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Enough Already!

As long as I’ve got the blood all angried up with politics anyhow, let me say something about this debt-ceiling nonsense that’s been dragging on for weeks and weeks: enough of this bullshit! It’s time to stop all the pointless grandstanding and just raise the damn thing already. It’s a simple administrative procedure that’s been done dozens of times in the past, and there’s no reason why this occasion has to have everything riding on it. No reason, aside from the Republicans being their usual overbearing, obstructionist asshats, of course.

Don’t talk to me about the debt or our out-of-control spending either. The fact is, Republicans don’t give a shit about the debt unless there’s a Democrat in the White House. They just don’t. The debt ceiling was raised 18 times during Reagan’s term as president, and nobody said a word about it. Dick Cheney said, and I quote, “deficits don’t matter.” Yes, I know it’s grown much larger in the handful of years since the Dark Lord shot off his mouth, but I stand by my statement: nobody would be talking about this issue now if the president had a little R after his name when he appears on television.

It’s painfully obvious to me what this debt-ceiling fight is about. It’s about the same thing all the fights in Washington have been since at least the days of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America: scoring political points. Finding a way to dominate, to set the agenda, to frame the argument, and ultimately, to assume and retain power. It is about the Republicans thinking that finally, after decades of trying, they’ve found a weapon they can use to bludgeon the New Deal to death, and to (hopefully) deny a president they’ve never accepted as legitimate a second term. Maybe even finding a way to impeach him, depending on what action he’s forced to take by their infuriating intransigence. In other words, Republicans are willing to destroy the country’s credit rating and very likely its economic recovery (such as it is) in order to score some points in their never-ending political game. They’re not frightened of imploding everything because they don’t believe the federal government has any right to exist anyway.

And then there’s the Democrats, proving yet again what a pack of craven pussies they are. They’ve basically handed the Republicans everything they wanted and haven’t fought for anything progressives want. Way to go, you cowardly slime. Not that the Republicans have accepted any of it. That’s largely why I think this whole conflict is nothing more than political: the Dems have rolled over for them and they still won’t play ball. Which is pretty much how things have been for the last three years.

Finally, there’s President Obama. Barack, my friend, I’ve stuck with you for three years even as you’ve wimped out on single-payer healthcare and stubbornly refused to put your foot down with the lunatics on the right, who would happily send you to Gitmo in the delusional belief that you’re a Muslim sleeper agent raised from birth to become a president just so you can bring down the country from the inside. But it’s finally reaching a point where you’re embarrassing me, man. Stop with the “Mr. Reasonable” bullshit already. The Republicans are not going to deal with you. They are not going to accept you and they are not ever going to like you. Just stop banging your head against that wall of bipartisanship, rally your own troops, and try being more of the flaming liberal the right claims you are. Tell them no, they’re not going to gut Medicare and Social Security, they’re going to grow the hell up and do the responsible, logical, decent thing that will go a long ways toward fixing everything: let the Bush tax cuts expire instead. But of course, you won’t do that, because you’re really not a flaming liberal, are you? By any sane measure of your actions, you’re actually a moderate Republican in the same mold as Dwight Eisenhower. Too bad you don’t have the prosperous times and sane Congress Eisenhower was blessed with.

This is a dangerous moment in history, I think… we could finally be seeing the moment Grover Norquist prophesied, when federal government is shrunk down small enough to strangle. Some people rejoice at the thought. Let’s hope they’ve been saving and investing wisely for their retirement. Because everybody does that, right? Right?

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Damn Hippies

I don’t suppose very many people outside of Utah have even heard the name Tim DeChristopher, so I’d better provide some back story before this evening’s rant begins.

It all started in the waning days of the George W. Bush administration, December 2008, when Dubya authorized the BLM to auction off millions of acres of public land leases here in Utah — some of which were uncomfortably close to the scenic landscapes of Arches and Canyonlands National Parks — for oil and gas exploration. Many people, myself included, feel like the Bushies were trying to pull a fast one, handing their friends in the energy industry some prime real estate at dirt-cheap (so to speak) prices in a hastily organized deal while the rest of the country was distracted by the approaching spectacle of Barack Obama’s inauguration. But some people noticed. And on the day of the auction, one of these people — a 27-year-old economics student from the University of Utah named Tim DeChristopher — decided to do something about it. He somehow got inside the auction and started bidding on parcels of redrock country himself. He later said his goal was simply to drive up the prices and make life a little uncomfortable for the energy-industry representatives in the room, but in a quirk of fate, he actually started winning auctions that he had no intention of paying for. He instantly became a hero to the environmental movement for successfully “monkey-wrenching” the corporations, and he later saw some vindication when the auction was ruled illegal because the proper protocols had not been followed, and most of the leases that had been
sold were rescinded. But of course there was a price to pay for daring to cross the powerful people: he was charged with two felony crimes related to his disrupting the auction.

