There’s a line in the excellent new Scorsese flick, The Departed, that has been playing through my head.  Near the beginning of the film, Irish Mob boss Frank Costello says, “Twenty years after an Irishman couldn’t get a job, we had the presidency, God rest him.”  The line plays on the same unique American aura  that The Godfather tapped into three-decades ago.  The American Dream.  The chance that a man, or a people, can go from nothing to the top in practically no time at all.  From the oppressed to cock-of-the-walk in a single generation.  I’ve come to accept that this is how evangelical, born-again Christians must have felt when George W. Bush was elected President. 

Highly religious American Christians had increasingly been the butt of the joke (pretty much any joke) for years.  They were hicks.  Under-educated.  Illogical. Intolerant.    Judgmental.  Self-righteous.  Ripe for mocking.  And mocked they were.  To see an Evangelical Christian on the news was to see someone, usually with a laughably sparse vocabulary complaining about some inconsequential matter most people would never think twice about, let alone take the time to protest.  The conservative Christian character on a TV show or movie was almost always playing the part of villain, standing in the way of the free-thinking, open-minded hero.  Burned and barbed by the media again and again, the Born Agains became wise to the fact that the best they could hope for when dealing with the media was to be laughed at.  And so they remained quiet.  They went to their mega-churches every Sunday, quietly.  They asked themselves which candidate Jesus would vote for, quietly.    Interpreting the bible literally, they believed the Earth was formed but 6,000-years-ago…  Quietly.  And their numbers grew.

In November of the year 2000, the first Born Again Christian was elected President of the United States of America, again, quietly.    It was a much tamer affair than when the Catholic JFK was elected.  People were not overly alarmed.  For, over the course of 30-years leading up to the 2000 election of George W. Bush, Americans felt that most issues of Religion and State had been more or less debated and solved already.  The State would take no position on issues of faith.  Religion would stay in the church.

That’s what most Americans figured.  There was one group, of course, that did not consider the Church/State fight settled at all.  And, after decades of being increasingly marginalized, finally, one of them had come to power.  And then, all of a sudden, the quirky, formerly quiet and respectful Jesus-folk went on the rampage.  As their Savior George W. Bush led these peaceful people into War, War(!), of all un-Christian things, they focused on “correcting” every gripe they had been surpressing for the past three-decades.  Gay marriage.  Evolution.  Prayer in school.  (Notice I left out abortion, which I wouldn’t classify as a “gripe,” as it is a quite serious issue, no matter the side you fall on)  And, so long as the Christian masses gave him free reign to do pretty much whatever the hell he wanted, Bush was happy to sustain their Theocratic fantasies, and (why not), even turn back the clock a bit on a secular progression or two.

Yes, the hardcore Christian did become emboldened, and their demands did rise.  And this is a problem because, as most people already recognize, most hardcore Christians are a mess of misplaced anger and hypocrisies.

Example: Born Again Christians imagine themselves to be a fiercely Patriotic folk.  You know them, the ones with the American flag bumper stickers on their cars, the ones overtly proclaiming their love of America to no particular ends.  And yet, I have more than a hankering that if there were a vote tomorrow to abandon the Constitution of the United States (you know, that document that makes America the country they so love) in favor of a new document stating that the country shall be run by laws in accordance with the rules written in the Bible, the Born Agains would vote to ditch that dodgy ol’ Constitution en masse. Ah, yes, how patriotic.
 
I don’t think it enhances ones argument to call the opposing side idiotic (though, truth be told, if you got a couple of beers in this space man you could probably coax it out of me).  But the conservative, born-again Christians certainly ACT idotically.  Judging their various conflicting stances, I can only conclude they do not have any idea what it means to be a patriotic American, or what this country really stands for.  As with their leader, it’s tough to figure out if they are actually ignorant or willfully blind.  Whatever the case, it is important to realize that Bush emboldened an Idiot Culture in America, and that is a very serious thing.

It’s the culture that demands criticizes evolution, without ever taking the time to learn the intricacies of the theory they decry.  The culture that, again hypocritically, creates false idol after false idol (Bush. Falwell. Etc.) and unquestionably accept the opinions of their demi-God as their own.  It’s a culture that has a curious disdain for science.  I suppose their anti-scientific attitude stems from the evolution “debate,” but, much like Scientologists’ not entirely clear hatred of psychiatrists, it’s strange conservative Christians, say, take a stance against believing in Global Warming, for no obvious reason other than the fact it was those dastardly “scientists” who “came up with it.”

 In some ways, I welcome their resistance to scientific proclamations.  After all, am I not just as blindly believing the things the Scientists say as they are the things their Super Reverends say?  Do I ever delve into the actual studies and verify the facts I’m told by scientists?  No, not often.   But I have, in my day (college days, mostly) gone in depth into several experiments, examined how their facts are arrived at, how the publish/peer review system works, and, like Socrates, who remembers that a triangles’ angles equal 180-degrees, even if he doesn’t remember exactly how the mathematical proof showed it, I am confident that the system is delivering me accurate facts and proclamations.  The conservative Christians question what scientists say, but I don’t think any meaningful percentage of them ever go back to the original experiments.  I don’t think they have any interest in PROVING the scientists wrong.  They’re lazy; it’s a lot easier to just point to The Book and say, “Nuh-uh.”

The emboldening of the willfully ignorant.  That’s to be the lasting legacy of the Bush Presidency.  Ouch.

Spotted today on the CNN.com front page: “UFO, weather, delay shuttle landing.” Haha. Some editor’s been waiting his whole life to write that.

