On Becoming a Realist
December 15, 2004
Writing a blog is a new and fantastic experience for me. Some weeks the comments posted here are my own. Sometimes they are a collaborative effort with my cohorts Slack and The Safety Wolverine. But the content of the website is always the result of a tacit, almost telepathic understanding, distilled from the alchemy of collaborating on the Radio Sub Rosa programs. Weeks and weeks of work and discussion go into producing the programs, as well as a great deal of much-appreciated input from close friends. For every five minutes of finished audio there's at least an hour of pure discussion and arguement, fleshing out ideas and concepts, dissecting history, and focusing our collective vision. The blog is a bit different but still part of that vision. When I write something and post it I know that we're on the same page, literally and figuratively.
There's a few different themes running through the Radio Sub Rosa programs. One that I'm always harping on is summed up with the following statement from the opening track of Emerald Empire:
Why are spending all this money to build things for the sole purpose of blowing things up when we could be using all this money to build things
The topic has singular relevance to me because my father is a retired thermal dynamics engineer, literally a rocket scientist, who spent his entire career with one foot in aerospace and one foot in the defense industry. I admired the work he did on the massive space shuttle engines and even witnessed a couple of open air tests, awesome, fiery displays the shook the desert floor and crackled the air. I watched with rapt attention videos he brought home when the shuttle was in service, shot from a camera in the vehicles cargo bay as tiny communications satellites were deployed, spinning up from their cases in the space shuttle bay and into the web of orbital space. Once he showed me a video of a satellitte that failed to "burn" properly and was lost. He was trying to figure out what went wrong. The video showed the motor fire--it looked like a tiny cotton blossom in a field of black--then suddenly flare and vanish. My father just said, "Huh," quietly and watched it a dozen more times. How he possibly deduced any useful information from the three or four seconds of burn is beyond me. He had the instincts, I suppose. He was one of the three or four Thiokol engineers who pleaded with NASA not to launch the Challenger on that fateful day in January 1986. Afterwards, he was sent to pick through the pieces of the failed motor and determine the catastrophe's cause.
As I grew older his other work began to perplex and then trouble me. One night at a restaurant I noticed my father lost in thought, eyes fixed in a thousand yard stare, utensils and food forgotten. I asked him if he was okay. He composed himself immediately and said, "Sorry, it's those damn missiles." I asked what he meant and he replied, "I was thinking of something I need to work out. I've been stuck on it for a week." Those "damn missiles" were, as I recall, the MX system, the "Peacekeeper." I also remember him showing me a long, threaded shaft he'd brought home. He explained the shaft, one of four, was attached to a motor that would turn it at high speed and extend a missiles thrust cone in less than a second just prior to ignition.
"What for?"
"So we can place them on tractor trailers or a train car. The cone collapses and takes up much less room. Then it's raised into firing position and the cone extends like that." He snapped his fingers.
He rarely brought his work home because so much of it was secret. I both admired his work and abhored it. The latter started getting to me in my teens and I even had nightmares of the nuclear apocalypse. In one, my father got the whole family to safety by placing a call on a phone I'd never seen in the house before. That was telling. As time went on I had a growing sense of just what kind of secrets my father worked on. I remember being conflicted when seeing or reading reports of massive demonstrations in West Germany (there were two Germanies then, of course) over the proposed deployment of a new American missile system there. That was the first I'd heard of the Green Party. It was also, I think, my political awakening.
These days, long retired near the end of his life, my father agrees with me that far too much is spent on defense. He calls the original "Star Wars" system a waste of resources and feels the new efforts are much more about dominating the weaponization of space than about defense. In other words, a good offense is the best defense. He calls Bush and his War Cabinet "zealots" and fears a century of warfare with the Islamic peoples. The Cold War he viewed as necessary because he held deep-seated animosity for totalitarian systems. He views the war in Iraq as the unnecessary and rash action of a superpower that could and should be policing the world, not destabilizing it.
I remember as discussion we had sometime after the Soviet Union imploded. I told him about an idea I had for truly transforming the American presence in the world by channeling the "peace dividend" we were promised into something evolutionary. The idea was a fleet of ships for global humanitarian relief and natural disaster response and recovery operations. I suggested developing powering them with gradually cleaner and cleaner propulsion systems and some hi-tech wind power gadgets I'd read about. To my surprise, my father not only agreed with me but added, "And my company could be used to develop those." I found hope in that--an old cold warrior and patriot seeing the chance to transform his industry and maybe the world.
That was the time to make the term Realist mean something other than a person who only sees the world as a dangerous place. There is danger in the world, of course, and dangerous people. But nothing in the post-Cold War world suggested America was prepared to admit, let alone confront the potential fallout of questionable and coercive policies from decades of the standoff with Soviet militarism. Now we have more fear, more coercion, and double doses of jingoism. The Kneejerk Yankee Doodle in the White House considers himself a Realist. His cyclopian vision of the world's dangers are not only terrifying in themselves. They are an insult to people like my father who truly believed a better world was possible and hoped to contribute through astonishing advances in technology and communications, even if some of those developments were frightening beyond reason. It was believed the Cold War should be won and the peace kept.
It's time again to redefine a Realist as someone who isn't afraid to evolve.
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