IRREVERENT Magazine - Features

I got back to the office after a long working vacation in Vail tired and exhausted. I won't go into the details, but let's just say that it won't be the hidden hand of the market guiding this year's elections. If you thought the swift boat veterans were entertaining just wait until you see what we've cooked up for Hillary and Frist as they position the debate for their presidential runs. Poor bastards. Sorry you "independents": McCain's fucked. We don't need rational conservatism, and quite frankly he's not going to give enough governmental largess to the "progressives" either. No you can expect that this pale imitation of 60's politics that we're seeing is going to continue.

"C'mon Mercer," you're saying, "What the hell do you mean '60's politics'?" Well it's quite simple. You have a military industrial complex fighting highly suspicious wars on flimsy precepts concerning threats to Our Way of Life(tm); an axis of power stretching down a Pennsylvania Avenue owned by one party; a Washington elite class who's interest in average citizens doesn't extend beyond "How many of their kids can we kill before somebody notices.?"* Underneath it all is a little known government agency whose reputation for corruption, malfeasance, and just plain incompetence is astounding. I'm talking not about Congress -- although they might as well be operating in a vacuum as far as doing their job as a check on executive power is concerned -- nope I'm talking about our good friends at NASA.

Back in the day, and when I say back in the day I mean when the Greatest Generation^TM was busy collaborating with Nazi murderers to go to the moon**, we didn't much care about graft and corruption in the Quest for Space^TM. Personally I don't care about it now, but every once in awhile, when I'm off working on things that actually put money into my bank account, Scott assumes that I'm not slaving hard enough at this Charmin substitute and sends me some progressivist nonsense to spark my imagination. This time he pulled out a doozy thinking that I could work up a good rant about some kind of wealth transfer the Bushies initiated to give the aerospace industry several billion dollars. He gave me link after link about Bush's announced Mission to Mars, hoping that I'd call it a boondoggle, or a vision that would be almost Kennedyesque if it was Bush getting licked in the oval orifice rather than that other great Republican President Bill Clinton. Unfortunately, Scott gave this to the wrong dude, I love space programs. Especially space programs that dole out huge amounts of money.

When I say back in the day I mean when the Greatest Generation was busy collaborating with Nazi murderers to go to the moon...One of the cool things about space programs is that you can pick up all kinds of cash simply for research and the best bit is the research doesn't have to make sense. Let's take Project Prometheus. Now the idea here is that solar power generators on space missions really don't work very well. The reason being, of course, is that the sun is so much less powerful the further away you get from it. That means that spacecraft have to carry some kind of power system that can generate electricity. Enter Prometheus. Only this time instead of straight up fire, he's bringing plutonium, what a guy. Of course playing with plutonium means playing with the EPA, and playing with the Department of Energy, and best of all playing with the Navy. Especially since, with your average well-designed NASA mission, you're talking about several pounds of radioactive material being blown all over the keys when this thing goes KERFLOOM!! after take off. These guys all have their own consultants and employees and lawyers so the big money ball just keeps on rolling. Then, somewhere along the line, a poor single mother trying to send two teens to college gets to keep her job cleaning up government offices. It's a win for everybody. Well not everybody.

There's a species of political creature called the regressive progressivist. These guys think that all the world is run to enrich Big Business^TM at the expense of the Little Guy^TM. If I were one of these regressive progressivists, and only interested in using government power and public money to enhance the lives of the less fortunate, like, oh, say mafia connected labor unions, I'd be way pissed about Prometheus. After all it's consuming valuable resources that could be more effectively used to provide better pension insurance funding, allowing more airlines and auto manufacturers to go bankrupt and thus bust the power of the unions forever. Fortunately, I'm not a regressive progressivist, and would actually like to help the working man. Help him get to Mars I say where living is good, well minus the lack of heat, water, food, and least importantly air.

Now this is not to say that Bush isn't using space exploration in a wonderful and excitingly cynical way. Surely it's no coincidence that a president known for having more space in his mind than having his mind on space suddenly finds science just after launching a little foreign adventure. After all NASA's been trying to get this dawg to hunt for years, even a "visionary" like Bill Clinton didn't get inspired by it.*** It took a president, who, although nearly six feet tall, has the inferiority complex of a man 4'6". Don't believe me? Let's go to the tape:

The dude "joins" the Texas Air National Guard and then disappears but not, like the über popular John McCain that he crushed in the 2000 primaries, into a Vietnamese prison camp. Oh and of course in WWII dad got shot down in combat, not, like the younger Bush, in singles bar after singles bar.

