I’m having a hard time recalling the last time the two biggest news stories of a single day offered a starker contrast than last Thursday. February 18 being the day NASA landed its latest rover on Mars … and the day Ted Cruz, senator from freezing, powerless and waterless Texas decided to pack up the wife and kiddies and hit the Ritz-Carlton in Cancun.
Prior to Thursday I had geeked out and watched a dozen or more YouTube videos about the Mars 2020 mission. These included backstories of some of the scientists who had devoted a dozen years and more of their lives to pulling off the highwire endeavour of dropping the Perseverance rover with all its exotic tech on exactly the chosen spot after a six-and-a-half-month 130-million mile crossing through space. So yeah, I had tears in my eyes as the signal came in that the machine had landed safely and the team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory leapt out of their chairs in exultation.
It was an astonishing accomplishment, even if we’ve come to expect it of NASA.
But then came Cruz. With nearly all of his 29 million constituents suffering and some dying from a predictable, man-aggravated cold weather catastrophe, Cruz seeing no role for himself in either serving or protecting Texans, packed up and left for Mexico. While we may not have expected exactly that stupid a move from Harvard-educated Cruz, somehow it came as less of a surprise than it might.
The two events offer a vivid example of a key and, if you ask me, perilous division widening across the United States.
How so?
Well, on the one hand you have a deeply-coordinated long-term effort by an team of scientists; (ethnically and racially diverse it’s pertinent to note), people of discipline with a near religious devotion to empirical fact. The career they’ve chosen and the work they do fail utterly if they miss, omit or ignore facts.
Meanwhile, you have a burgeoning species of professional politicians, embodied by Cruz, but including Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Texas’ Republican-controlled legislature, (an almost all-white male crew) and fellow travelers like Josh Hawley of Missouri, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Jim Jordan of Ohio and of course Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia — to name only a few — whose success, such as it is, is heavily if not entirely dependent on ignoring facts, rejecting basic laws of science and only pretending to function as “public servants.”
I couldn’t help but imagine how the two events — the Mars landing and the Texas grid failure — would have played out had the cast of characters reversed roles. If Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene ran NASA and NASA’s science nerds were in charge of Texas’ deregulated power grid … with all it’s voluntary guidelines for maintaining function in cold weather?
On the former, forget blowing up on the launch pad. The Cruz, Hawley, Greene, etc. act — a standard now of Republican political theory — is so solely reactive to juvenile tribal pressures, Mars 2020 would have been red-lined the minute someone tipped them that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is in California … a “blue state run by a socialist Democrat governor!”
Bye bye red planet.
But in Texas, who among us thinks for a minute that Team NASA, looking at the 2011 breakdown of the grid and the years of demands to weatherize the damn system, would have said, “Sheeeeit, all those mittens and scarfs for all those pipes and valves would really cut into shareholder value. Let’s not and say we did. Or blame AOC. Whatever.”
Several people have noted that modern Republicans have perfected a species of electable politician out of DNA based on simply being against everything “the libs” are for. Look no closer than South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem for a Midwest example of blowing off — i.e. doing nothing in the face of the factual science of the COVID pandemic, resulting in one of the highest death rates in the world — and being widely touted as having demonstrated the cut of a presidential jib because of it.
As the folks at NASA control rooms might say, “WTF?”
Cruz and Hawley are no different. They just don’t look as good in skirts, and to date anyway aren’t under attack for running up fat Sarah Palin-style tabs at taxpayer/chump expense flying around on state planes to MAGA rallies.
But (my gal) Marjorie! An unapolgetic carpetbagger from an upscale Atlanta suburb migrates over to rural GooberLand for the easier voter pickins and wins in a slam dunk because she made no real policy promises other than bringing QAnon math, delusion and grievance to DC. Oh, and more guns.
(The death of Rush Limbaugh — the stem root of all hat-no cattle conservative patriotism and theatrical fact rejection — simultaneous with Cruz’ antics was almost too rich for words.)
Watching the split-screen of the Mars rover and Ted Cruz, my alleged mind drifted back to a theme Israeli historian/author Yuval Noah Harari keeps making in his books, essays and lectures. Namely that “cognitive evolution” is increasing right now. Not necessarily among all, but clearly among a small but significant sub-section of the human population.
Not a hundred or a thousand years from now, but likely within the next decade Harari believes we will see the first of what will in effect be a “super species” of humans. People with access to the best information, plus the means to collate and apply it to practices and technology, will dramatically increase both their life-spans and their years of vigorous good health.
That dramatic leap in human evolution will not be based in performative ignorance, laissez-faire math and “owning some libs.”
A lot of facts will be involved.
I can imagine a scenario where when such a day comes, even after all he’s said and done to distort logic and reason, Ted Cruz will once again gather up the wife and kiddies, call in a police escort and push ahead to the front of the line.
Until then though he’ll have to be content — along with Josh Hawley and Marjorie Greene — with having a veto vote over NASA’s budget.
Yes, it is a fascinating distinction. On the one hand, competence, results, facts, these are the things that matter. On the other hand, it is appearances, it is a performance for an audience, illusion. “All the world’s a stage”.
So this is my personal prejudice coming out, but it seems to me as if we are living through a reversal of the Enlightenment. What is now important is creating “facts” that fit our theory (philosophy, religion, prejudice, etc.) of how the world works, not trying to adjust our theory of how the world works to the facts.
Pete: Sorry for taking so long to reply. Who can argue that Trumpism isn’t anti-Enlightenment? Empirical data. Science. Rational discourse. Out the window, or at least completely expendable if politically necessary. My final point, about Harari, is that what we might call the new “super Enlightenment”, fully exploiting all the abilities of science, is already creating a widening gulf between those who accept and appreciate it and those who deny it or ignore it, for whatever their reasons. (And that modern conservatives are encouraging the latter.) Harari’s caution is that there is no guarantee evolution-wise, that the Enlightened will carry the day. Have you been shot up? We’re out of town until the 21st, but Salut is beckoning.