Because of the nature of this state — vast tracts of undeveloped land that are breathtakingly beautiful, surprisingly fragile, and geologically rich, all at the same time — Utah is often ground-zero for big environmental battles. Huge swaths of Utah’s territory are owned by the federal government, which generates much resentment in a largely conservative state that, frankly, doesn’t have a lot going for it aside from lots of open space. People in the outlying and very desolate parts of the state crave the jobs that oil and gas fields, as well as various types of mining operations, would bring. But naturally those very same regions are the unspoiled wild places that environmentalists want to ensure remain unspoiled, essentially locked away from the locals who would tear them up in search of something of more tangible value.

With those kinds of tensions percolating through the atmosphere, it probably goes without saying that DeChristopher’s trial generated a lot of emotion, and a lot of theater. And as it happens, I’ve been a witness to much of it, due to the fact that I work right across the street from the federal courthouse. The plaza just west of my building has hosted a number of big — well, big for Utah — rallies in support of DeChristopher, attracting heavyweights lefties like Peter Yarrow of the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary; the actress Daryl Hannah; and Utah’s own Terry Tempest Williams, an acclaimed naturalist and writer. It was all rather entertaining during the trial itself. But the fun ended this week, following DeChristopher’s sentencing. (There was never any question he would be convicted, of course, not in this state. He may have been on trial in a federal court, but it was a federal court in downtown Salt Lake City, under the auspices of a judge who was born and raised here. And in this state, you do not cross Big Business or interfere with the free market and win your case. A casual glance at the comments in the Salt Lake Tribune suggest a not-insignificant percentage of Utahns would like to see him tarred and feathered. Of course, an also not-insignificant number of people would like to nominate him for sainthood. Utah also happens to share a lot of history with Edward Abbey, whose novel The Monkey Wrench Gang is said to have inspired radical environmentalism in the first place… yet another of those diametrical contrasts that make life here so interesting.)

DeChristopher was sentenced Tuesday to two years in a federal minimum-security prison as well as a fine of $10,000, which is surprisingly light in my opinion. Not because I think he deserved more, but because I expected the judge to throw the book at him. (The maximum sentence could have been a full ten years in prison.) His supporters on the plaza disagreed, however. They apparently thought he should’ve gotten simple probation. I’ve also heard they were angry because the judge hadn’t allowed him to explain the necessity of his actions in order to do something to limit climate change. Whatever was motivating them, they were getting ugly by the time I got off work. And this is where my rant begins.

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The Rearview-Mirror View

Roger Ebert’s latest blog post makes me feel a little better about my growing curmudgeonliness, er, sense of disconnectedness from the culture around me. He begins by quoting a writer I’ve never heard of, Marshall McLuhan:

“Most people…still cling to what I call the rearview-mirror view of their world. By this I mean to say that because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world.”

So far, this all sounds like the kind of ivory-tower “critical theory” claptrap that spooked me away from pursuing a Master’s degree in literature. But the post becomes quite a bit more interesting when Ebert applies McLuhan’s rearview theory to his own life. And here’s the section that really caught my eye:

In the media, I am analog by training and long habit. Phonograph records seem logical to me. Now that I can obtain any music in an instant on the internet, the music is no longer present. When I owned an LP album, I possessed something tangible. When I download an album from iTunes, I can listen to it, but I possess nothing I can touch. When I enter a theater and see a movie, I experience it differently than when I watch a video. The instant availability of tens of thousands of movies diminishes them somehow. In my nature I subscribe to the principle that a movie involves a screening in a place and at a time. The movie is an event. I do not make the mistake of believing my experience is better than those raised in digital immersion. Nor should they believe theirs is superior to mine. We are simply different; I have an older frame of reference. The fact is that my argument with video games may be a matter of my embedded nature. The thought of spending hours playing one fills
me with dismay. Nor are many gamers eager to read Balzac’s Lost Illusions, which I have just finished. Some are open to both. I applaud them.

Bingo. Now, I haven’t read Balzac myself, nor do I think it likely that I ever will. But this is merely a difference between my tastes and Ebert’s (or possibly an example of my own embedded nature, being a generation younger than him; certainly I’m more open to superhero movies than he seems to be!). Aside from that, however, what he says about tangible media so completely mirrors my own feelings that I wish I’d written it myself. I especially like the bit about how movies used to have a real significance that has been lessened by the evolution of home (or, I suppose these days, personal) video. I was just saying something along those lines to a younger coworker the other day… a much younger coworker who has no memory of  what it was like back when you had to see an incredible movie as many times in the theater as you could, because once it was gone there was no guarantee you’d ever see it again. He couldn’t imagine such a thing; I have moments when I miss it.

