NASA cowards and American decadence

mparent7777

I have long believed that American society has exhibited a widespread pattern of decadence and that the odious behavior of the Bush administration is simply a mirror of the much more serious decay of our institutions. Institutions don’t come apart because of a temporary failure of leadership. What truly wrecks them is the failure of the rank and file to remain true to the institutional mission. Proof of this is the latest scandal at NASA.

This week, the decision was made to launch the Space Turkey (AKA, Space Shuttle) on July 1. This decision was made over the objection of two senior NASA officials, one of whom was the top ranking safety officer. Did these men resign in protest and go to the press to try to save the lives of the next shuttle crew? Of course not! They allowed themselves to be bludgeoned into approving the launch decision, provided their CYA objections were included as a matter of record. Why did this happen?

The simple answer is that Americans have, for the most part, lost the courage of their convictions. The good life of big houses, comfortable cars, and fat paychecks has become an addiction for the middle managers who hold our institutions together. Had the dissenting NASA officials resigned, they would have suffered devastating economic retaliation, probably including blacklisting by our government-dependent aerospace industry.

The true believers on this blog cling to the fantasy that corruption in America is some localized cancer that can be neatly cut out by a change of national leadership. But they have the wrong cancer metaphor. We are looking at mestastatic cancer, cancer that has infiltrated our society at Enron, Arthur Andersen, General Motors, the NYSE, Fannie Mae, Merck, Morgan Stanley, NASA, the DoD, Halliburton, and most other large institutions in the United States.

The reason the Space Turkey will launch (with uncertain survival prospects) in July is the same reason 40,000 Enron employees kept their mouths shut until their company collapsed: moral cowardice resulting from affluence-induced decadence.