Need Another Seven Astronauts

January 28, 1986. Everyone I knew growing up remembers where they were when the Challenger disintegrated some 70-odd seconds into its week-long mission. It's funny that no one remembers the date though. It's just not one of those dates that will live on in infamy. The tragedy was so specific, so captured in the footage of blue sky split by plumes of smoke. That same shot of pieces continuing upwards in an ominous arc, describing the face of the devil. It was all they had to show us, or all they could. The assassination of John F. Kennedy was one death captured discretely on a few seconds-worth of home movie footage, the only visual record of one of the most profound moments in American history. Those dates could be forgotten when the event was captured in one still frame, unlike September 11, which is known by the date because events across the country and the world could not be captured in one three-word description, or one camera still. Anchormen could only call it, "the events of September 11, 2001." The Challenger was a sentinel event somewhere between the Kennedy assassination and 9/11. Sort of a forgotten defining moment of history, though complete with both image and soundbite in a neat package. It was not a loss of collective innocence nor was it an existential threat to our way of life.

For a second-grader however, the Challenger was all of these things. It captured tragedy so tidily, like losing an ice cream cone to the pavement, or falling off the swings during recess. Christie McAuliffe was a teacher from Minnesota whose mission on the shuttle was to host a series of educational programs on space flight to be aired for the nation's youth. She was the finalist in a long selection process to find the perfect teacher and role model. McAuliffe captured the pose of Woman-of-the-80s independence while retaining the countenance of the nurturing mother. McAuliffe was part Sally Ride, part Amelia Earhardt, with just enough June Cleaver to pacify the traditionalists. This was a major PR move for NASA. The accomplishments of the prior decades were fading from memory; the program had evolved away from the days of manly, grizzled test pilots in leather jackets strapped to modified ballistic missiles. Sometime in the late 70s, NASA became nerds in blue jumpsuits competing in an uninspiring zero-g science fair. The Space Shuttle was a technological wonder, but nowhere near as captivating as a Saturn V hurtling its payload all the way to the Moon and back. The shuttle never went more than about 300 miles away from the Earth, but somehow felt cold and distant, lacking the humanity of exploration. Christie McAuliffe was supposed to be a reasonable compromise between these poles. As a teacher, she was a human face, suitable to inspire youth while retaining the space program's integrity as a scientific endeavor. She'd be on primetime. It was meant to put the space program back in the public eye. It was a noble cause-- recapturing children's imaginations and pushing our culture back into the game of exploration.

I was 8 years old when the Challenger mission was set to launch, and had just started my day in Ms. Dresner's second grade class. Maybe a year before, I'd had a dream that had set me on a determined quest to become an astronaut, no matter what. It wasn't like some kids dreaming of being a fire fighter or a police man. This was something burning and long lasting. My room was festooned with schematics of spacecraft, some purchased, some my own shaky works. My imagination had little room for dinosaurs, the Transformers or anything else that defined our cohort as the Second Grade Class of 1986. The Challenger mission was probably the coolest thing I could think of, the closest I'd feel to space since that dream, first inspired by Space Mountain at Disneyland, with its inertial lunging in the darkness towards the spiral arms of galaxies, high over the atmospheres of distant planets. Hours of television directed right at me, a kid, like I was at Mission Control. This was something I could grab a hold of on my way from being a young kid, to being the stoic, stubbled spaceman I'd imagined for my future.

We were sitting in rows in a class of about 30 kids when another teacher came to tell us that there had been an accident, and that they weren't sure if anyone had survived. No one really knew what to do. Ms. Dresner left a small radio on, sitting on top of a cabinet, listening for updates. We went on with the lesson plan for the day. There was a chance that the cabin had remained intact and that the seven astronauts were alive at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. There was some hope that it wasn't a complete loss. As second graders, few of us really knew what a complete loss was. That night I had another dream, this time of Ronald Reagan standing at a podium, announcing that no one would go into space for the next 437 years. That was my version of complete loss, I guess.

A few days later everything began to move on. Ms. Dresner passed out our Weekly Readers, warning us that they were printed before the Challenger. The Reader had a story about the success of the mission, with little profiles of each of the astronauts, and part of McAuliffe's lesson plan. It was an awkward half hour for all of us. No one really knew what to do with the Readers, so we looked at the books they advertised on the back. I drew scuba gear on each of the 7 astronauts on the cover, a sort of joking, morbid coping mechanism for what I felt. The jokes came soon thereafter, proving that the event didn't have the gravitas of the Kennedy assassination or 9/11.

Q: "How did they know Christie McAuliffe had dandruff?"
A: "They found her head and shoulders on the beach."