It doesn’t really matter, I suppose. Human beings have been lamenting for centuries how different things are now than when they were kids, and how, in their eyes, things used to be better. But it is nevertheless good to occasionally find some reassurance that you’re not the first to feel that way, as it often seems.

Incidentally, I told you the next couple entries wouldn’t mention the space shutt– oops. Sorry.

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A Bit of Explanation

Over on my Flickr photostream, where the image from the previous entry resides, our friend Cranky Robert asked if I could explain a bit about the book you see in that photo standing alongside my bottle of The Good Stuff. I thought some others among the Loyal Readers might be curious about that as well, so here is an extended and somewhat reworked version of what I said over there:

The book is a childhood treasure of mine, a Christmas gift I received when I was ten or eleven. (If I recall correctly — and I’ll admit that I might not — it was a stocking stuffer along with a non-fiction book about black holes and the novelization of the Disney movie The Black Hole.) Copyrighted in 1979, two years before the first orbiter actually reached space, Shuttle: The World’s First Spaceship was a work of pop-science, essentially a primer for laypeople (and precocious 11-year-olds like myself) on just what the shuttle was, how it was supposed to work, and why it was going to be cool. Like so many similar publications from that general era — I’m thinking primarily of magazines like OMNI, Science Digest, and Popular Mechanics, as well as a number of book-length works by so-called “futurologists” — it was breathlessly optimistic and filled with wild predictions of space stations, orbital factories and laboratories, solar-power-collecting satellites that would beam energy back to Earth, and, eventually, vast cylindrical colonies in space. And all of these would be constructed and/or serviced by shuttles and their descendants, which would of course be refinements of the shuttle’s spaceplane design, and not Apollo-style capsules, which is where we’re headed back to now in the post-shuttle era. All that stuff about cities in space may sound laughable now, but it really wasn’t so
outlandish when I was a kid. In a culture where we’d just recently had men walking on the moon, it all seemed plausible, if extremely ambitious. And back then I believed we had the ambition. I wanted to believe that, anyhow.

As you may have gathered, this book was the source of many of my visions of the future that never arrived. I was interested in the shuttles before I read it — which is why Mom and Dad got it for me as a gift — but Shuttle: The World’s First Spaceship was what really fired up my dreams and gave them specific, real-world forms. More real-world than Star Trek, anyhow. And so, for the purposes of the photo and the occasion, the book seemed like the most appropriate symbol of what I was saying goodbye to. (It was also convenient to hand, and small enough to sit beside the bottle and glass without distracting attention away from them.)

And at this point, I imagine my Loyal Readers have read quite enough about space shuttles for a while. I still have some thoughts on the subject, but I’ll hold onto them for the time being and promise the next few entries will be on different subjects…

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A Toast

A Toast

To the good ships Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour. May history record that they were stepping stones on the way to something wonderful, and not the dead end many would have you believe. Here’s to their two brave crews who didn’t make it home. And here’s also to the dreams of a generation born just slightly too late to have witnessed the glories of Apollo; the shuttles were our spaceships. The fact that they never quite lived up to the promises we were made is disappointing, yes. But they were magnificent machines nevertheless, and they should be remembered as such…

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Mission Complete

STS-135 Atlantis Landing (201107210007HQ)

When I flipped on my TV at 3:45 this morning to see if anyone was covering the landing, all I could find was a mess of infomercials, a rerun of the previous night’s Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and some talking head blathering on about the debt ceiling. That speaks volumes about this whole situation, doesn’t it? Thirty years ago, all three major broadcast networks (this was before Fox, of course) devoted hours to the comings and goings of the space shuttles. Today people have other things on their minds, like Magic Bullet blenders and which political party is more effectively holding the nation’s economy hostage with their maneuverings. Fortunately, though, I had the Internet to turn to, and the NASA TV website. I got the live video feed up and streaming just in time to hear the double sonic boom as Atlantis homed in on Kennedy Space Center.

I’ll be honest, I was feeling pretty anxious as I sat there alone in my home office in the wee, dark hours, surrounded by an empty house and a silent world. I had this irrational fear that in spite of all the checks and inspections, something was going to happen to Atlantis as she re-entered, or as she touched down, and the whole damn shuttle program would end on a note of tragedy and ignominy. But no… it was a perfect landing, as smooth as a high mountain lake on a windless day. The only way it could’ve been better was if the sun had been up. There’s not much to see during night landings until the shuttle crosses the threshold of the runway and gets illuminated by the floodlights. Oh, NASA tries to make things interesting with night-vision cameras and a feed from the pilot’s heads-up display — and I’ll admit it is kind of neat to see the runway lights rising up out of the darkness through the cockpit window — but for this last, final, ultimate landing, it would’ve been really wonderful for Atlantis to be gleaming a triumphant white in a blue sky as she coasted past lush green swamps and waterways flashing like mirrors. C’est la vie, I suppose.

