After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (5 page)

Compare the Twenties to the Nineties: in the former, the discovery of insulin and penicillin, plus the first vaccines for tuberculosis, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, on and on. In the last decade of the twentieth century, what? A vaccine for Hepatitis A, and Viagra. Good for erectile dysfunction, but what about inventile dysfunction? In October 1920, a doctor in London, Ontario, Frederick Banting, had an idea as to how insulin might be isolated and purified and used to treat diabetes, which in those 28

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days killed you.1 By August 1922, Elizabeth Hughes, the daughter of America’s Secretary of State and a diabetic near death, was being given an experimental course of the new treatment. By January 1923, Eli Lilly & Company were selling insulin to American druggists. That’s it: a little over two years from concept to patient. Not today: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration now adds half a decade to the process by which a treatment makes it to market, and they’re getting slower. Between 1996 and 1999, the FDA approved 157 new drugs. Between 2006 and 2009, the approvals fell by half—to 74.2 What happens during that half-decade? People die, non-stop—as young Elizabeth Hughes would have died under the “protection”

of today’s FDA. Because statism has no sense of proportion. You can still find interesting articles about new discoveries that might have implications for, say, Parkinson’s disease. But that’s all you’ll find: articles, in periodicals, lying around your doctor’s waiting room. The chances of the new discovery advancing from the magazine on the coffee table to your prescription are less and less. To begin the government-approval process is to enter what the cynics of the twenty-first-century research biz call the valley of death.

When
America Alone
came out, arguing that the current conflict is about demographic decline, globalized psychoses, and civilizational confidence, a lot of folks objected, as well they might: seeing off supple amorphous abstract nouns is not something advanced societies do well. You’re looking at it the wrong way, I was told. Technocratic solutions, new inventions, the old can-do spirit: that’s the American way, and that’s what will see us through.

Well, okay, so where is it?

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creScent moon

Half a century ago, the future felt different. Take 1969, quite a year in the aerospace biz: in one twelve-month period, we saw the test flight of the Boeing 747, the maiden voyage of the
Concorde
, the RAF’s deployment of the Harrier “jump jet,” and Neil Armstrong’s “giant step for mankind.”

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Buzz Aldrin packed a portable tape player with him on Apollo 11, and so Sinatra’s ring-a-ding-ding recording of “Fly Me to the Moon” became the first (human) music to be flown to the moon and played there.3 Had any other nation beaten NASA to it, they’d have marked the occasion with the

“Ode to Joy” or
Also Sprach Zarathustra
, something grand and formal. But there’s something marvelously American about the first human being to place his feet on the surface of a heavenly sphere standing there with a cas-sette machine blasting out Frank and the Count Basie band in a swingin’

Quincy Jones arrangement—the insouciant swagger of the American century breaking the bounds of the planet.

In 1961, before the eyes of the world, President Kennedy had set American ingenuity a very specific challenge—and put a clock on it: This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.4

That’s it. No wiggle room. A monkey on the moon wouldn’t count, nor an unmanned drone, nor a dune buggy that can’t take off again but transmits grainy footage back to Houston as it rusts up in the crater it came to rest in.

The only way to win the bet is with a real-live actual American standing on the surface of the moon planting the Stars and Stripes. Even as it happened, the White House was so cautious that William Safire wrote President Nixon a speech to be delivered in the event of disaster: Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace . . . 5

Yet America did it. “Fly Me to the Moon/Let me sing forever more.” What comes after American yearning and achievement? Democratization: “Everybody Gets to Go the Moon.” That all but forgotten Jimmy Webb song from 1969 catches the spirit of the age:

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Isn’t it a miracle

That we’re the generation

That will touch that shiny bauble with our own two hands?

Whatever happened to that?

Four decades later, Bruce Charlton, professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham in England, wrote that “that landing of men on the moon and bringing them back alive was the supreme achievement of human capability, the most difficult problem ever solved by humans.”6 That’s a good way to look at it: the political class presented the boffins with a highly difficult and specific problem, and they solved it—in eight years. Charlton continued:

Forty years ago, we could do it—repeatedly—but since then we have
not
been to the moon, and I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability.

Of course, the standard line is that humans stopped going to the moon only because we no longer
wanted
to go to the moon, or could not afford to, or something. . . . But I am suggesting that all this is BS. . . . I suspect that human capability reached its peak or plateau around 1965-75—at the time of the Apollo moon landings—and has been declining ever since.

Can that be true? Charlton is a controversialist gadfly in British academe, but, comparing 1950 to the early twenty-first century, our time traveler from 1890 might well agree with him. And, if you think about it, isn’t it kind of hard even to
imagine
America pulling off a moon mission now?

The countdown, the takeoff, a camera transmitting real-time footage of a young American standing in a dusty crater beyond our planet blasting out from his iPod Lady Gaga and the Black-Eyed Peas or whatever the twenty-first-century version of Sinatra and the Basie band is. . . . It half-lingers in collective consciousness as a memory of faded grandeur, the way a the new rome 31

ninetheenth-century date farmer in Nasiriyah might be dimly aware that the Great Ziggurat of Ur used to be around here someplace.

So what happened? According to Professor Charlton, in the 1970s “the human spirit began to be overwhelmed by bureaucracy.” The old can-do spirit? Oh, you can try to do it, but they’ll toss every obstacle in your path.

Go on, give it a go: invent a new medical device; start a company; go to the airport to fly to D.C. and file a patent. Everything’s longer, slower, more soul-crushing. And the decline in “human capability” will only worsen in the years ahead, thanks not just to excess bureaucracy but insufficient cash.