Q: "What does NASA stand for?"
A: "Need Another Seven Astronauts."

And there was another one about 7-up that I don't remember. I knew them all, and told them with gusto, even though I didn't like it.

For my tenth birthday, my mother sent me to Space Camp in Cape Canaveral. My interest in space had continued to grow, and this was a week-long opportunity to steep my brain in All Things Space. We flew shuttle simulators, sat in a chair that simulated lunar gravity, and had tours of everything at Kennedy Space Center. At the end of the week, it happened that there was a shuttle launch scheduled, it was maybe the second launch since the Challenger. We stood on a patch of grass about 5 miles away across water, surrounded by cars and RVs that had come from all over to see the launch. I stood, watched, heard, and felt the shuttle Discovery lift off the pad for space. It is one of the most magnificent and truly awe-inspiring moments of my life. I'll never forget the anticipation, the feeling of witnessing the force it takes to propel an object up and away from the Earth's pull. It will probably remain the only time in my life where I jumped up and down, screaming at the top of my lungs for the site of something so powerful. It was the only moment of true abandon in my life that I can remember.

As I've gotten older and made the compromises that everyone seems to make, I've accepted that I may never make it to space. If I do, it'll be as a tourist and not as an astronaut. My brother was the same way about baseball, and it was sad to see him shirk off his passion for the distractions of adolescence. I don't think most people make it through that rite of passage with their dreams intact, but that's okay. The world needs lawyers, grabagemen and middle managers. We find passion again, in other places. That's the good thing about children from what I'm told.

Even if the Challenger made it to orbit, its impact on the world would probably have been fleeting and negligible. It probably would have gone down in the annals of 80s primetime television with Michael Jackson, ALF, Who's the Boss and the Muncheechees, but we'll never know. Maybe the biggest victim of all was NASA. Space exploration was never the same after the Challenger. Its remaining chromed luster and mystique had been burned away by a bad O-ring somewhere in the stratosphere above Florida. NASA never again tried such a PR stunt, never tried to shed their encroaching super-geek image. It was like witnessing a person whose personal growth had been stunted by tragedy, never moving on, acting like a middle-aged teenager. During the 90s, while everyone else grew up, NASA became one of the last enclaves of true geekdom. It was the decade of the internet, geek-chique, the real revenge of the nerds. Only space exploration seemed to retain that aura from the pre-information age of Dungeons and Dragons, BBSs, and Jolt-drinking hackers in trenchcoats with rainbow wire hanging out of their pockets. Everyone else seemed to move on. Maybe it was superstition that held them back. Maybe they felt like they stepped out of the karmic order of things, like trying to relate to the public was too crass an objective for pure-blooded scientists. Maybe they thought it best to lay low and not ask for much attention after the Challenger. They'd already been burned once by sticking their necks out. The geeks have gotten old and cannot be taught new tricks. The disintegration of the Columbia shuttle in early 2002 was explained as little more than a statistical artifact, like a lightning strike or a plane crash. No one even knew what Columbia's mission had been during the time it spent in orbit before its fateful descent. From then, NASA was relegated to the list of obscure government agencies that ensure incompetents, or those simply lacking in social skills, a living and an excellent pension. An odd bunch of nearsighted explorers with unkempt hair and bad breath.

This one is for the crew of the Challenger, who never completed their mission. The seven people who are remembered today as dusty victims of an increasingly obscure tragedy, a "where were you when" moment, a series of tasteless and weathered jokes. This is for the deferred dreams of second-graders everywhere.

We all desperately need you to keep making more for the rest of us.

We need another seven astronauts.

Health Savings Accounts, new GOP Proposal: Divide and Conquer

Health Savings Accounts?

If the biggest employers in the world can’t lower the costs of healthcare for their own employees, or offer it at all, then why would my ability as a lowly consumer be better at it than them? These companies are pioneers in developing strategies to lower costs to the consumer and even they can’t do it. When it comes to lowering health care costs for Americans, I’d want the biggest, baddest meanest of them all, the guys with the license to seek and destroy any healthcare warlords out there who run corrupt, inefficient regimes, who take their nation’s wealth in return for dysfunctional scraps of providers, procedures, and pills. I’d want the Marines of healthcare delivery and planning. Not the rent-a-cops.

Since we don’t have healthcare marines we turn to our employers, you know, the guys who keep us busy and give us money. They do what they can to get us health insurance, depending on how long we’ve been there, or how important we are to them. The whole point in insurance is to buy something that diffuses our risks among other people. The young subsidize the old, the healthy support the sick, and men pay for women. Face it, women’s reproductive systems just have more going on. And one way or another, the rich pay for the poor. We all have a threshold for being aware of the hardship of others. No one wants bodies in the streets, or images of kids covered in sores with flies buzzing around, like the commercials on TV. Not here. And no one, except for young, healthy males with a little cash could afford to fend for themselves when it comes to their health, and no group will be able to pull for lower costs, least of all old, sick poor moms. Only animals leave their parents to die when the old guy’s teeth fall out and he can no longer eat.

