Picture it: a room full of Cabinet members and other important-looking people who do a thousand little things that influence our lives every day.
The War on Terrorism and budget crises have been the main topics of conversation as they wait patiently for the president to enter the room. Now they sit up, trying not to look weary and frazzled from dealing with a long struggle with foreign and domestic affairs.
Bush opens the meeting with, “Let’s go to the moon!”
Just for the record, it is an imagined exaggeration. It is just the first image that popped in my head when I first heard of Bush’s plans for the space program, complete with the Will Ferrell impersonation and the
seeming naivet.
However, I am willing to give Bush’s plans the benefit of the doubt. I spent a good amount of time thinking of reasons for this sudden move to the stars. Here are a few reasons Bush came up with:
* Exploration. Bush invoked the image of men, specifically white male Europeans, drawn into unknown lands and across the open sea. Wow! We can discover places and things!
That is what explorers have always done. They explored for the sake of discovering things so that they can name the places and eventually get their names in history books.
Now the profession is coming back. You, too, can become a bank holiday.
Yes, explorers like Columbus are just the sort of examples to help fashion our space program. Just ask the Arawaks, natives of the islands Columbus explored.
* Natural resources. Now we get to it. I was facetious about Columbus and other explorers, but of course we are not going to the moon to find gold and slaves.
Even so, in order to give an excuse for the profitability of this expensive venture, Bush had to bring in talk about natural resources that can bring in profit.
Not only will the act of making the moon a base for further exploration save in the expense of transportation of materials for space travel, we can also find that the surface of the moon has the components to make materials for more space vehicles and breathable atmosphere.
Now, let me repeat that. Space vehicles will go into space to get more materials to go into space to get more materials.
So much for Bush’s excuses. Here are some reasons I came up with:
* It will give NASA something to do. Let’s face it. NASA has been pretty inactive compared to the 1960s.
Too long have they only been known as the makers of mattresses, Tang, and those pens that can write upside-down. Finally they can have a purpose in terrestrial, or extraterrestrial, events. I, for one, am happy for them.
* Bush wants to be like John F. Kennedy. There are few presidents that are remembered like JFK. Everything is named after him. He is quoted more than almost any other president. He has an eternal flame on his grave, for goodness sakes.
I would not blame Bush if he wanted to capture some of that grandeur and status in history. (As if getting Hussein was not enough.)
Since Bush is not as good a speaker as JFK, he does not want to get assassinated and Marilyn Monroe is not alive, he has to use the space program. If he succeeds, maybe people in the future will be saying, “Clinton who?”
* We need to put the American flag on the moon before anyone else gets there. Everyone knows that we did not actually land on the moon in 1969. The entire thing was a hoax filmed in New Mexico. I saw it on the Sci-Fi Channel. They had experts in T-shirts and frizzy hair telling us about this through stutters and nervous ticks.
So now the “government” is trying to cover it up by going up real quick and planting it before anyone else can see. And they can already get to the moon pretty easily.
They just have to find Bigfoot so they can relocate it to the moon, where it will sniff out for moon cheese, the real natural resource of the moon.
* Finally, we have to go to the moon and Mars because science fiction says we should. Compared to many of the great, or not-so-great, works of science fiction, we look pretty pitiful. I mean, it is 2004. Shouldn’t we be colonizing Pluto or living under Big Brother by now?
Never mind finding ways to feed starving people or save the deteriorating environment. Where are all the nubile alien women? Where are the planets of dragons and people with tentacles? We have loads of catching up to do, and Bush is getting us off on the right step.
Don’t get me wrong. Just like anyone who has watched those documentaries about UFOs and Egyptian faces on Mars, I have always been fascinated with actually going out there and seeing the universe in all its infinity.
Who knows? We could actually solve overpopulation through colonization, or even venture out of our solar system to find “new life and new civilizations.”
That would show all those bearded liberals. As Bush said, “Along this journey, we’ll make many technological breakthroughs. We don’t know yet what those breakthroughs will be, but we can be certain they’ll come.”
Yeah. Just like those weapons of mass destruction.
Angela Adair is a junior English major. She can be reached at [email protected].