So it seems, once again, there’s something screwy going on up there in space: one of the American astronauts on the orbiting Space Shuttle Atlantis (which just yesterday had a nasty leakage of some smelly gas) spotted a piece of their shuttle floating by the shuttle’s window (a-ha! Travel back in time with me to a great scene from the superb 1983 film “The Right Stuff,” when the astronauts demanded the rocket scientists build a porthole into their space capsule. If they didn’t convince the engineers to put in a window back then, our boy never would have spotted that space debris today! Whatever…).

OK, beating up on astronauts is never going to be a popular endeavor, but I can’t hold my tounge any longer: get over it! I mean geez, ever since the tragic explosion of the Columbia, every space flight is seemingly wrought with catastrophes. News networks, being fed their information by NASA, go into a tizzy every time an astronaut has a tummy ache. It’s space travel, guys, we get it: it’s dangerous. We’ll wish the flyboys luck when blast off, and let us know when they land. Please stop blowing every minor problem up into an earth-shattering disaster. I don’t know who is really to blame here, the news networks breathlessly covering every space shuttle annoyance, or NASA, who are obviously so freaked out by the possibility of losing another shuttle crew that it’s a wonder they ever manage to get the things blasted off.

Being an astronaut is incredibly dangerous, but so are a hundred and one other jobs, none of which have the added the pride and cachet of being a United States Astronaut. To harp back to “The Right Stuff” again, recall all the test pilots killed trying to break the sound barrier, and nobody even knew what they were up to. Look at how many soldiers are killed every day in Iraq. Look at NASCAR, which averaged about a death per year from 1989-2002. And (gotta work this stat in), look at the NASCAR fan fatality rate: on average, 6 fans die at every race!

Moving on from such morbidity, let’s just remember that astronauts certainly know what they’re getting into when they sign up for the space program. While they certainly want every reasonable precaution taken before they head into the final frontier, I have to believe these guys are explorers at heart, and don’t want endless second-guessing hamstringing their efforts to go farther, faster, better.

To Mars!

A few days ago I read a post on the social news website Digg.com that linked to an online store selling ultra-powerful laser pointers. These laser pointers were so potent, in fact, I’d probably classify them as weapons. They could be seen from miles away, light frickin’ cigarettes, and, of course, blind you quicker than a board-with-a-nail-in-it.

A few hours ago, and, well, pretty much any few hours you care to pick before that, stretching back 3-some-odd years, I saw a news story about more violent deaths in Iraq.

For whatever reason, these two news items ended up intertwined in my psyche. I started thinking about the difficulty world powers have waging wars in current times, what with the new unacceptability of civilian casualties. In these enlightened days we live in, the United States’ vast arsenal of nuclear arms is near-useless, almost certainly regulated to “strike back” territory; the US could never climb its way out of the ditch of worldwide scorn if it were to drop an atomic bomb on a foreign city without first being nuked itself.

So, with our big guns out of the picture, the United States finds itself in the mystifying position of being back on a par with ragtag group of rebels. The insurgents in Iraq know there is no chance of the US using nuclear weapons on the country they have just liberated, and thus their arms stack up reasonably well against those of your average US soldier. Sure, the insurgent’s 80’s-era AK-47’s aren’t as quite as nice as the Marines’ shiny new rifles, but they’re pretty damn close. And insurgents may not have the ability to drop precision, laser-guided missiles onto American HumVees, but their I.E.D.’s have much the same effect.

My point is, with the terrifying technology the United States has used to prop itself up as a superpower for the past half-century out of play, the insurgents don’t fear the military mite of the US in a way we feel they probably ought to.

My solution? Laser beams.

OK, OK, this being the first Cosmonaut News blog entry and all, I’ve probably, with that last paragraph, dashed any chance of this site ever becoming a respectable opinion rag. But hear me out…

What the hell ever happened to laser beams? It wasn’t that long ago that Regan was telling us we’d be using them to shoot Russian warheads out of the sky. It isn’t so far off into the future that we, by sci-fi writer’s accounts, should all be sporting laser pistols. So why is it that that only people who seem to be keeping the death-ray-dream alive are a bunch of freaks with a little store on the InterWeb?

I’m hereby advocating the user of laser weapons by the United States military, either immediately, or as quickly as they can invent them. I want billions poured into this technology. I want every grunt G.I. armed with a head-exploding laser rifle.

Now, you see, I don’t actually think that laser guns are all that much an improvement over bullets and gunpowder. Hell, I don’t know anything about the technology; for all I know there are a million-and-one well-proven reasons they’re inferior to current weaponry. But I say use them anyway, because they’re new. And they’re terrifying.

A well-trained American Indian could shoot off a plethora of arrows in the time it took an American settler to reload his musket, but the settler was wielding a controlled explosion in the palms of his hands. Scary stuff.

A group of insurgents hits a US armored vehicle and come in firing off their AK’s in one of their typical run-and-gun attacks. All of a sudden, the US soldiers start blasting their attackers into bits with their new death-ray laser-beams! You bet your ass that even the suicide bomber’s eyes will go wide with terror and wonderment, and suddenly they’ll remember: “Oh, right, we’re at battle with the United States of American. The country with the most powerful and technologically advanced military in the history of the world …”

The US Military needs to become scary again. And, like I stated before, I’m sure there are several reasons that laser weapons are actually inferior to bullets. But this would be a psychological attack; very likely, a temporary setback in the fight against the insurgents. But it could create the type of foothold that is necessary to turn the tide.