Late For The Sky

Oh, man, where do I start?

Like many of you, perhaps, I spent last Saturday afternoon torn by sobs. That didn't last long, though: by nightfall anger seemed a much better option, anger at the mush-mouthed orthodoxies I was hearing from all sides of the shitstorm that followed, anger against the voices of hagiography on one extreme and of nullification on the other; anger that I could not articulate until days later, when this thread on the Underground squeezed it out of me.

Angry. Angry because I have not got it in me to be sad anymore. The Boston Globe (which, if it wishes to be taken seriously as the world-class newspaper it so insists it is, really should start archiving all its articles online) ran an article with this subhead: How much more can America take? Can't speak for America as a whole, obviously, but I'm pretty fucking fed up, myself.

And it's gotten even uglier as the backlash has set in. I've been frankly horrified by the reactions of some people who really ought to know better—equating the simple human decency to grieve with "quelling free speech in the name of Amerikkkan imperialism," drawing smug, simplistic apples-and-asteroids equivalencies ("How many meals for starving children could have been bought with the immense cost of a shuttle launch?", as if it were an either/or decision), suggesting that it was somehow okay for the astronauts to die because they knew the risks and were well-paid (glad to see the old double standard still at work, guys, if handily inverted to value the lives of the rich less than those of the poor)—every horrible cliché smear against progressive politics and thinking ever concocted by the Right, given bleating, braying life. Ann Coulter couldn't have written this stuff.

In the meantime, I still grieve. For lives lost. For opportunities wasted. For the betrayal of a future of possibilities for a present of expediencies. I grieve. And that's about all I'm gonna say about that.

(Except to say thank you to Dan for the shout-out, and for the new tagline. I don't usually engage in this sort of interblog upsucking, but if you haven't mounted the face of die Venusberg lately, you're really missing out: the once-and-future Tannhauser is in crackin' form lately.)