The Poet's Eye
     commentary by Lightning Rod

The Poet's Eye is skeptical without being cynical,
innocent without being naive and critical without
being judgemental.

Spaced Out
for release 01-17-05

NASA, working with the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency has landed a probe on Titan, one of the moons of Saturn. Just imagine that. Our scientists and engineers have sent a camera 900 million miles into outer space and landed it on a BB. Not only that, they are receiving pictures from it.

The $3.3 billion Cassini-Huygens mission to explore Saturn and its moons was launched in 1997 from Cape Canaveral. The Huygens probe was spun off from the Cassini mother ship on Christmas Eve, 2004 and parachuted to the Titan surface. There were no weapons of mass destruction discovered.

Does it seem slightly preposterous to you that a government whose agencies can discern methane rivers on Saturn's moon at a distance of two billion kilometers can't determine if Iraq has weapons of mass destruction when its spy planes have been daily overflying the country for ten years at a mere several thousand feet? Maybe we should let NASA handle our intelligence.

In a few days we will inaugurate G.W. Bush for his second term. It will be a day of infamy. The only reason that I can imagine that W was re-elected after the bumbling and deceit and ill-guided policies of his first term is that he had no discernible opponent in this election. Plus, Americans will buy anything if it is packaged right and sold with endless repetition. We will buy Britanny Spears and Jenny Craig and Paris Hilton and even believe that Michael Jackson is a white boy with Elizabeth Taylor's nose.

Perhaps it would be wise if George Bush got NASA to handle, not only the intelligence problem, but also Social Security, because he is evidently in outer space on this subject. He seems to think that we can save the system (which is in no major or immediate peril, no matter how many times you hear BushCo repeat that mantra for the next several months) by robbing it. It's easy to see that Dubya's understanding of economics is no better than his command of the English language. Yet on the 20th we will inaugurate this idiot who should have a name like "Wink Martindale" because he is just a game-show host, someone to put a congenial face on theft and corruption.

But the NASA solution to the Social Security 'crisis' might be a matter of engineering over politics or the arcana of economics. Since the baby boomers are about to retire and overload the SS system, I'm sure that some smart NASA engineer would come up with the obvious idea of suspended animation. These are science-fiction buffs, you know, they all grew up on Asimov and Clarke and Heinlein. They know the obvious solution to the problem of excess elderly SS recipients is to cryogenically freeze them and then launch them into space, say at about the age of three score and ten. This would take the strain off the system caused by baby boomers living to eighty or eighty-five years old and drawing excessive benefits. The system would be liquid for another couple of hundred years. Problem solved.

I'm dreaming here. I know it. Politics is not a science. It's an art, and a black one at that. It takes more cunning than intelligence. Logic or science has never worked before to solve our political problems, why should I expect them to work now? Politics is a business that runs on emotions and rumors and rumors of rumors and bald faced lies and hollow promises. It has nothing to do with science. In politics, hypothesis is more important than proof.

We have a twelve year old child in the house. She is somewhat beyond the age of credulity. She knows when I am joking with her and when I am lying in jest. But she thinks that American Idol and Fear Factor are called reality shows because they are really, well, you know...real. I've been in show business too long to go for this type of willing suspension of disbelief. In order to accept the lies that are being sold to us as fact by our government, you have to either be a twelve-year-old or be natively innocent, like the American public. They expect the best. They expect that they will be getting the truth when their leaders speak to them.

But this ain't rocket science, this is politics. If Bushco tells you that Social Security is a basket case, and if they tell it to you often enough, eventually you will believe it, and if they tell you that robbing the system will save it or that methane flows like water on some distant moon of Saturn, you will believe it. After all, they are good Christians, and Peter Jennings says it's so.

The Poet's Eye gazes into the Hubble Telescope. The cameras pan and we center on the Capitol steps, Inauguration Day. Chief Justice Rehnquist looks as though he could have, at one time, harbored life. He administers the trembling methane oath. Four more years of war, theft, lies and corporate rape....brrrrr. I think I'll move to Titan.

Titan! to thee the strife was given
Between the suffering and the will,
Which torture where they cannot kill;
And the inexorable Heaven,
And the deaf tyranny of Fate,
The ruling principle of Hate,
Which for its pleasure doth create
The things it may annihilate, ---Lord Byron

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