The last space shuttle came to a complete stop at 5:57:54 a.m. EDT, or 3:57 here in Salt Lake City. I continued to watch until 4:20, even though nothing was visibly happening. (I remember being so impatient as a kid watching the coverage of the early missions, because I expected the astronauts to just fling open the shuttle’s door and hop out immediately after landing, the way my various fictional space heroes did. I had no idea what was taking them so long!) As odd as this may sound, I was simply enjoying the sight of the orbiter resting on the runway, her details gradually filling in as the sky brightened behind her. There were lights in the cockpit windows, shining out with a warm amber glow, and the scene reminded me — rather incongruously — of those idealized paintings of woodsy cabins after a long, successful day of fishing. I found myself imagining the mission commander walking around beneath her, inspecting and admiring his ship while enjoying the cool, moist air on his skin and the warmth and smell from the coffee cup in his hand. Or perhaps I was imagining myself doing those things. For a moment there, I really wasn’t sure.

I couldn’t stay up until the astronauts disembarked, as much as I wanted to. The sun may have been rising over Florida, but it was still practically the middle of the night in SLC, and I had a long day of work to look forward to, and a concert tonight that will keep me up late again, and I don’t sleep as much as I ought to anyhow. So with a half-smile that was a mixture of sadness and satisfaction, I said my goodbyes to the space shuttle Atlantis, clicked off my computer, and went back to bed for a couple hours. And as I was drifting off, the DJ in my head served up a fragment of an old song, Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind,” a line about deadlines and commitments, and a mood of being resigned to an unadventurous adulthood even while your spirit is still yearning for something else…

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Random Suspicious Thought

Do you suppose the real reason why NASA granted Atlantis an extra day in space was so the shuttle program wouldn’t end on the 42nd anniversary of the first moon landing? Hmmmm.

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Only One Day Left

The sign says it all:

I’ve learned that Atlantis had one final job to perform after undocking from the ISS and before returning home. Earlier today, the crew deployed a tiny satellite called PicoSat from a canister in her payload bay. Weighing in at only eight pounds, PicoSat’s function is to send back data on the performance of its own solar power cells, in hopes of learning something that could be useful for future space hardware. PicoSat is, of course, the last payload that will ever be deployed by a U.S. space shuttle, the 180th over the last three decades.

Atlantis looks to be in good shape and the weather forecast is favorable for a deorbit burn following her 200th orbit for this flight, leading up to a scheduled landing at 5:56 tomorrow morning, Eastern time (that’ll be 3:56 here in Utah). If something goes wrong, she’ll try again at the end of her 201st orbit, coming down at 7:32 AM Eastern (5:32 Mountain time). I’ve been thinking I shouldn’t even try to get up for the event — after all, I don’t sleep enough as it is, and this past week has been worse than usual in that regard, and I have a job to get to and plans for tomorrow evening that will probably result in yet another late night — but like I’ve been saying all along, this is important. Odds are I’m going to be very bleary-eyed when I stagger into work tomorrow…

Photo source.

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Irony Sucks, Doesn’t It?

I don’t buy a lot of books anymore — long story — and Salt Lake is lucky enough to have a handful of good independent shops that somehow survived the corporate incursions of the ’90s, but I still thought this cartoon was deadly accurate:

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I’ll be honest… I actually like Barnes and Noble, even though my buy-local instincts tell me I’m not supposed to. Borders has never done a lot for me; they never seemed to have what I was looking for and what they did have always seemed to have been lightly flogged with a weed whacker. (I’m very big on condition… if I’m shelling out ten bucks for a paperback, I want one that looks like I just plucked it off the printing press, not one that’s been creased and dog-eared just getting it out of the carton and onto the shelves.) But B&N was cool. For a faceless corporate giant and all.

It does make you wonder… many areas don’t have any book-buying alternatives except the big chain stores. If B&N goes the way of Borders — and that certainly looks likely — then what’s left? Wal-Mart? Eww. There’s always Amazon.com, but wonky “recommended for you” algorithms aren’t the same as leisurely browsing physical shelves with pleasant classic music on the PA and a cup of coffee in your hand. One more way in which the digital revolution has brought us unprecedented convenience, but at a great cost…

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Parting Shot

Atlantis in the light of the rising sun, shortly after casting off from the space station last night:

STS-135_atlantis-after-undocking.jpgPhoto source.

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