So we want someone with a lot of authority to negotiate on our behalf for more and better care for more people for less money. You’re waiting for the old progressive punchline of the government coming to save the day. Well, yes, but in a clever way that allows people to make money and compete while ensuring that everyone has what they need. Since it involves our mortality, we’d prefer to have the market playing Capture the Flag, and not Battle of Stalingrad. Most universal healthcare systems look this way—most are private, but made safe for the consumer by putting down fair rules like coordinating insurers with providers, occasionally negotiating rates for pills and procedures on behalf of companies, and setting premiums that send some money to people who need it more. They mandate that everybody be covered, they figure out how to do it, organize the key players and they make sure it keeps happening. This is a role for government. Big business has no stake in our equity, or lowering costs for consumers when it’s something we absolutely need to live. Something we need from cradle to grave.

Government has no business serving us beer and chips while we’re watching the Super Bowl. We don’t want it there, and we don’t want them around when we choose a doctor either. Understood. But, to borrow from Econ 101, the demand schedule for health and happiness is about as elastic as they come. We need someone to come along and make sure we have it. When it comes to it, we demand healthcare much more than beer and chips, and healthcare is much more expensive. This is the government coordinating a market that would otherwise have no long term scope. It would be fragmentary, dangerous, and taken advantage of only by young men in good health and some power. Would you give an old lady a machine gun and a can of tuna in Mogadishu and tell her “good luck”?

There is little ideology at stake here save indifference and contempt for people who are worse off.

The welfare-warfare state

The title isn't an original idea. Near as I can tell, it was coined by Christopher A. Preble, a Cato Institute scholar on foreign policy. It's part of an article I just finished on why conservative republicans cannot retain the level of power and direction they've enjoyed since the '02 elections when they sealed the deal on the senate majority. But as usual, I gleaned a more all-inclusive, global, and impractical message from something. As Americans we are addicted to spending. Our economy depends on comsumer demand outpacing even the wages intended to support that demand. Our household savings rate is now in the red, our fiscal policy looks like Ivana Trump when she receives her alimony check. We are living and growing at the mercy of Chase Manahttan's and the People's Republic of China's willingness to lend to us.

These matters of economic policy are gaining attention among pointy-headed intellectuals, but there is no way such an abstract, worry-mongering issue such as this could ever gain political traction on its own. Spending is not attached to personal or political consequences because it is in no one's short- or medium-term interest to do so. No person or politician will go on living as he does if this were to be addressed. At the same time, China is more than happy to own US Treasury bills, and Chase Manahattan lives to lend, both so long as their positions are secured as creditors, and we remain the debtor. The supply and demand sides of the debt equation will not change until one side flinches.

Rewind to Latin America, Africa, and much of Asia, circa Thirty Years Ago. Lenders were more than happy to oblige to their development needs, as long as the conditions of "tied aid" were met. Developing nations would purchase American and European farming supplies, industrial infrastructure and expertise in exchange for capital. In the economists' perfect world, this injection of cash would one day lead to a world of self-sufficient, developed nations with a heavy stake in retaining a trade relationship with their former benefactors. It was overlooked that this was the same policy of mercantilism that led to the Boston Tea Party, the Stamp Act and you know what else here in the USA. In the twentieth century, after rich nations gave up on colonies, revolution was no longer an option. We saw nations default on their debts instead.

America is no more self-sufficient today than Argentina was in 1985. Our economy is supported by borrowing, and that borrowing will continue as long as we purchase finished goods from the lending country's own factories. Wheras thirty years ago, we were an net producer of finished exports, today, we send raw materials abroad as if we were exporting bananas and coffee. This is one of the many ways that America is the richest Third World country on the planet. In a sense we are like the airlines or oil companies: too big to fail. What comes of that is unclear to me.

What is clear are the eerie words of Dwight D. Eisenhower during his farewell speech to the nation:

"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience ... In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic process."

More of our tax dollars go to military spending than any group of nations in the world combined. More of our foreign debt goes to servicing these needs. While state spending on welfare continues to grow, it is nothing compared to the pace of growth and the scope of America's military budget. It is for ideological reasons alone, and not macroeconomic ones, that certain groups attempt to draw the nation's attention to bloated welfare roles, moms with twelve kids and a check from the state and other freeloaders, supposedly rampant among the poor. Welfare states have bankrupted debtor nations in the past; they have secured votes for fat populist politicians at the cost of needed improvements to nations, but in our case this is unlikely. The phenomenon of spending addiction may be the same, but the size and potential damage to our democracy is not.

