WHAT GOES UP MUST COME DOWN

I kept telling everyone it was a Golden Age in the 90's. Did they believe me? No! My favorite thing in all this is the way that Resident Bush changed selling his tax cut proposal. Last fall it was, "Times are good, it's time to give the money back." Now that times aren't so good he says "it's time to stimulate the economy." And when we've run up even bigger deficits than his Dad, it'll be time to what? End taxes and declare the country bankrupt? That greedy bonehead will say anything to get his gift to the rich through, no matter what. You know, with recession coming on and power blackouts, the Clinton 90's sure feel like the Good Ole Days now! Hell, even lowering interest rates another half point has failed to put excitement back in the economy! Things are really falling apart lately, aren't they?

NOT! We are so used to having it easy that we can't even tell what real duress is anymore. This is more like the economy exhaling a bit before taking the next breath. At least there's no presidential peccadilloes to talk about like in the Clinton Era, though with all those heart problems you gotta wonder whether our current Commander-in-Thief, sorry, Commander-in-Chief will even make it to the end of his term. That's right I'm talking about the REAL President, Dick Cheney. The guy who looks like he might be the one fulfilling the Zero Year Curse. What's Dubya going to do then?

Oh come on, don't look at me that way! Don't you read these columns? Every president who's died in office won an election in a year that ended in zero--that's the Zero Year Curse. That's why Cheney is toast. I hate it when I'm put under such duress, having to explain something a second time! Another symptom of America's falling IQ, no doubt!

We've gotten so used to things going up that we're just not prepared for things falling down again. But what goes up must come down. Like expectations and -- LOOK OUT!

Wow! Was that a meteor that just flashed by? No, just the space station Mir in it's dying glory.

First SkyLab, now Mir. Governments like to put astronaut toys like that up in the sky, but they all come crashing back down eventually. Actually I'm for space exploration in a way, but I don't have too many illusions about it. People won't go to space in any large numbers until we figure out something better than chemical rockets to get up there. Too expensive. Maybe gravity is just God's way of telling us to stay on the planet! Colonizing other planets will never solve our population problem anyway. Even if we could build cities on the Moon or terraform Mars (read Kim Stanley Robinson's Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy for a really entertaining blueprint how) and build enough rocket ships to take a few million emigrants there, they would only be replaced by new babies born here. In about ONE WEEK at the rate we're going. Oh well! Ultimately space exploration's going to be done by robots, not humans. It's a lot less to rocket up when you don't need all that life support equipment. But we continue to send up a few select astronauts. It's because our government really doesn't want to explore space that much. Robots could do it better, but astronauts simply make better PR. Pity, because if we explored space with robots, the one guarantee would be that we'd get really good at building them for all kinds of uses, not just space.

But there is one kind of rocketry that gets Dubya and Dick really excited: NMD, the National Missile Defense. You remember, Reagan's "nuclear umbrella," SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative. What we all called Star Wars.

Back in July last year I was lucky enough to see a big Star Wars test. Channel surfing, I stumbled upon CNN's feed live from Vandenberg Air Force Base, just when the final countdown for the target missile was ticking off. "Cool!" I thought, "Our tax dollars at work!"

I watched the liftoff coverage and then immediately went outside. I've seen rocket trails from several Vandenberg launches, though it's about 150 miles north of me here in LA. Once before I'd caught a missile in the act of going up--a stunning sight that left its mark in the sky for at least an hour. It was close after sunset and the exhaust plume turned bright orange, starkly day-glo against the twilight. After a time, high winds mutated it into a Sanskrit-like character. Later it became hazy shimmers like an aurora borealis gone south on vacation. I was excited at the prospect of a new show.

This time it was much darker, a good hour and a half after sunset, but since it was a ballistic launch, not orbital, I figured the rocket's arc could be high enough to still catch some sunlight. I got outside maybe 90 seconds after liftoff. Immediately I saw, brilliant and clear, the hot white of the rocket's engines arcing out over the Pacific. But for some reason, perhaps by piercing a high belt of water vapor or because of some component in the exhaust, a hazy cloud had been created. It was HUGE. As far away as I was from Vandenberg, the cloud was still as big as both hands outstretched. Huge and glowing strangely because instead of day-glo orange, the haze was BRIGHT BLUE, almost the blue you'd get on a cloudless afternoon, but hanging there incongruously in the black of the night sky. It was an uncanny, ghostly image worthy of the X Files.

