Vic Socotra

19 July 2009

The Great Black Wing

(Saturn Booster with Werhner Von Braun)

It dipped down into the upper fifties last night, with low humidity. There is something wrong with all this, but I will take it while it is happening. I don't permit myself to be as black in this public space as I feel sometimes. With the Jet Stream looping so low this pleasant summer, it is easy to put the Great Warming aside for a moment.

I could launch off into polemic easily enough, but chose not to do so.

I am content, for example, that I am not the program manager of the RSM-56 Bulava (“Mace”) rocket system at the Moscow Institute of Thermal Technologies. It has failed again, and doubtless management will be scourged.

It is a cautionary tale about abandoning technology due to hard times, and then attempting to re-create it from whole cloth on demand, when the people who created the miracles have moved on to retirement, or something worthwhile.

I stood under the looming hulk of a Saturn V booster on display at the Redstone Arsenal one time. It was the rocket that sent man to the moon, and remains the largest and most powerful launch vehicle ever brought to operational status. NASA launched a lucky thirteen of them between 1967 and 1973 without a casualty. They were, and are, the biggest rockets ever made in terms of height, weight and payload.

The Soviets had to compete, of course. Their Energia rocket had slightly more thrust when it flew two test missions in the late 1980s, but was cancelled as the whole socialist enterprise began to crumble.

The man who described the Saturn V to me said we couldn’t build another one on a bet these days, any more than the Russians can quickly build a much smaller rocket now.

I would hate to be a strategic planner in Beijing today as well. The seeds of dissolution of their broad land empire show signs of fraying. They appear determined not go permit the tensions that undid the Soviet Union to begin to fray the fabric of Han hegemony. I wish them luck in that endeavor, since I bid no one ill.

Of course my sympathy is with the Tibetan and the Uighur people. Freedom and self autonomy is always the preferred option, though that can be a perilous path these days.

That is true here, too. A pal wrote me, castigating the memory of Uncle Walter. He was at the root of the abandonment of objective journalism, he thinks, and the beginning of the institutional elitism that left the golden age of Edward R. Murrow behind.

That may be true, though the tradition of objectivism in journalism is a fairly new development in the history of this version of democracy. From the beginning, the news was about partisan causes and polemic.

Uncle Walter was a product of the Depression, and a New Dealer. He told the story straight about the good war, and his "20th Century" series was a staple of my youth. That he was unable to see the 1968 Tet offensive for what it was, a disaster for the Vietcong, may be unforgivable to some.

It is undeniable from an objective perspective that it began a relentless drumbeat in the media for withdrawal that confounded a military force that never saw defeat in the field.

At least Uncle Walter feigned a certain objectivity that was entirely lost of his successor, the contemptible Dan Rather, and the adoption of the Baby Boomer myopia of the current generation of those who call themselves journalists.

In a way, we are home again, full circle, with the right and left having their own house organs, Keith Olberman versus Bill O’Reilly in a ying-yang of vituperation.

The daily news and newspapers are dying, as you have noted, and what is to come is not yet completely clear. There is a marvelous piece on an on-line and print amalgam called Politico, which is causing a sensation in this hot-house town. It may represent the future, where we get our news from silos of self interest groups, and will not have to accept the partisan pabulum that passes for objective news in the Post and New York Times.

It is interesting in the extreme, and I venture across the silos with curiosity and more than a little trepidation. Beyond the mainstream media, our Liberals of today appear more closely aligned with the old Progressives of yore, the Fellow Travelers whose name is again being spoken without irony.

One of the lessons of the Donk's music theater was that the heart and soul that wrested this continent from those who held it is very much alive. The well-meaning middle class is out there, too, the ones who were frightened by the prospect of another Great Depression, and were willing to turn the keys to the mighty machine over to the slick Chicagoan and his fellow urban travelers.

The jitters being displayed by the Blue Dog Democrats- remember, they beat their Republican opponents only because they promised rectitude, not a great leap forward into socialism- are well earned. The majority opinion here in our beloved republic is quite centrist, and generally in favor of fairness.

Great revolutions like the original one in 1776, or the New Deal are always near-run things.

Hence the tendency of the victors to overreach, as happened with the second Bush, and appears to be happening now. The corrupt Democratic majority in Congress fell to the Contract With America because most people were fed up with it. The Republican majority failed for the same reason.

Never waste a good crisis as an opportunity for change. The massive increase in taxes to enshrine national healthcare as the keystone of the progressive state is an act that can only be accomplished during the stampede.

After all, the financial bubble was fueled by our own addiction to foreign oil, which caused huge pools of cash seeking a safe place. The investment of that money back into the US economy was too tempting for the clever guys not to play games with, and so brought us to the brink of ruin.

My pal thinks it may have taken us just beyond it. It could be that the yanking back and forth may prove more than the structure can handle.

The underlying context is the flapping of H G Wells’ great black wing. Day in and day out it blurs, as it did in The Time Machine. The Republicans attempted to starve the Federal system so that the beast would never recover. The Democratic answer is to attempt to expand it so rapidly, and so completely, that it will swamp the system and gather us all onto the mother teat of Washington.

It might work. The New Deal fundamentally changed the relationship of the people to their government, and the reverberations have not ceased yet nearly eighty year on.

Of course the bill has not yet come due.

Is there any wonder that there is hysteria on the right? The mainstream dismisses concerns about the neighborhood activists of ACORN managing the census as delusional, like the preoccupation about where the President might really have been born.

I agree. This can’t really be happening, can it? It must be delusional. Wasn’t this about a financial panic?

I noted that a mysterious $250.00 payment was deposited to my Veteran's Disability Account a few weeks ago. I can only take the payment as a bribe, since in any other context such an amount offered to curry favor would ordinarily be dismissed with contempt.

Times being what they are, I laughed and spent it. What do they call it in Chicago?

"Walking around money?"

When the Bush people did it, they at least gave me the courtesy of keeping what I made, rather than pretending it was a gift.

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