NASA REVISITED

My old friend, Matt, who I mentioned in my earlier post about the Columbia explosion, sent me a link to another essay about the disaster. I feel like it poses something of a challenge to my mythologizing of space exploration and I need to respond. First, go read the essay here.

Now on to my response.

My first observation is that Joe Keohane's writing is all over the place and I am having difficulty figuring out what the main thrust of her essay is. It's probably either because she is an undergraduate (a junior at Georgetown) and hasn't quite perfected her writing skills OR because Georgetown is a much better school than the university I attended (U of Texas at Austin) and I'm not quite up to the task of following along. It's most likely a combination of both. Anyway, I'll assume that her overall point is somehow dealing with the essay's title, "Are We Really United in Mourning?" and her closing paragraph which seems to advocate some normal human sympathy for the dead astronauts along with suggesting an overall demystification of space exploration.

Keohane's essay brought to mind a couple of thoughts.

First, when UT film graduate Robert Rodriguez's Spanish language film, "El Mariachi," became a surprise success, seemingly half of Austin was abuzz about how cool it was that this guy could temporarily sell his body to Pharmaco (they test drugs on students and the homeless and pay them for it), raise a paltry $7k, and make one of the best films of the early 90's (anybody that had gone through UT's RTF production track knew that his formal education probably had nothing to do with it). I heard about a friend of a friend who was skeptical: it struck him as impossible that such a good film could be made so cheaply and suggested some sort of hype-oriented conspiracy theory.

Second, here is a bit of dialogue from an episode of the Simpsons:

Sullen Teen at Lolapalooza: Are you being sarcastic?

Another Sullen Teen at Lolapalooza: I don't even know anymore...

I feel like, given the circumstances described by Chomsky in my post below, American culture now vacillates between two extremes: people either zealously believe in some sort of set, dogmatic ideology, philosophy, or religion, or people zealously believe in nothing at all. I'm sure that Keohane has a great deal of intellectual substance (I really did enjoy reading her essay; it forced me to think a great deal), but I'm very tempted to describe her as Shakespeare's Benedick once addressed his wit-rival and lover, Beatrice: "Lady Disdain."

It's not that I disagree with most of the points she made. I don't think it's so bad that she felt no sadness about the Columbia; as the Butthole Surfers have shown, "Strangers Die Every Day." I didn't read Herbert's essay in the NYT, but I'm sure it was typically pundit-pompous and absurd. I agree that Columbia does not equal the terrorist attacks of September 11th. I agree that there are major hazards when people are idealized. I agree that the loss of the Columbia was "sad not senseless."

It's just that I got such a strong feeling of bias against mythology, against inspirational stories, against the concept of belief itself from her essay.

In another essay, "The Narrative Construction of Reality," psychologist Jerome Bruner has shown how human beings literally understand their lives and the world in terms of stories (I would have provided a link to the essay if I could but it doesn't seem to be readily available via Google search). Clearly, such a notion provides endless opportunities for evil manipulation of the masses--indeed, the philosophies of Goebbels now reign free in both American politics and American advertising/P.R. But does this mean that we must suck the wind out of ALL national myths? Must progressives believe that there is not one great thing about our culture?

I'm not sure that Keohane was advocating such a position, but I certainly feel that her essay clearly drifts toward that point of view.

My response to Keohane's essay, in short, is that Americans should, indeed, be wary of how the corporate media and politicians (and rock stars, for that matter) make myths for general consumption. After all, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the stars and stripes clearly meant war and revenge, not freedom and democracy. But we should not be so skeptical that we become totally without hopes or dreams.

Like it or not, our lives can only be understood in terms of stories and myths. The challenge is to understand exactly what those stories and myths mean, and then to discredit those which deceive, and to glorify those which enlighten.

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