I doubled back to the door and yelled for the kids. They came in time to see the rocket's plume, like a white searchlight stabbing into the near-turquoise cloud, as if a helicopter was shining a light into a special effects fog for a movie. The flame was soon just a dot at one end of it, moving fast downrange and then gone, but the blue patch stayed there for another twenty minutes, losing haziness, brightness and hanging there motionless, surrounded by black like an artifact from a flawed photo process.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles out in the Pacific, another rocket rose to destroy the first.

It missed.

Actually those Air Force types should have known Star Wars would never work. Why do you think they call them MISSiles? But seriously, we're nearly twenty years into this and they still haven't got it right. Even when they know the exact time and place of the launch! NMD is the wrong name. It's Star Wars, because like the movie, it's an incredibly expensive fantasy.

But it was "deemed successful" by the military folks in charge of the test. I guess they were talking about the part with the pretty colors.

In light of this great success, President Clinton did not kill the program, leaving it to the next president to continue or pull the plug. I always thought that was one of the best reasons to vote against Bush. Working or not, everyone knew he'd buy these toys. How he's going to pay for it while cutting taxes is--shall we use his Dad's term?--voodoo economics. I have no doubt that after spending about $100 billion more they'll eventually hit the target rocket--I can almost hear the cheers of the defense industry now! Then they'll spend ten more years and maybe another $300 billion deploying the system. At which point it will be obsolete, of course, the enemy having found an incredibly cheap way to confuse the system, like painting pink polka dots on the warheads or something.

Military hardware programs like Stars Wars are just defense industry pork and since they eat up resources, we can't spare any tax dollars for things like art endowments anymore. I guess who needs Art when we can make rocket paintings high above the earth? Maybe if we spent more on education we'd have a generation of diplomats that could ensure the missiles would never fly at all. A couple hundred billion saved from Star Wars just might make a difference in education, don't you think?

In last month's press conference Resident Bush repeated that Star Wars is being developed "to keep us safe." Safety sure seems to be a big concern to those who profess complete faith in God's Plan. Or is their faith really in closets full of firearms? Like those firearms, missile defense isn't very likely to work the way it's supposed to in an emergency. Moreover, in this day and age exactly who is this enemy who's likely to lob missiles our way? China needs us to buy consumer goods. In spite of the current spy plane flap, they wouldn't nuke their cash cow. North Korea's missiles can hardly make it to the South, besides they'll be unified soon. Cuba cannibalized their leftover Russian missile parts to keep their 40 year old Chevys and Plymouths running. India and Pakistan? They only target each other. And Russian gangsters already sold off all the old Soviet warheads, so let'm shoot the missiles! You see, we're already safe from ICBM's. If anyone wants to send an atomic bomb, it's going to arrive at a wharf in Brooklyn on a barnacle-encrusted tramp steamer. Or on a rubber raft like the one that came up to the USS Cole. Or on a Ryder truck. Bye-bye N-Y! This expensive high tech defense system is just not necessary.

But no, I'm obviously naïve. Our shaky economy will never handle more unemployed anti-missile designers on the streets!

Maybe in twenty years when they are through with the International Space Station they can use NMD to shoot it down! Just about the time they'll have the bugs out of the system, I bet. Strangely, the only thing this might be useful for is to take out some stray asteroid that might head Earth's way. Only small asteroids need apply, though; this ain't Hollywood! But the chances of that happening during the Bush Administration are, er, astronomical. Seriously, the Zero Year Curse is at least a million times more likely to be fulfilled. Literally. I think we can save our money.

Hmm. You know, thinking about my Zero Year scenario again, if Cheney dies they'll need a new Vice President like when Ford replaced Agnew back in '74. Who would be Cheney's replacement? I have the perfect candidate! He's tanned, rested, ready and has tons of experience! And he's an expert on voodoo economics too! That's right, appoint Dubya's Dad as the Vice-President! You know the Resident needs a good role model up there!

In the end it's all a big frequency, so what goes down will come back up too. Like a surfacing sub. Just take an extra look through the periscope first, please! Anyway I'm sure we'll all live through this downturn. It's made stocks cheap; it's time to buy! And I know just the ones that are likely to grow - defense industries! In fact I think I'll go back into the Closet to look over some of their balance sheets and make some investments right now. Might as well sponge up a little of the windfall and put it to a more enlightened use. Think of it as recycling our tax dollars! And many happy tax returns to you too. Thanks for reading and until next month the Closet is closed.



(C) 2001 - Rusty Pipes


Official Disclaimer: It's all true.