While Little Bush is busy mismanaging a couple of oil companies and the Texas Rangers, Daddy is busy trying to defend himself against the criticism that he was a coward for not going after Saddam after the first Gulf War. Then Daddy loses a second term for being fiscally responsible and breaking his promise of no new taxes. Finally the potential for Georgie to do better than his papa.

Boomer cohort Bill Clinton spends eight years building up the conservative base, laying both interns and the ground work for a Republican victory in 2000. He also enjoys a good relationship with the public by being likable, genuine and, at least when it's not about little Willie, open with the press. Bush junior gets off to a bad start when he calls, sotto voce, a reporter an asshole. Fortunately the media decides that somebody so cold and prickly needs to be smothered in warm fuzzies and immediately goes to sleep in the White House press room.

And now the war. Surely a bunch of Republicans can run a war better than the fucking Democrats who sacrificed so much blood in the jungles of south east Asia. Boo Yah Master Chief! but, wait, oh yeah, we built an army to kill people, ie Soviets, quickly, not to police them and occupy the damn country, that's just so WWII.

Having so far proved that he's inadequate to the task of governing, Bush strikes out and tries to build a legacy that's about hope and advancement. In 2004 he announced his ambition to out-Kennedy Kennedy by putting a man on Mars. Unfortunately he forgot the "before this decade is out bit." and then this year he forgot to mention it at all. That's our George, gave up baseball, gave up drinking, gave up space. A legacy of giving.

Of course one good thing coming out of NASA's meditative plodding is the creation of whole range of bizarre little competitions. The X-foundation, a private prize designed to find better and cheaper ways to get you and I into space was finally won by that bastard Burt Ruttan. Apparently he thinks that he's got to have as many aeronautic firsts as possible. Now this was a private prize, and so, when immediately after winning, Burt was able to license the technology to Virgin's Sir Richard Branson, nobody had to worry about mis-spent money. In fact things are proceeding so well along that line that no less a Democratic leading light than Bill Richardson, Governor of New Mexico, is trying to drum up support for a spaceport in his fair state.

It's curious to me that my erstwhile editor kept bringing up the X-prize as another piece of fraud. Whatever could be Scott's motivation, other than being against a system that would move space travel from something enjoyed by elites like himself, to a routine vacation for poor ink-stained wretches. Well in the process of sacrificing one of my many interns to the almighty Google I discovered that Wisconsin, where Scott is known to maintain several postal boxes under various identities, is also seeking FAA approval for a spaceport. Well imagine that. I'm not suggesting a search of recent real estate deals in the diary state would be of any interest whatsoever, unless, you know, one needed to know how many parcels of dairyland had been purchased by big headed drunks of Irish/German descent.

Of course no matter who gets the spaceport the real question is who is going to be the first to die in the X-foundation's newest competition, X Rocket Racing. Think not so much rocket propelled NASCAR, but rocket propelled Formula 1. Lot's of money, lots of fame, lot's of danger. Lots. Now this is technology that any sitting president, including Tom Vilsack, D-Iowa, (oops I may have said too much) can get behind. Total bread and circus time to distract us from the fact that, after US troops withdrew, Iraq collapsed into three terror exporting states until Syria and Iran split the country right down the Tigris. To distract us from the crushing poverty engendered by trying to save the pensions of "hard working" union members who drove first their companies and then their country into bankruptcy. To distract us from the continuing dominance of bad taste as Wal-mart brings redneck chic even unto Rodeo Drive. To distract us from considering how few Arabic speakers the NSA has looking at all the intercepts from the not at all illegal "terrorist surveillance" program. Oh California may try to keep them out, but I'm sure there's a dump truck full of money backing up to a door somewhere.

Where does all of this leave you and I? Just some 'mokes out trying to put a few of our hard earned dollars into the tanks of our Hummers? Well I don't know about you, but I'm buying a ticket for the next Virgin Galactic flight out of this joint. Earthgirls are easy, but I sure wouldn't mind getting me some of that Arcturian poontang.

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*At the time of this writing the answer is 2495 in the entire War on Terror^TM

**This moon landing brought to you by Werner Von Braun and hundreds of dead British V2 victims. Hey Suntori, who's our primary partner in the Coalition of the Willing again? Heh heh, stupid limeys.

***Of course when your intern is already helping you see stars who the fuck needs a space program?