Monday, October 03, 2005

"The future is here,


...it's just not evenly distributed." *

*(William Gibson – “Pattern Recognition”)

This from the Tribune got me to thinking about…stuff.
U.S. Space Traveler Floats Into ISS

By MIKE ECKEL
Associated Press Writer

October 3, 2005, 2:01 PM CDT

KOROLYOV, Russia -- American millionaire space traveler Gregory Olsen floated into the international space station Monday, welcomed by the outpost's two-man crew with the traditional Russian greeting of bread and salt.

Two days after blasting off from Kazakhstan, a Soyuz capsule carrying the New Jersey scientist, as well as American astronaut William McArthur and Russian cosmonaut Valery Tokarev, hooked up with the station 250 miles above the Earth at 1:27 a.m. EDT, about five minutes ahead of schedule.

With the arrival, Olsen became the third private citizen to visit the orbiting station, having paid $20 million to become what he calls a "space flight participant."

Olsen's relatives and U.S. and Russian space officials applauded as the capsule's docking was announced at Mission Control in Korolyov outside Moscow.

"He's never felt better," said Krista Dibsie, Olsen's 31-year-old daughter.

As her 4-year-old son Justin sat on her lap, holding crayon drawings of rockets, she said: "I can't wait to see him back on Earth."

The docking was conducted automatically. Technical problems have forced some previous capsule pilots to dock manually, a tense procedure that risks damaging the station.

Some three hours later, the crews opened the air locks and the Soyuz passengers met face-to-face with Russian Sergei Krikalev and American John Phillips, who have inhabited the station since April.

Russian TV showed Olsen carrying a video camera as he floated into the station, where he bumped his head on the ceiling. Krikalev and Phillips welcomed the three Soyuz travelers with hugs and the packets of bread and salt.

Later, the five men were shown posing for photographs, waving and smiling.



In 1955, no right thinking person believed space flight was possible. Our Founding Geeks were mocked without mercy and berated at parties for whispering that someday we'd make a run at the Moon. For reading and writing about it in pulp magazine with lurid covers.

After all, everyone knew that space was vacuum, and so what would the rockets "push against"? Huh? Huh? Well answer me, Poindexter!?

Then came the wedgies.

And now space is boring, and pedestrian enough (pun intended) to have tourists.

Go down the dark, spiral stairs of my heart into the inner-inner rooms (the ones you can – like Holmes in the “Norwood Builder” -- only surmising by measuring the interior dimensions against the exterior and inferring their presence) and you will find, crouching in corner – packing a Mohaska big enough to blow holes in the Moon – an optimist.

And, brother’s and sisters, I was not raised in the Church of blind optimism.

No, I was not to the Cockeyed Manor born, and I don’t live there as a grown man. For my money, being stupidly optimistic is just being stupid with a vacant Jack-o-Lantern's grin; it is nothing more than not seeing the hammer coming down on your head. In fact an empty, rosy detached-from-reality Peggy Noonanian ebullience always makes be slightly nauseous. There are some people, no matter their intentions or credentials, that I just don’t want on my team, and moronic hope gives the whole idea of hope a bad name.

I was a cynic in my 20’s because being a Cynic was light typing with a long lunch and full dental compared to the stoop labor of being a Realist with a 51% positive outlook. The Manichean, binary purity of turning my back on the world and looking for something entirely new was irresistible. It was, in its way, the refuge of every drunk, junkie and Old Testament God: hiding out in a belief that the world was a hopeless place and needed to be Etch-a-Sketched out of existence. Painted over and started fresh. I mean, it was so obvious that the world was run by idiots who kept fucking everything up and refusing to just Fix Things!

So much easier to become a Communist or a Randite or a Green. Not that I was more or less lazy than anyone else, but the ugliness of the world seemed too persistent. The imperfections too insoluble and heavily crenellated. The fuckuppery too deeply incised into the DNA of the real world.

And so one can be forgiven for looking over a span of five or ten years and saying, “Fuck this. It’s all polluted. Start over.”

That’s not a bad sentiment insofar as it carries inside of it a little clutch of delicate eggs. A fury at the world for not being better than it is, but also a belief that it can and should be changed. That people should not have to live like they do.

