A few long-suppressed rants: movie Avatar and new Brown book are bummers; NASA should go
By TOM BRENNAN
I’m writing this from an undisclosed location that snowballs won’t reach, so it’s time to get caught up on a few topics I’ve been avoiding.
Movie Review: Avatar sucks. It’s like a teenagers car crash movie with pterodactyls. My wife thought it was like a three-hour fireworks display; lots of great visual effects, especially the 3-D, but way too long. It has a plot the way Rhode Island has a landmass.
Book Review: Dan Brown’s latest book, The Lost Symbol, sucks. One of the most anticipated novels since the last big Harry Potter book, Dan Brown’s 2009 opus has a silly plot, one it’s impossible to take seriously.
I don’t want to spoil it for you (Oh, maybe I did already) but the big world-ending event that hero-symbologist Robert Langdon is desperately trying to head off is not nuclear or inter-stellar Armageddon; it’s a public relations problem.
I’m not kidding. The evil villain chops off his own father’s hand and leaves clues leading to a showdown in a dark and dank chamber while a computer modem cranks out a bulky video press release file that will embarrass a number of American political leaders seen participating in a Masonic ceremony. Oh my, heavens to Betsy, demonstrating with a specious video that politicians do inappropriate things would be worse than learning Tiger Woods boinked a caddy. Can the end of the world be next?
The computer has finished its send process and the big file seems to be headed for the eyes of the world when a CIA official flies her helicopter over a building housing the computer’s transmitter and zaps it with an electromagnetic pulse. Phew. Civilization saved.
The Lost Symbol is a POS (If you don’t know what that means, ask your kids.) It reads like Dan Brown’s literary agent and publisher were bugging him to write another book because his stuff makes the money flow and he was overdue. So Dan must have sat down and typed for six weeks, then said: “You want a book? I got your book. Here!”
The Space Program: I think it’s time to close down NASA and turn space missions over to the private sector, research institutions and perhaps a few universities. I was a big rooter for the federal projects that gave us space satellites and the manned travel programs that led up to the moon landings and the first awkward exploration of the moon’s surface.
I was as thrilled as anyone when Neil Armstrong took his first giant leap for mankind. NASA in those days was an entrepreneurial organization that put people on the moon – and brought them back – before the Russians could. Nowadays NASA is a bureaucracy.
During the Cold War, achieving the impossible was a matter of national prestige. It seemed really important that we get there first, and perhaps it was. The Apollo program and its predecessors cost many billions of dollars, money that was taken from the pockets of individual Americans, but it was what we had to pay to win the war. So we did it proudly.
But the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station are a bureaucrat’s idea of a space program. The ISS doesn’t do anything but fly around in a circle, achieving next to nothing. The science it produces is minimal. (Where is Tang Two?) When it’s all done, the thing will be directed to splash down in the Pacific so it doesn’t become dangerous space junk.
The program was sold to American taxpayers on the notion that it would be a training ground for astronauts who would go on to explore the cosmos. But there are no space missions to take advantage of the hard-earned lessons of the Shuttle crews. Their extra-terrestrial exploits qualify them to write training manuals. But the brave young fliers are bright, healthy and capable people, so most go on to jobs in the private sector or academia. None travel the universe, though a few control the machines that go in their place.
The spirit of Apollo has been lost. It is honored, but not followed. If NASA’s budget is justified as a way to build national prestige, let’s face facts; it ain’t working.
President Barack Obama likes to pretend that big federal expenditures will be paid for by health insurance companies, oil, banking, aeronautical and pharmaceutical industries and other large, easy-to-hate corporations – as if those companies weren’t going to pass their extra costs on to their customers, who will pay the bill in the end.
The tactic depends on people forgetting that ‘stuff,’ and government-imposed costs, flow downhill – to them. When government spends money, no matter where it seems to get the cash, it really comes from the pockets of the American people.
I have similar feelings about the Post Office, which mainly delivers catalogs, but my dog likes the mailman better than she likes me. (He gives her cookies, but so do I!) So I think I’ll save that rant for another day.
The point is that government does a lot of things, at tremendous cost, which should not be done by a government that gets its money, one way or the other, from the people it represents.
If it doesn’t have to be done – if it isn’t worth doing – government shouldn’t do it.
Tom Brennan is author of the Alaska satirical thriller, The Snowflake Rebellion, two true-crime collections, Murder at 40 Below and Cold Crime, and the Alaska humor book Moose Dropping & Other Crimes Against Nature. His Website is: http://arcticternbooks.com/
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