Welcome Home, Sorry To See You Go

From Space.com

In the predawn hours Atlantis returned home from space for the last time, safely bringing her crew of four back and ending the space shuttle program.

All things must end; that I understand. But I have a hard time seeing this as a happy ending, for I see now an excuse to end the American space program, not a reason to move ahead.

James Lileks sums up well how I feel:

NASA is keen to tell you there’s a still a future for sending Americans into space, but there’s a general cultural anomie that seems content to watch movies about people in space, but indifferent to any plans to put them there. This makes me grind my teeth down to the roots, but I suppose that’s a standard reaction when the rest of your fellow citizenry doesn’t share the precise and exact parameters of your interests and concerns. That’s the problem when you grow up with magazines telling you where we’re going after the moon, with grade-school notebooks that had pictures of the space stations to come, when the push to Mars was regarded as an inevitable next step.

Just got hung up on the “why?” part, it seems. Also the “how” and the “how much” and other details. I can see the reason for taking our time – develop new engines, perfect technology, gather the money and the will. It’s not like anything’s going anywhere. But it’s not like we’re going anywhere if we’re not going anywhere, either – when nations, cultures stop exploring, it’s a bad sign. You’re ceding the future. If you have a long view that regards nation-states as quaint relics of a time in human history when maps had lines – really, you can’t see them from space! We’re all one, you know – then it doesn’t matter whether China or the US puts a flag on Mars. It’s possible a Chinese Mars expedition would commemorate the first boot on red soil with a statement that spoke for everyone on the planet, not a particular culture or nation. It’s possible. But history would remember that they chose to go, and we chose not to.

So what’s the attachment, really? Childhood attachment to Star Trek fantasies, geeky fascination with spaceships, adolescent marination in sci-fi visions of rockets and moon bases and PanAm shuttles engaged in a sun-bathed ballet with a space station revolving to the strains of Strauss, phasers and warp six and technobabble and the love of great serene machinery knifing through clouds of glowing dust? Probably. It’s not over, I know – but it’s like watching the last of Columbus’ ships return, and learning they’re cutting up the mast for firewood, and no one’s planning to go back any time soon. At first you look at the ocean and imagine what’s out there, because that’s what you’ve been doing all your life – and then you lean to stop wondering, because it reminds you of the day you saw the last ship leave.

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi... Thus passes the glory of the world.

At The Bike Shop

"Nothing like a bike shop to remind you how the economy would look if capitalism was abolished and pot legalized."

See James Lileks for a more complete explanation.

Not Taking The Little Changes

Back from the Inland Empire - Spokane, not SoCal - and rather wishing I hadn't. Rain turning to snow here; of course, that's happening up there too.

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James Lileks has a interesting Bleat today; one of pushing back against the annoying little changes in life, changes that aren't always for the better. So you make your own changes.

The washes always end the same: the crew chief looks over the work, gives a thumbs-up. I give a two-finger salute. Which I did. Hail and farewell. Won’t be back, because your sticker will be right below my field of vision and I have no idea if it will come off without leaving residue and there are other places whose locales don’t carry nineteen tons of personal luggage that make me feel old and sad and astonished at the things that come and go, and seem inestimably precious in recollection.

Also, your typefaces suck.

Change is not Progress

James Lileks today:

But it’s boring to criticize the 50s for not being as “enlightened” as the 70s, or think that “progress” doesn’t have trade-offs. I put “progress” in “quotes” because the term is generally used to describe the devolution of social strictures, and while I think many such erosions had salutary effects, civilizations often mistake change for progress. Any change premised on the mutability of human nature usually ends up being a mistake. Not the mutability of people; we’re quite pliable. Our natures, however, are fixed.

Euros and T-Shirts

James Lileks, in last Friday's entry:

On the other hand, Elgar is one of those artists who’s distinctly British. Decent, just, regal, solid. Every European culture has distinct composers who capture the national flavor – Wagner’s theatrically tragic romanticism, Respighi’s time-soaked Roman interludes, all the mournful bipolar Russians. (France had no distinct classical voices until Debussy and Ravel started blowing smoke and pouring absinthe; they got in on the tail-end of the tradition to make its decline seem comfortingly modern. There was Berlioz, who was amazingly French, but: how many great French symphonists? Right.) These are sounds that shape cultures, create and reinforce identity. As an American I don’t believe in this sort of cultural homogeneity – for us. But for them? It’s who they are. You can be an Italian in Europe with Italian values in an European context, but the idea of making everyone Europeans with European values, with nothing to distinguish the individual cultures but varieties of cheese seems foolish. Because these things will assert themselves again, and they will do so at the worst times.


O Irony: Europe could be truly multicultural if it defined the term to mean a large geographical entity with several distinct cultural identities sharing simple values – parliamentary democracy, degrees of socialism, abhorrence of militarism, and so on. But the leaders have pushed multiculturalism down to the local level, where immigrant cultures abrade long-standing traditions, and the pub that had no trouble being down the block from the Church is now forbidden a license to move because it would be too close to a Mosque. The pretense of continental old-culture integration must assume that immigrant cultures assume to the new transnational model, when most immigrant cultures will simply maintain their old ways. Why not? I would. It’s human nature.


