Wednesday 14 January 2004 By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Mars Needs Dim Republicans
Dubya dons a shiny spacesuit, dreams of spending billions
to meet little green men. The nation cringes
Oh right like this is exactly what we need.
Let us imagine the discussion : "Boys, the nation's in massive reeling
record-breaking debt and morale's at an all-time low and disposable
American soldiers are dying brutal horrific deaths every day over
nothing at all except our greed and flagrant cronyism and corporate
petrochemical profiteering.
"Our cities are gasping and health care is a joke and we've mauled
Medicare beyond recognition, and we're plundering the living hell
out of
( see : http://slate.msn.com/id/2093707 )
Social Security, the last remaining stable and sound fund left, to try
and shore up our rapacious and gluttonous spending.
"There are no WMDs and our former allies openly resent us and the
poll ratings are slipping and the big glops of warmongering lies are
drying like blood stains into a carpet. And it's an election year. Damn.
"What's to be done ? What could rally a wary country during its time of
humiliated need and force-fed ignorance ? What could turn this troubled
nation around in the face of oily corporate war and fiscal gluttony and
environmental savagery ?
"Why, neato space stations on the moon, and sending men to Mars,
that's what !"
( see :
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2004/01/11/nati
onal1939EST0531.DTL )
Yes indeed. Leave it to BushCo to try and slap an astronomically
expensive, useless balm on the nation's gaping wounds by vainly
attempting to recapture some of that droning faux-'50s and -'60s
nostalgia no one really asked for.
Remember that time ? The "greatest generation" ? A time when
white-bread repressed often unhappily married segregationist
America gathered 'round the ol' black-and-white to gaze in
passionate wonder at the images beamed back from the Apollo
landings ?
What a time it was. Don't you want some of that sense of desperate
hopefulness back ?
Of course you do. Got $500 billion to pay for it? Hey, that was the cost
estimate for a similar man-on-Mars scheme when Dubya Sr. proposed
it in 1989, just before he was promptly laughed off the fiscal stage.
Of course, like every obscene BushCo proposal, there was never a mention
of how NASA could ever possibly pay for such a venture, and no mention
of how BushCo could rape the Treasury that much further to fund random
exercises in ridiculous excess. Oh well.
Look at it this way. Dubya will, by every account, go down as the worst
environmental president in American history. He will also be remembered
as the most blindly warmongering president and the least articulate
president and the most corporate-shilling president and the most flagrantly
fraudulent and borderline treasonous president.
And, hence, you can bet your big snakeskin Texas cowboy boots he wants
this "big ol' Mars thingy" to be some sort of, you know, legacy. He wants
his name in the history books as the one who decided to meet the little
green men. He wants to stick a flag in the rusty planet and claim it in
the name of, you know, Ronald Reagan.
This from a man who never cared a whit for space exploration in his entire
spoon-fed career, a man who never even once visited the famed Johnson
Space Center in Houston while serving as Texas governor. And you just
know half the impulse for this inane new idea is so Shrub can get himself
flown to the space-shuttle launch pad and have his picture taken in a
shiny spacesuit. How cute.
It's got that reek. It's got that reek of typical macho Republican
election-year BS, the sort of hollow grandiose chest thumping that stains
so many BushCo PR stunts, all war and guns and rockets and oil and big
slabs of chemically blasted hormone injected semirancid Texas beef (hey,
it's what's for dinner).
Look. NASA is wonderful. Space exploration is magnificent and essential
and we learn enormous amounts about ourselves in the process. The Spirit
rover on Mars right now ? Breathtaking.
Astounding new technologies are developed during major NASA missions,
ideas that trickle down into the cultural mainstream and make life, if
not easier, then at least more interesting, or lighter, or thinner, or
edible at temperatures down to minus 450 degrees with a battery pack that
lasts 127 hours and a new infrared extrasensory ink that can be read by
blind comatose monkeys. Space is good.
But look again. Our schools are desperate. The Wal-Mart/SUV mentality is
a national cancer. Basic services nationwide are being starved and shut
down as cities scramble for fiscal scraps. John Ashcroft still has a job.
The national treasury has been looted and plundered like never before in
American history, toppling from a record surplus to a record deficit in a
little over three years, with 3.1 million newly unemployed Americans as a
bitter kicker. That tiny blip of an economic "recovery" you keep reading
about ? Tell that to your unemployed neighbors.
And it's just shy of appalling that BushCo is suddenly all atwitter over
a massive, impossible, ridiculously expensive scheme to send a manned
mission to Mars, when any 5-year-old could come up with roughly 2,323
more vital and needful areas where such huge sums of money could be
spent.
Can you think of five, just off the top of your head, as you step around
that homeless person? Damn right you can.
Do we need to recall that sucker-punch $87 bil BushCo reamed through
Congress to help pay for our continued occupation of Iraq, a nation that
doesn't want us and was never a threat to us and that is now equaling
Vietnam in costs, both fiscal and humanitarian ?
Does Mars mean we get to bring our troops home and save those
budget-gutting billions and redirect them toward something progressive ?
One guess.
Maybe we should just shrug it off. Just dismiss it as yet another a silly
exercise in political ego and bogus machismo. After all, it's all about
big dumb gesture, all about trying to cover up appalling atrocities and
insulting policy in an election year -- much like suddenly pretending
to care about immigrants, or health care, or gay rights, when your party
defines itself as the world headquarters of homophobic pro-corporate
isolationism.
This is what it boils down to, really : a big joke. There will be
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More :
http://www.sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2004/01/14/notes011404.DTL
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Bush envisions moon as test, jumping-off point for Mars mission
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2004/01/11/nati
onal1939EST0531.DTL
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