"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.