The American experience – in theory, anyway – required acceptance of a set of civic ideals, because those were the cultural norms. As played out in the 19th and early 20th century, this meant learning how to operate the System that ran large cities, and if you were in smaller cities, it meant forming discrete isolated organizations that kept private traditions alive while maintaining involvement with the civic apparatus. It generally worked because everyone was from somewhere else, and everyone was interested in Doing Better. Getting Ahead. Making Things. Baking a bigger pie to be carved up, or inventing a new pie altogether.


Bromides and generalities, I know. But of all the Outrage of the Day stories that gush over the wires, the tale of the high school kids who were expelled for not hiding American flag T-shirts on the Fifth of May is one that just . . . depressed me, completely, for a while. So the act of wearing a flag on another nation’s non-holiday holiday is an act of provocation and malice. So we are now to assume that other American citizens will be insulted by the presence of the American flag on a day that commemorates a battle against France in another nation, and must be protected from the sight lest they . . . what? Get violent? I doubt any school administrator would admit he or she suspected that would happen, which leaves us with: The presence of the flag is offensive. So says a public official.


Tell me how this goes someplace we want to be.

Lileks on Pixar

Sorry, one more Bleat link: Lileks discusses Pixar here.

Wall-E is plucky & cheerful, but horribly lonely; whoever figured out the little scene where he rocks himself to sleep at the end of his day should get laurels and a lifetime of champagne. “Up” puts it up front. “Toy Story 2” has that rip-out-your-heart song by the doll who was left under the bed when her girl grew up and forgot her. “Monsters Inc,” less so – everyone’s well-adjusted, except for the evil lizard – but Sully’s scene at the end is pretty much every parent’s dream, a trip back to toddlerhood.

Maybe that’s why I don’t mind that they’re making “Cars 2.” Slogan: “Because we don’t need to rip your heart out every summer, do we?”

Quotable

From Lileks' The Bleat:

The difficult part of the day is not sinking into the Slough of Carelessness, and letting all the obligations and duties float past while I twirl in the eddies.

Looks Wrong

You can justify (or is it rationalize?) the firing of General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner by President Obama just feels wrong.

I'm not the only one.

As James Lileks says,

Maybe I’m old-school, but “President fires CEO” looks as wrong as “Pope fires Missile.”

Ah, the sweet smell of hope and change. Smells like socialism.

Paul Harvey... Good Day!

Paul Harvey passed away this past weekend.

Lots of words have been written, but I liked what James Lileks had to say:

Ninety years! It’s hard to feel sad. Sometimes you hear of the death of a famous person, or formerly famous person, and you deflate a little, partly because it’s a pity, him being dead and all, and mostly because it moves something from your own experience from the ALIVE into the GONE column, and makes you wonder if you’re replenishing your own store of cultural icons, or just dusting the ones you’ve had for years. For some reason when I heard Paul Harvey was dead (once again, via Twitter) I thought: damn. And then I wanted to applaud. Some lives are like that. Curtain down, the house is dark - and everyone decides, on their own, to clap. I don’t know what Paul Harvey was like, and I don’t care: that career was a performance. Sure, I’ll clap. And stand.

Surpassing the Glories of the Tsars

"The range of experiences available to the most ordinary kid nowadays surpasses the glories once reserved for Tsars."

James Lileks

Defend the Things in Which We Believe

James Lileks writes on the Fourth:

And so another Fourth comes. The vast majority of Americans of all political stripes will greet the day with pride – the reasons will vary, but the core ideas are still shared. The future, however, contain a very big question, and it’s not one we haven’t faced before: together, or apart? Except now the terms have been redefined: “together” implies that we must throw our weight in with a portion of the world that seems intellectually incapable of apprehending the concept of a greater foe, and takes refuge in the dream of “disaffected” or “disenfranchised” physicians disconnected from a greater meme. “Apart” has come to mean we define our culture in opposition to another, and confront it with values we truly believe to be superior, and do so with full knowledge of our own flaws. Yesterday was the anniversary of Gettysburg, a day in which the divisions were horrible and bloody, and had to be hammered out to make the great experiment whole again. Rent apart, we had to work our way back to the whole. This is different. We have to come together, in order that we may stand apart, and defend the things in which we believe.

...It’s not a matter of race or religion; the logical extension of the ideas of the West transcends those things. I see those ideas in the flag, which is why I put it up. People claw their way to live in a place where it flies. It’s an idea that happens to be contained within a nation.

The Height of Civilization

James Lileks, writing in The Bleat:

They’re turning off the Eiffel tower to save the planet. The tower – which is the largest metal refutation of the concept that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar – is probably fueled by nuke-juice, but never mind. It’s going off to set a good example. Let us all be inspired by the darkness... All lights will be turned off for five minutes to show concern. After which the lights will be turned back on, of course. It’s a peculiar inversion: the height of civilization now consists of undoing the plug, not connecting it.