation has ignored us long enough, that’s for sure. And at the rate we’re going, I can’t help but wonder when and how we’ll end up going away.