The Shuttle Goes Down

I was there the first time around.

As a lifelong Washingtonian, I can remember back to that day in the mid-1980s, as the shuttle Enterprise was flown around the Beltway on the back of a 747.  It was awesome, as a young teen, to watch as it soared by.  I stood on a bikepath overlooking the highway, and the jet roared low and slow overhead so everyone could get a good long look.

It was amazing.  That image, of the iconic silhouette, of the reality of the first orbiter, well, that's still burned into my cortex.  It's an important memory.

It was an emblem of America's commitment to peaceful space exploration.  Oh, sure, the Enterprise herself was just a testbed, a functioning prototype.  But it was a profoundly hopeful thing to witness with my own eyes.  Here was powerfully real evidence of our nation, committed to the future.  We were making it happen.  We were getting it done.   The prototype?  On her way to be stored by the Smithsonian at Dulles, where one day a museum would rise to house her.  Other shuttles, a fleet of them, promised to open low earth orbit to all manner of exploration.  And then?  The future seemed filled with possibilities.

Today, the shuttle Discovery made the same rounds.

Across my Washington DC area social network, there was much excitement.  Pictures snapped from smartphones and culled from local media sources popped and repopped on Facebook.  The local newsradio station hummed with shuttle sightings.

So exciting!  A real spaceship!  Right there in the skies above the Nation's Capital!

I can't quite feel the same excitement now.

In the place of the Discovery, there is nothing.  Oh, there are and were plenty of pipe-dreams.  We'll go to Mars, said a president!  We'll set up a moon base, said a candidate!  Sure we will.  That talk is nothing more than the yarns told by your always-broke uncle, spinning a story about how he's going to make it big from the same sofa he's living on in your grandparents basement.  It's just not real.

We've become a nation that has forgotten the effort required to make things like that happen.  Our drive for space has faltered.  Our capacity for heavy lift to orbit is functionally zero.  We have no real plans to get back on track.  NASA's funding is waning.

Heck, even North Korea, a starving, struggling, mostly insane backwater tyranny, shows more motivation to get into space.   We're content to stick out our thumbs and let the Russians do the work.    Or not do anything at all, except perhaps weaponizing the program so it can be funded covertly.  Going into space as a nation requires resources, which means paying for it, which means taxes.  We've forgotten how to do that after years of being told you can get something for nothing.  That is and always has been the easy lie of charlatans, quacks, and politicians.

So now we have nothing, and are too distracted and unfocused as a nation to even realize we should be ashamed by that reality.

The possibilities that the Enterprise represented have faded.  The future that the Discovery worked towards is not to be seen.

It may yet resurface.   I hope it does.  But today over the skies of Washington came a reminder of how quickly future becomes history, and how easily potential can be lost without both commitment and effort.

Freedom, Faith, and the Jefferson Bible

The original text, handmade by Thomas Jefferson.

Yesterday, the boys, the missus and me decided to head out of the house and roll into downtown DC to do a little museum hopping.  We're remarkably blessed to live so close to the Smithsonian museums that line the National Mall, which are 1) an amazing resource open to the American people and 2) free.   Gotta love you some "free."

There were a couple of exhibits that struck our fancy.  The little guy was big into hitting an exhibit of American military history.  The big guy, while feigning early-teen disdain, called our attention to a display of art based on the photoluminescent creatures that live in the ocean's depths.   My wife was looking forward to an interactive display, in which you could blend your facial features with that of a proto-human.   I will not share that picture, although it was amusing, for reasons having to do with wanting to sleep in my own bed tonight.

The two donor Bibles.

Me?  Well, I wanted to see what is popularly known as the Jefferson Bible.

As a religious studies graduate of Mr. Jefferson's University, this little tome has some iconic power for me, and seeing the thing itself, right there in the case, well, that was cool.

In the event you've not been aware of it, the Jefferson Bible is Jefferson's fairly straightforward attempt to create a text that he found amenable to his Enlightenment Deist sensibilities.   Jefferson, being an eminently rational and philosophical soul, well, he had some trouble with the Bible generally.   His faith...and he was a faithful person, in his own way...really did not extend to being able to embrace the more supernatural elements of the Christian faith.  Miracles?  Angels you could hear on high?  Ancient legal and purity codes?   He just couldn't get there.

Still, he'd been impressed enough with what he had learned about the teachings of Jesus to feel they were worth reading and studying.   So he created his own "Bible," entitled "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth."

He did not do so by engaging in a careful scholarly re-translation from the most ancient and reliable of texts.  Nope.   Instead, he took a couple of bibles.  Then, he cut out the parts he liked, and pasted them into another book.   That's it.  Hey presto, Jefferson's "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth."

It's striking for a variety of reasons.

First, given the context, it was a relatively...um...bold thing to do.  There were plenty of proto-Americans who would have looked rather unfavorably on slicing up a Bible.  There are some even today, although if they've ever cut and pasted a verse into a document, really, honey, it's the same thing.  And you don't get that "Founding Father" status unless you're willing to stand up boldly for what you believe in.

Second, I was struck yesterday at how Ol' Tee Jay managed to inadvertently create a document that looks remarkably like the "Q" source proposed by redaction criticism, that collection of sayings and teachings that both Matthew and Luke most likely had in common, but which has been lost to history.   That was, of course, not his intent.   Jefferson couldn't have cared less about the connection to prophetic literature or to Torah.  He was a busy man, what with a nation to create and all.  He was just pickin' the stuff he liked, without really focusing on the way that the text linked to other texts. 

Third, in creating this document,  Jefferson was doing what most Bible readers do anyway.  We read the bits we like, and focus on the bits we like, and ignore the rest.  We may not go all kindergarten on it with our scissors and paste, but we're perfectly capable of doing that in our minds.   And Lord knows, we do plenty of it, constructing our own understanding of what is valuable and what is not.

There's both necessity and danger in that, of course.  If we get our sorting right, we end up focusing on the parts of the Bible that should be most radically defining.   If we get it wrong?  Well, that can take us into all sorts of odd and delusional places.   But Mistah Jeffahson was discerning enough that he caught most of the good stuff.

Finally, staring at this Jesus mashup cobbled together by a bright soul nearly 200 years ago, I found myself being thankful for the country that he helped form, a country in which we're free to believe as we wish, and where no human being can force belief upon any other human being.   We can persuade and argue and debate.  But we remain, within those boundaries, wholly free.

On this Thanksgiving week, that's a vital and real blessing to remember.