I would never want anyone to outgrow their sense of indignation, and I can speak only for myself when I say that I felt just exactly that way once, and yet I have come to nurse a hard-nosed, scarred-up sense of confidence in our future as a nation and as a species that seems to get a little stronger every year.

Not that the setbacks don’t come and wham me right down to my knees. Not that I wasn’t weeping and shrieking after November 2004, “What the fuck is wrong with you retards!”

And I suppose I still am.

But I don’t get my sense of assurance about tomorrow from a bottle or a needle or a dipshit theology that’s little more that heroin without the track marks.

I don’t get my unshakeable sense of the slow, steady improvement in the human condition from turning my head off.

I get what optimism I have from being able to plant one foot solidly on a bedrock of history and the other on a reasonable grasp of human nature, and turn, and take a good, long look at our past and know with perfect certainty that while George W. Bush is without doubt the worst President in U.S. history, these are not the darkest days mankind ever faced.

I get it from reading and from listening to what people like you say and do.

I'm a pragmatist, and I don’t want to detoxify the noxious Modern GOP and give the Modern Democratic Party a mass spine transplant for sport. I want to fuck high I.Q. supermodels with mile-long legs for sport.

We desperately need an interplay of ideas about how much Government we should have, and of what kind, and what it should cost, and we need that debate to go on every day, because the truth is there is no formula. Ideologies ultimately suck because they refuse to adapt –- would rather die and kill a lot of bystanders than adapt -- and adaptation is the only thing that keeps us one step ahead of extinction.

We are an evolving experiment and these are evolving institutions in an evolving world. They must change and the parameters of what we ask of government must change, and for that to happen we need robust debate by people of good will from every side.

Which brings us to the Dobsons, the DeLays and the Falwells in our midst.

To our Republican fellow citizens, they are the Enemy Within and you’ve turned our country over the to them. It’s as simple as that. They are the smirking vectors of a disease that is intractably hostile to freedom itself and what you have done is a sin against democracy and humanity that can only be redeemed by repudiating them, even if it may cost you an election or two.

To the Lefties in elected office, you must call these motherfuckers out in simple, two-fisted language without compromise. It's a simple fact of governing that you have to work with Republicans to get anything done, but enough of the smiling, glad-handing, “My Dear Friend” bullshit. As long as their Party welcomes scumbags like Santorum into the fold, slimes decent Americans like Cindy Sheehan and lets a traitor like Rove – the modern Master Builder of the deliberate strategy of pandering to scum and kneecapping honorable citizens -- gambol through the corridors of power, they are not your friends and never will be.

I don’t want to see the Christopaths and the racists driven into the sea because of some abstruse, arcane dispute over God and man and sin.

We – all of us, left and right-- need them to go because with them polluting everything they touch -- tricking hatred out in the robes of Christ and parading to bigoted ignorance down Main Street as if it were actually something to be proud of -- we cannot have the ongoing, vital, public conversation that we desperately need to have.

I may disagree with some of its tenants, but Original Republican Party is not the enemy, any more than the Democrats are. They are the two, main arteries of our democracy doing what they do.

The problem is, one of these arteries is infected. Diseased to the point where it threatens the body as a whole. I beat on the GOP because the GOP has allowed itself to become the thrall and host of a genuinely evil and anti-American cult of loathsome creatures that must be flensed away from our body politic, shunned and repudiated.

They offer you Republicans the oldest, and most accursed trade to found in any myth and faith: an exchange of power -- the "Kingdoms of the Earth" -- for your soul. You get to win elections, but only at the price of watching everything you claim to believe in rot and die by your own hand.

I am an optimist because this was never about a particular skirmish over evolution or prayer in school.

This is a Battle for the Future. Over who will lay their seal on it and make it their own, and I am an optimist because I know the past, and I know things have been worse, things have gotten slowly better, and things can change if we keep trying.

I know that no Caesar could have had an arterial stent installed to keep him from dying. No Khan could pop a Tylenol or listen to Mozart on an iPod. Cleopatra had no Pill or penicillin. Alexander the Great had no armada of satellites piping data in 1’s and 0’s into a worldwide information network so that clicking over to weather.com could give him days of advanced warning about blizzards and hurricanes. No Borgia ever had a microwave, or the electrical grid into which they could plug such a thing.