“Yes, we can!” droned the dopey Obamatrons of 2008. No, we can’t, says Charlton, not if you mean “land on the moon, swiftly win wars against weak opposition and then control the defeated nation, secure national borders, discover breakthrough medical treatments, prevent crime, design and build to a tight deadline, educate people so they are ready to work before the age of 22. . . . ”

Houston, we have a much bigger problem.

To be sure, there’s still something called “NASA” and it still stands for the “National Aeronautics and Space Administration.” But there’s not a lot of either aeronautics or space in the in-box of the agency’s head honcho. A few days after Charlton penned his elegy for human capability, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden appeared on al-Jazeera and explained the brief he’d been given by President Obama:

One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering.7

Islam: The final frontier! To boldly go where no diversity outreach consultant has gone before! What’s “foremost” for NASA is to make Muslims “feel good”

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about their contributions to science. Why, as recently as the early ninth century Muhammad al-Khwarizmi invented the first universal horary quad-rant! Things have been a little quiet since then, or at least since Taqi-al-Din’s observatory in Istanbul was razed to the ground by the Sultan’s janissaries in 1580. If you hear a Muslim declaring “We have lift off!” it’s likely to be a triumphant ad-lib after lighting up his crotch. As far as I recall, the most recent Islamic contribution to the subject of space exploration came from Britain’s most prominent imam, Abu Hamza, who in 2003 declared that the fate of the space shuttle
Columbia
was God’s punishment “because it carried Americans, an Israeli and a Hindu, a trinity of evil against Islam.”8

It’s easy to laugh at the likes of Abu Hamza, although not as easy as it should be, not in Europe and Canada, where the state is eager to haul you into court for “Islamophobia.” But the laugh’s on us. NASA is the government agency whose acronym was known around the planet, to every child who looked up at the stars and wondered what technological marvels the space age would have produced by the time he was out of short pants. Now the starry-eyed moppets are graying boomers, and the agency that symbolized man’s reach for the skies has transformed itself into a self-esteem boosterism operation. Is there an accompanying book—
Muslims Are from
Mars, Infidels Are from Venus
?

There’s your American decline right there: from out-of-this-world to out-of-our-minds, an increasingly unmanned flight from real, historic, technological accomplishment to unreal, ahistorical, therapeutic, touchy-feely multiculti.

So we can’t go to the moon. And, by the time you factor in getting to the airport to do the shoeless shuffle and the enhanced patdown, flying to London takes longer than it did in 1960. If they were trying to build the transconti-nental railroad now, they’d be spending the first three decades on the environmental-impact study and hammering in the Golden Spike to celebrate the point at which the Feasibility Commission’s expansion up from the fifth floor met the Zoning Board’s expansion down from the twelfth floor.

Google and Apple and other latter day American success stories started in somebody’s garage—the one place where innovation isn’t immediately the new rome 33

buried by bureaucracy, or at least in most states, not until some minor municipal functionary discovers you neglected to apply for a Not Sitting Around on My Ass All Day permit. What did Apple and company do in those garages? They invented and refined home computers—an entirely logical response to late twentieth-century America: when reality seizes up, freedom retreats and retrenches to virtual reality, to the internal. Where once space was the final frontier, now we frolic in the canyons of our mind.

We’re in the Wilbur & Orville era of the Internet right now, but at the Federal Communications Commission and other agencies they’re already designing the TSA uniforms for the enhanced cyber-patdown.

And what do you have to show for all that government? It’s amazing with a multi-trillion-dollar barrel how quickly you wind up scraping the bottom of it. In Obama’s “American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan,” two of the five objectives were to “computerize the health-care system” and

“modernize classrooms.”9 That sound you hear is the computerized eye-rolling with which every modernized hack author now comes equipped.

For its part, the Congressional Progressive Caucus wanted “green jobs creation” and “construction of libraries in rural communities to expand broadband access.”10 And in a postmodern touch, Mark Pinsky at the
New
Republic
made the pitch for a new Federal Writers’ Project, in which writers laid off by America’s collapsing newspaper industry would be hired by the government to go around the country “documenting the ground-level impact of the Great Recession.”11 America has a money-no-object government with a lot of money but no great objects.

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GotterdammerunG

When the father of Big Government, Franklin Roosevelt, was brought before the Hoover Dam, he declared:

This morning I came, I saw, and I was conquered, as everyone would be who sees for the first time this great feat of mankind.12

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But the bigger government gets, the less it actually
does
. You think a guy like Obama is going to put up a new Hoover Dam (built during the Depression and opened two years ahead of schedule)? No chance. Today’s Big Government crowd is more likely to put up a new regulatory agency to tell the Hoover Dam it’s non-wheelchair accessible and has to close. As Deanna Archuleta, Obama’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior, assured an audience in Nevada: “You will never see another federal dam.”13 “Great feats of mankind” are an environmental hazard, for mankind has great feats of clay. But hang on, isn’t hydropower “renewable” energy? It doesn’t use coal or oil, it generates electricity from the natural water cycle. If that’s not renewable, what is? Ah, but, according to environmental “dam-busters,”

reservoirs are responsible for some 4 percent of the earth’s carbon dioxide emissions. Environmental devastation-wise, the Hoover Dam is the patio pool to Al Gore’s mansion. Out, out, dammed spot!

So, just as the late Roman Empire was no longer an aqueduct-building culture, we are no longer a dam-building one. It’s not just that we no longer invent, but that we are determined to disinvent everything our great-grandparents created to enable the self-indulgent lives we take for granted and that leave us free to chip away at the foundations of our own society.

So-called “progressives” actively wage war on progress. They’re opposed to dams, which spurred the growth of California. They’re opposed to air-conditioning, which led to the development of the Southwest. They’re opposed to light bulbs, which expanded man’s day, and they’re opposed to automobiles, which expanded man’s reach. They’re still nominally in favor of mass transit, so maybe we can go back to wood-fired steam trains?