[Newspoetry] Manned and UnManned; Poetic Reasonings

[DL Emerick]

House to Back Bush on Moon, Mars Trips 
The House for the first time in five years will weigh in on national space policy today, considering a bipartisan endorsement of President Bush's initiative to send humans to the moon and Mars and authorizing an extra $1.3 billion over the next two years to forestall cuts in NASA's traditional...   (By Guy Gugliotta, The Washington Post) 

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It would be nice if they were doing all of this spending on high-technology because they really felt that there were valid reasons for a "manned" space missions.  But, I suspect the cause is entirely homo-centric.  We will spend heavily to send "men and women" into space -- but not tv cameras and microphones.  It would be nice if they would have a necessary and proper debate on these huge extra costs when it is decided without the least debate that our space missions must be "manned."

If space missions were a competitive business, and there is a sense in which they are (see materials on commercial satellite launches, for instance), the US "manned" mission approach would be as antiquated as the old USSR mission approach.  The USSR had sophisticated ideas using the low technology capabilities of their country.  They had neither sophisticated metals nor fuels.  Their manufacturing systems were especially unable to produce small light-weight miniaturized components.

So, everything in the USSR space program was ruggedly engineered and robustly built -- big and bulky -- gargantuan, even.  This incidentally led to boosters that could lift massive weights into orbit -- such as space stations.  But, the tremendous size of Soviet rockets frightened US analysts all during the Cold War -- because we kept thinking, "My God!  If they can ever figure out -- or else capture or steal -- miniaturized devices, their rockets will rule the world!"  They never did, of course, thanks to a strong US technology embargo program that used to monitor and regulate completely all trading with the Communists.

(The recent collapse of this rule of fear in technology trading now makes it possible for Communist China to say to the US: "We will use our nukes on you if you interfere on the Taiwanese issue" as they did last week.  Oh, where is the anger and resentment, the Congressional hearing, you would have expected in the old days?  A powerful foreign enemy nation threatens to use nuclear weapons against us and yet we say and do nothing?  Who is this Bush and whatever happened to Quemoy and Matsu islands, over the proper defense of which JFK and RMN so vigorously and intelligently debated, in 1960?  Ah, back then we had presidents and presidential candidates who actually knew a great deal about the world and its history and its needs.

Today, we have a president we re-elected because most people thought he was like their kid brother -- not the smarter one, but the one that was more fun to be with, to pal around with, to party with.  Heck, you could drink a keg with George -- but Kerry would have been a party pooper!  And, you just knew you could count on George to empathize with you, no matter what you told him, while you just knew that Kerry would have to reason about anything, first, and judge you, second, before ever deciding whether it was proper to give you a hug and show you any sympathy.)

We have become a nation that decides viscerally, first.  How do the entrails read?  What is your gut feeling?  Ah, that is the stuff(ing) of leadership today.  We no longer think, we no longer reason, we no longer lay down standards of rationality.  It just doesn't compute!

One fictional hero of mine was the Mentat in the original novel DUNE.  The Mentat's model was simple: take into account all of the available information, then draw all of the connecting lines from these dots, compute what reality must be in its fully dimensional self, if all that is hidden, including the future, were also now to be seen.

The House, the Congress, the Nation, the World itself would be better for this, if once again reason itself were to re-appear and to become fashionable again.  And, my friends, what would be signs of this alleged return of rationality (for there are some who say it has never been here, yet)?  Well, in a word, true debate would return -- for reason is ever and always an act of compromise, an open discussion of differences that ought to be -- not repressed, but tolerated and accommodated, even celebrated.

During the Vietnam War, the truest protestors to the war, I thought, were symbolize by the flower children -- the girl depicted on Time's cover -- the one in the flowing light skirt and blouse, the one who held out a daisy toward an approaching soldier, a bayoneted rifle across his khaki-covered, helmeted body, the one who poked that flower down the barrel of the soldier boy's gun.  Oh, we Freudians know how classically latent all the sexuality of the entire universe is there, just in that one moment of time, when a boy meets a girl, face to face, and she gives him a flower, melting his long iron, his shooting gun, his hard rod.  Debate then properly dissolves and is completely dismissed from thinking -- and thinking itself becomes a distraction -- when only feeling should be flowing freely.

But, otherwise, my friends, and everywhere else, when we meet, let us reason and let us insist on its signs.