And more recently and more personally, right here in these United States, if I and my ex has met each other a generation earlier, it would have been illegal for us to marry.

But that’s not true any more.

From a distance, the future – an idealized, stylized, dogmatized future -- always looks all pretty and clean-lined, and always makes the present like a dog. Like taped-up, dollar-store, ghettokeds compared to a pair of $500 Manolo Blahnik taxi shoes.

But that's a delusion. The future never works out that way. It can't.

I am an optimist because the world has always seemed to be a dysfunctional nuthouse run by fucktards…because it always HAS been a dysfunctional nuthouse run by fucktards, but razing it and starting over doesn’t work. Flooding it and repopulating it doesn’t work. The world that you see around has gotten incrementally better generation after generation, because that’s how it works.

That’s how we’re built.

And in the end, that’s why I’m an optimist.

Because the future is a place worth living in.

Which makes it a place worth fighting for, with a smile.

50 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sir,
You write like Lagavulin.

teh l4m3 said...

Well put.

Anonymous said...

I don't know if I buy into the promise of the Golden Ascent to the future. It could happen that way, but I sometimes find it equally plausible that we could descend into a dark abyss. We are developing technologies that could create nightmarish worlds - whether by mistake or design. I sometimes think that the promise of hope for a wonderful tomorrow is just a marketing strategy to sell products. And in that deception lies the possibility of a decaying fuckup of inadvertant ecological breakdowns.

I once wrote in my diary, "Technology promises a dissolving future." It's kind of like the ever elusive horizon; no matter how far you slog forward, you'll never reach it. Or if you do reach some idea of a destination, you quickly become dissatisfied with it, which is how they program you to feel. Essentially, you are right back where you started.

I'm interested in the hear and now. Don't tell me what's going to happen, I want to see what is happening. I want to be satisfied with present. But then, I guess your point was that there are always ways of making the present better, isn't it? That's what we humans always try and do.

It's interesting you put 2001 A Space Odyssey up in the headline, because that was the film that my father showed me when VHS first came out that really tripped me out as a kid. I loved that idea that this image of the future would be so graceful... but here we are, about 1 inch closer to that untouchable horizon. Of course, as an adult, I realize that the purpose of the film was to tell a story, not sell us on a future. But there is no denying the impact that film had on the expectations of humans in the second half of the 20th century as a significant side effect.

The glass is half empty! Drift, another great post.

Anonymous said...

drifty - speaking of optimism, i've started a campaign to raise money to ask the pollsters to ask the Impeachment Question. AfterDowningStreet has taken over the campaign - details are over at afterdowningstreet.org/polling

Moderate Republicans are welcome to join in.

Anonymous said...

Kim Stanley Robinson shot me with an idea i've worried on a bit. In the 'Red/Green/Blue Mars' series there was a summit to draft the foundation of a new government/society. It would be nice to take the luxury of setting a clean sight on where we might want to go - i'm not talking utopia, but workable systems, rational priorities.

Strife is life and that's damn skippy with me. But leveraging intellect and consensus to place entropy as our adversary rather than each other seems like a quantum jump - a big leap into something else entirely. This would be beyond self-actualization; this would be species-actualization.

Fighting and Smiling to get there.

Anonymous said...

Optimistic about the future? Maybe. But never forget that after the fall of Rome we got the Dark Ages (like today's GOP but with more skin diseases).

Jim said...

Great post -- I remember a few years ago, around 2001 bubefore September 11, when I realized that the Republican leadership would rather keep their collective boot on the neck of a poor, ignorant theocratic Third World country (after all, they wouldn't be poor, and the hoi polloi would be kept out of their maincured 'national' parks) than be a part of a modern secular nation. I'd always believed that the arc of history tended toward justice, but then I remembered the Expulsion of the Muslims and Jews from Spain, the real 1492. Multiethnic, advanced Spain was given over to the Inquisition, to tear and burn out heresy and its daughter progress. The only answer is to fight these thugs and bad priests.

BadTux said...

