Mars Needs Dim Republicans
Dubya dons a shiny spacesuit, dreams of spending billions to meet
little green men. The nation cringes

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Wednesday, January 14, 2004

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Oh right like this is exactly what we need.


Let us imagine the discussion: "Boys, the nation's in massive reeling
record-breaking debt and morale's at an all-time low and disposable
American soldiers are dying brutal horrific deaths every day over
nothing at all except our greed and flagrant cronyism and corporate
petrochemical profiteering.

"Our cities are gasping and health care is a joke and we've mauled
Medicare beyond recognition, and we're plundering the living hell out
of Social Security, the last remaining stable and sound fund left, to
try and shore up our rapacious and gluttonous spending.

"There are no WMDs and our former allies openly resent us and the poll
ratings are slipping and the big glops of warmongering lies are drying
like blood stains into a carpet. And it's an election year. Damn.

"What's to be done? What could rally a wary country during its time of
humiliated need and force-fed ignorance? What could turn this troubled
nation around in the face of oily corporate war and fiscal gluttony
and environmental savagery?

"Why, neato space stations on the moon, and sending men to Mars,
that's what!"

Yes indeed. Leave it to BushCo to try and slap an astronomically
expensive, useless balm on the nation's gaping wounds by vainly
attempting to recapture some of that droning faux-'50s and -'60s
nostalgia no one really asked for.

Remember that time? The "greatest generation"? A time when white-bread
repressed often unhappily married segregationist America gathered
'round the ol' black-and-white to gaze in passionate wonder at the
images beamed back from the Apollo landings?

What a time it was. Don't you want some of that sense of desperate
hopefulness back? Of course you do. Got $500 billion to pay for it?
Hey, that was the cost estimate for a similar man-on-Mars scheme when
Dubya Sr. proposed it in 1989, just before he was promptly laughed off
the fiscal stage.

Of course, like every obscene BushCo proposal, there was never a
mention of how NASA could ever possibly pay for such a venture, and no
mention of how BushCo could rape the Treasury that much further to
fund random exercises in ridiculous excess. Oh well.

Look at it this way. Dubya will, by every account, go down as the
worst environmental president in American history. He will also be
remembered as the most blindly warmongering president and the least
articulate president and the most corporate-shilling president and the
most flagrantly fraudulent and borderline treasonous president.

And, hence, you can bet your big snakeskin Texas cowboy boots he wants
this "big ol' Mars thingy" to be some sort of, you know, legacy. He
wants his name in the history books as the one who decided to meet the
little green men. He wants to stick a flag in the rusty planet and
claim it in the name of, you kow, Ronald Reagan.

This from a man who never cared a whit for space exploration in his
entire spoon-fed career, a man who never even once visited the famed
Johnson Space Center in Houston while serving as Texas governor. And
just know half the impulse for this inane new idea is so Shrub can get
himself flown to the space-shuttle launch pad and have his picture
taken in a shiny spacesuit. How cute.

It's got that reek. It's got that reek of typical macho Republican
election-year BS, the sort of hollow grandiose chest thumping that
stains so many BushCo PR stunts, all war and guns and rockets and oil
and big slabs of chemically blasted hormone injected semirancid Texas
beef (hey, it's what's for dinner).

Look. NASA is wonderful. Space exploration is magnificent and
essential and we learn enormous amounts about ourselves in the
process. The Spirit rover on Mars right now? Breathtaking.

Astounding new technologies are developed during major NASA missions,
ideas that trickle down into the cultural mainstream and make life, if
not easier, then at least more interesting, or lighter, or thinner, or
edible at temperatures down to minus 450 degrees with a battery pack
that lasts 127 hours and a new infrared extrasensory ink that can be
read by blind comatose monkeys. Space is good.

But look again. Our schools are desperate. The Wal-Mart/SUV mentality
is a national cancer. Basic services nationwide are being starved and
shut down as cities scramble for fiscal scraps. John Ashcroft still
has a job.

The national treasury has been looted and plundered like never before
in American history, toppling from a record surplus to a record
deficit in a little over three years, with 3.1 million newly
unemployed Americans as a bitter kicker. That tiny blip of an economic
"recovery" you keep reading about? Tell that to your unemployed
neighbors.

And it's just shy of appalling that BushCo is suddenly all atwitter
over a massive, impossible, ridiculously expensive scheme to send a
manned mission to Mars, when any 5-year-old could come up with roughly
2,323 more vital and needful areas where such huge sums of money could
be spent. Can you think of five, just off the top of your head, as you
step around that homeless person? Damn right you can.

Do we need to recall that sucker-punch $87 bil BushCo reamed through
Congress to help pay for our continued occupation of Iraq, a nation
that doesn't want us and was never a threat to us and that is now
equaling Vietnam in costs, both fiscal and humanitarian? Does Mars
mean we get to bring our troops home and save those budget-gutting
billions and redirect them toward something progressive? One guess.

Maybe we should just shrug it off. Just dismiss it as yet another a
silly exercise in political ego and bogus machismo. After all, it's
all about big dumb gesture, all about trying to cover up appalling
atrocities and insulting policy in an election year -- much like
suddenly pretending to care about immigrants, or health care, or gay
rights, when your party defines itself as the world headquarters of
homophobic pro-corporate isolationism.

This is what it boils down to, really: a big joke. There will be no
men on Mars in 2020. There will be no massive, super-keen space
station on the moon anytime soon. Even BushCo's own financial advisers
openly cringe when the Mumbly One tosses up such an obvious and
impossibly costly PR stunt, one so clearly designed to instill a false
sense of hope and "America rules!" faux patriotism in a country
heavily drugged on fear and false righteousness.

All well and good, right? All just silly politics as usual, really,
just so much election-year flatulence from the administration that
brought you the New Vietnam.

That is, until you realize who the joke is on.