October 16, 2003

  • It’s my belief that the demise of Communism in the Soviet Union was due not to corruption, or excessive vodka drinking, or the disproportionate burden of the cost of the military on the economy, or the West’s active resistance to communist ideology, or the seductions of market capitalism, but due, rather, to the Soviet Union’s successful ventures into space.


    Space is the great ideological chiller.  No structure of thought can stand up against it: the farther you go, the less you know.  And like the viral transformations borne upon biotic asteroids that have crashed throughout earth’s history into our atmosphere, making the experience of space an indulgent focus of one’s culture carries a life-changing payload.  The space capsule sent out carrying an astronaut into space is never the same one that returns.  It’s become a Trojan Horse, stallionized by the cosmic flow that pulses beyond this silent planet.  And the returning astronaut, with his forever altered unconsciousness, returns as a psychically seditious hero to the dispatching cultural constructs that launched him out and beyond.


    “Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do…”


    Now, China has joined the ‘Space Erase’ with its premier launch and return of its first next-generation hero:


    Yang, whose place in Chinese history books has now been assured, has been lauded as a "space hero" by the head of China's manned space program Li Jinai.


    With that first step successfully completed Thursday's editions of virtually every Chinese newspaper carried Yang's picture on their front page, emblazoned alongside Chinese flags and images of his spacecraft blasting into space.


    The state-run China Daily newspaper mirrored many enthusiastic reports with leading it coverage with the headline "Great Leap Skyward." 
        -CNN


    My contention is that the precise correlate of a Great Leap Skyward is a Great Plummet Ideologically.  And with a nation as great as China, that should become something wondrous to behold.


    Hey China, Marx and Engels and Mao are about to get thumped.  You’ve awakened the frontier-archetype once again, the changeling trickster of space has shattered the conceptual box, the ‘old ways’ are doomed for revamp, and there will be no more Mr. Rice Guy.


    Now, if we want to defuse the recent, dangerous posturing by North Korea, just line ‘em up on the launchpad.

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