I think you get the point. The objective of politics in a true democracy is not to engage in bullshit points-scoring and artificial segregation into "left" and "right". The goal of politics in a true democracy is to serve the people. There can be, and are, honest differences of opinion regarding the best way to attain that objective, and a national discourse is necessary in order for the people as a whole (remember them? The guys who elect the politicians?) to have the information needed to make good decisions and resolve those differences.

But the neo-conservatives and their radical ilk are not interested in any of that. They are only interested in power, raw and crude, and see rational discourse and compromise as signs of weakness, not as part of what is necessary for a democracy to truly function. They are, indeed, a cancer upon the body politic, whose baleful influence since the presidency of Richard Nixon has caused a breakdown of the national consensus that led to national greatness during the three decades from 1935 to 1965 -- the rise of the greatest industrial machine on the planet, the strongest military on the planet, the Interstate Highway System, Social Security, Medicare, etc. all are accomplishments that occurred either during those three decades or shortly afterwards and have been proven in the crucible of time.

In the end, we are Roman Empire circa AD 395, seemingly the greatest empire on the face of the planet but in actuality hollowed out by politicians seeking power rather than seeking economic growth and prosperity, to the point that when the barbarians pierced the legions on the frontiers, they found nothing but a hollow shambles, easily conquered. If we do not do something about the toxic growth which currently afflicts the body politic, the same thing will happen to the American empire...

Gotta go, busy stocking my iceberg with MRE's...

-- Badtux the History Penguin

Anonymous said...

Well said, sir.

Repeat as necessary.

How-evah...not to whiz in yer wheaties, but as the Dark Ages commenter above pointed out, "the long run" may be further away than you might like.

The "better future" that someone 100 years hence might get to experience, may frequently be proceeded by mucho weeping and gnashing of teeth...which those folks unfortunate enough to be born BEFORE the Next Enlightenment will be stuck with. And THAT's what dents my own optimism of late.

The illustrious Billmon has touched on this lately, in a more short-term perspective. He cites Italy in the 1990's, where widespread corruption led to a wave of reformist activity, which led in turn to...even MORE widespread (and apparently well-entrenched) corruption.

As lame as the Democrats have been lately, I could easily see us going down that path, and I'm too damn old to expect to be around for the Next Renaissance.

YMMV.

--Captain Goto

Anonymous said...

The Bush-DeLay-Lundgren dildos who bang theirprivates to the powerful 1968 "2001: A Space Oddesey" theme?????????????.

driftglass said...

rosebuddear,
My ex is a black woman, and until the Loving v. Virginia decision, states had the right to make such marriages illegal.

Because God wanted it that way.

Loving wasn't until 1967.

The last state to abide by Loving was Alabama, who did not fully comly until 2000, and required a "special election". In that election in 2000 -- not 1800, not 1900 -- 40% of the citizens of Alabama still voted to keep interracial marraige illegal.

BTW, which you hear the GOP talk about thier base, it is about these unreconstructed racists to which they are referring.

pseudolus,
mix away and pour me a double. It has been a long day.

Captain Goto,
Could very well be a long time. Could very well be that the first starship is staffed with Chinese and Indian and Maori...and there's an American along to peel space taters.

My species will still make it out of this neighborhood, and I'll do what little I can, where I can, with what I can.

All,
We fight because we have to. Because that is the difference between a certainty of failure and the possibility of victory...as drop-by-drop as it may be just to get back to what we once were.

Shorter: we need to hang on tight to each other and kick as much ass as we can target.

Anonymous said...

If Bush-Nero's crony Miers is confirmed to the Supreme Court then we will know that the American Republic is dead and that it will not be America that leads humanity to a brighter future.

driftglass said...

Gay Veteran,
So that single appointment is the dividing line?

jurassicpork said...

Yeah, I heard about that Alabama thing re: interracial marriage. Didn't know that 40% of them voted against it, tho.

My ex-girlfriend was black. She died over ten years ago at age thirty from kidney cancer. We had two kids and she passed away on our younger son's first birthday.

Theresa always had rotten timing.

So I'm a bit touchy about racial epithets because I don't want my boys growing up in a world like Selma in the 60's.

Anonymous said...

And Santorum bangs his to that theme too.

Anonymous said...

And Brownstain in front of little boys, By whacking & whipping it out.

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