How long until become a nation that produces things that the world needs? I have no clue, but this is as existential a threat as any terrorist attack or moral crisis could possibly be.

January 2006

It's been almost 6 months since leaving India and I feel pretty lousy for not adding any updates, or going any further than my last half-assed posting. I came back to the States and within two months I had bought my first house; in another two I was married to my longtime sweetheart, Katie. Within two minutes of getting back to America, I had disengaged from the mindset of the lone traveler. I was a perspective home-buyer, a fiancee, a future son-in-law. There were so many new roles to take on that I had managed to shunt off to the side by leaving the country for a few months.

Traveling always seems to happen in the gaps between eras of life; between lovers, semesters and degrees, jobs, after retirement and before death. For all the talk of traveling's effect on the traveler, the confounding effect of when people choose to travel shouldn't be ignored. This particular gap was a vast one for me.

For obvious reasons, this blog will probably evolve away from 'travelogue' to 'soapbox and journal' now. This transition, like many others, deserves a segue. So here it is.

What India can learn from America, and what can Americans can learn from Indians?

India/America:

When Indians look towards the States, they see an enormously wealthy, powerful nation composed of all kinds of people. Its lack of history, openness and optimism makes it seem like a shallow, safe place to do business and to be oneself. Beyond the money, America offers little to the Indian mindset. It promises cold winters and the sterility that all people from dirty places feel when they go somewhere clean. (I get that from Toronto). For the average Indian, America is a place where the odds of being rewarded for hard work are far greater than they'd be back home. For India, this isn't enough. As a nation, India places plenty of emphasis on hard work. Millions of students compete for a few thousand spots in the nation's top schools of engineering or medicine. It is a subcontinent of intelligent workhorses ready to do the bidding of anyone with power.

This unquestioning deference is frustrating to Westerners who work in India. It is too often that people will say "yes" to a request they cannot fulfill or do not understand. Yes is the only answer in a place with so much competition. There are no second chances, no "I'll get back to you on that". This "yes" tension springs from the need for powerless people to please the powerful. It's not that westerners want to hear "no" all the time, they want to see curiosity, a sense of problem-solving, arriving at solutions independent from someone else's orders. In a professional setting, there is simply too much willingness to take commands from higher-ups, and not enough initiative or creative thinking. There is just too much heirarchy.

Example: India's railway system holds the title of largest bureaucratic entity in the world. Bigger than the Red Army circa 1982, bigger than Walmart toay. The amazing thing is that it works-- it's easily as on-time as Amtrak, and you pay for what you get every time. The sort of typically screwed-up thing is how it barely works. Nothing changes. Trash builds up in the track beds, dogs wander through the stations. The same vendors sell the same things, and the trains run through a persistent patina of low-grade filth. No one is in charge, but every individual does his or her job with competence and a narrow focus. It is such a task-oriented way of working that the overall product of train service suffers. Entrepreneurship is dissent, it inevitably goes against existing order. In India this is seldom rewarded and little respected. It is the peasant mindset that we left behind when we boarded ships to the New World, and feels alien to me, a 4th generation American descendent of such people.

America/India:

I've written plenty about the American in India. Most of the conventional wisdom of a loud, smelly, crowded place is largely true. The sense of constant humanity left me with the damp cosiness you'd expect from napping in a curry-scented armpit. It is more of a continent than it is a nation. There are more languages spoken there today than modern Europe, and people look as much the same between its borders as they do between Portugal, Norway and Bulgaria. And there are three times more of them than there are of us Yankees, but there is something they all seem to have that is acutely missing here in America.

In America, the refrains of culture wars, family values, and crisis of virtue are long-standing traditions. There is something to this. People here really don't call their mothers enough. When it comes down to it, we place our careers above families in 90 percent of decisions we make. For someone to hate their kids is simply unimaginable in India. For most Indians, sex and marriage are closely related acts, while in America they're practically polar opposites. We love ourselves more than anyone else. In India, there is really a sense of social order, chastity and belonging in a family or a community that is generally missing here in the States. For all of us, liberal and conservative, we all have the sense that something is missing, some moral code is not innately understood as it is in other places, or as it was in other times. Our diverse backgrounds and subsequent beliefs make for fractious, bitter arguments over social issues, so much so that there is little we can agree upon.

You've probably noticed how these excesses and deficiencies dovetail. These are differences between self and community. There is nothing more valuable to me than experiencing and attempting to understand these differences, and how they make us who we are.