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Does the nation seem to you fundamentally transformed from the one Obama inherited 13 months ago? Because from up here in the cheap seats, it looks like all the dilemmas that the President promised to transcend are still around – and most of them are using performance-enhancing drugs.
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| “If you have men who will only come if they know there is a good road, I don't want them. I want men who will come if there is no road at all.” -- David Livingstone
It is the ineradicable and fatal temptation of leftism to believe that it can begin the world anew.
Soviet communism promised a new order of the ages – a destruction of the class system that would yield an egalitarian utopia. In reality, it was able to produce little more than mediocre vodka and work boots that came in only one size.
When Mao Zedong promised “A Great Leap Forward” for China – a leap, it should be noted, predicated on suspending the laws of economics – the result was more than 30 million Chinese dead through a combination of mass starvation and torture.
Modern liberalism’s aspirations are far more pedestrian, of course; hapless rather than directly malevolent. But they don’t suffer for grandeur. Just ask Barack Obama, who, on the night he clinched the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, predicted that future generations would remember his triumph as “ the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Presumably his speechwriters exorcised the line about him placing a rainbow in the clouds as a sign of this new covenant.
A year on, however, the Gnostic priest in the White House is beginning to look a bit more like one of those doomsday prophets constantly readjusting the date for his predicted apocalypse. Does the nation seem to you fundamentally transformed from the one Obama inherited 13 months ago? Because from up here in the cheap seats, it looks like all the dilemmas that the President promised to transcend are still around – and most of them are using performance-enhancing drugs.
Of course, this tragedy for Obama and his progressive ilk is also their political accelerant. Because they long for perfection, they can never be fulfilled – and their efforts must continue. Like their godfather, Franklin Roosevelt, they believe in “freedom from fear” and “freedom from want” as fundamental rights. That’s quite a tall order given that both are categorically incompatible with the nature of reality.
And yet as they tilt at windmills (doubtlessly funded through Department of Energy grants), the temple-builders of the liberal establishment miss genuine opportunities for human progress. For they can’t seem to comprehend that real discovery is bloody, imperfect and lurching.
Just ask the families of the astronauts who were onboard the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 or the Columbia in 2003. While the media watchword for those craft – both of which exploded and took the lives of all on board – was “tragedy," the reality was something altogether different. They were martyrs for the cause of discovery. Like those who died on a lonely ocean five centuries earlier, they bore the yoke of civilizational expansion all the way to the grave.
That is why it is heart-rending to see the normally intemperate aspirations of Democratic Washington shrink on the issue of space exploration. The Obama Administration has announced that its new plan for NASA’s budget will scrap plans for return visits to the moon. Instead, the new request focuses on developing commercial space flight (a promising enterprise to be sure, but one dedicated solely to low Earth orbit) and funding continued work through the International Space Station, an endeavor that projects the worst features of earth – bureaucracy and international institutions – into the heavens.
That Obama, the most romantic prose stylist to inhabit the White House since Theodore Roosevelt, is deaf to the poetry of space is both a grave disappointment and a historical error.
For millennia, the observable universe ended with man’s field of vision. Only 107 years ago, we took to the sky for the first time. It has been less than 50 years since the first human being went into space. And it has been just over 40 since the American flag found a home on the lunar surface. In the century past, we made perhaps the greatest leap ever in man’s relationship to the universe. And now we are turning away. Whether through indifference or cowardice, we are engaging in a voluntary intellectual amputation.
Obama is not the only, nor even the main, source of this problem. NASA has become a bureaucracy like any other. It’s no surprise that enthusiasm for the great unknown wanes when it is used primarily to study the effects of weightlessness on mold. But the solution is to refocus on the spirit of discovery rather than to abandon the means necessary to fulfill it.
If America or any other nation turns its back on space, it becomes the caveman who ignores the sight of the first spark. It becomes Columbus content to mark time in a Spanish port. It becomes the Wright Brothers never leaving their Ohio bicycle shop. It spits in the face of wonder – and in so doing denies every noble impulse of humanity. |
