Thursday, December 17, 2009

NOT ALL ABUSE VICTIMS BECOME KILLERS - SOME JUST BECOME HANGING JUDGES


Being tough on crime has two faces. 
The first is that you are fired up by force and violence as deterrents to crime. The second is that the idea of redemption or rehabilitation leaves you cold.

The other day the front page of my newspaper ran with the headline: “A life based on hate is no life at all.” Pretty eloquent, I thought. Who said it? Gandhi? Martin Luther King? No, it was Buford Furrow - the white supremacist who murdered a Filipino letter carrier and wounded a total of five people - three children, an adolescent camp counselor and an adult staff member - at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills. It turns out that he had done some soul-searching and repudiated his violent past.

I thought that was commendable. And then I read the subheading of the article. “REGRET: Relatives of victims say gunman’s apparent change of heart is welcome, but it won’t undo his deeds.”
Won’t undo his deeds? Are you kidding? Is there anything in the world that can do that? Er, no. What’s done is done. All we can do is to look forward and hope to do better next time. But the bias of our system is such that it cannot allow that to happen with good grace. Marry the man to his deeds and make sure that he pays for all eternity with no hope of divorce! In Furrow’s case, eternity amounts to two consecutive life sentences and an additional 110 years running consecutively with the life sentences.

Can anyone say overkill? If turnaround is fair play, I guarantee that you will never see this headline: “Relatives welcome throwing the book at hate criminal, but it won’t undo his deeds.” That might be just a tad too subversive for words. We don’t want to be reminded that our system of justice is nothing more than a vindictive judgment on that which cannot be undone. 

Anyone feel like beating a dead horse?

Take the case of Steven Anthony Jones. Jurors called him a killing machine. Prosecutors said he was like a submerged crocodile lying in wait for his prey. 
Even one of his attorneys professed to being taken aback by his resume of crime. When he came before Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy in his orange jail scrubs, she sentenced him to death for killing one man in an execution-style robbery and bludgeoning a woman to death. 
But not before she recited the highlights of his long career of violence, torture and rape, stretching from Lancaster to Arizona and back to LA County. As one by one the relatives of his murdered victims walked up to the stand and confronted Jones with their expressions of anger and grief, Jones turned to the audience in the downtown LA courtroom and said he understood he had ruined lives and was sorry. 
He blamed an abusive childhood and an addiction to drugs for his violence. “From the bottom of my heart, I apologize. I never knew about love. I never knew about family. All I knew was violence.”
I don’t know about you, but I think that as self-evaluations go, that one is spot on.

You cannot fault a child for failing to speak French when he grew up learning to speak Farsi. If physical violence is the only language you know, how can you be expected to become fluent in non-violent forms of communication? The judge begged to differ. She set no great store by his newfound awareness of his past. She told Jones that she was skeptical of his claim that he was a changed man. “I hope that your apology was sincere. However, these apologies do not make up for the horrific crimes you committed.”

This begs the question. What would make up for these horrific crimes? Injecting a man with a cocktail of toxic chemicals? Gassing or electrocuting him to death, and then resuscitating him so that he can gassed or electrocuted all over again?  Rinse, repeat??

Aside from that, change is the real issue. Times change. Societies change. But people? Can people change? If the criminal justice system is to be believed, the answer is, who cares. No institution on earth is more threatened by the implications of genuine change than the criminal justice system. 

If criminals can experience regret and remorse, they are on their way to being changed from a violent mindset to a kinder, gentler one. 
But here’s the rub. Change works in both directions. If human beings can change from a hateful, violent mindset to a loving one, perhaps they can be changed from an innocent loving mindset to a hateful, savage one. 
Now that is something that the criminal justice system cannot stomach. The idea of someone going from bad to good - that blindsides it and leaves its representatives shaking their head and sniggering with doubt and suspicion. But what leaves them positively apoplectic is the prospect that someone can go from being innocent and sweet to a violent criminal. That human beings can be born warm, cuddly, needing to bond, needing to connect - and then, through being routinely neglected, rejected, abandoned - through being viciously beaten, tortured and trashed - they can grow cold and insensitive, they can lose their vulnerability and bottle up feelings of anger and grief and grow mad and lash out against society…that's a non-starter. The system is shut off to that possibility!

And so when defense lawyers argued that Jones was just an innocent boy in the beginning, but that he was savagely beaten by his father every day, whether he did anything to deserve it or not, and that may have played a major role in how he turned out, Judge Kennedy will have none of it. “There are many, many people who have childhoods that are less than perfect and they don’t become violent killers as Mr. Jones has become.”

Is this one wise compassionate judge or what? Here she is telling a victim of catastrophic abuse that it's his own damn fault that he didn't grow up to become a decent law-abiding citizen. That's like a doctor telling a patient dying of cancer that it's his own damn fault that he didn't beat the odds to go on to live a healthy, productive life! 

It makes sense, doesn't it, in a loopy kind of way. As long as there are all these survivors of abuse who turn our well, those who fail to do so can't blame the abuse for ravaging their psyches and destroying their lives. As long as there are all these cancer survivors who do just fine, those who fail to make it cannot blame the cancer for ravaging their bodies and destroying their lives.

And don't you just love how the judge mincingly refers to all those with "less than perfect" childhoods. As if a less than perfect childhood is the same thing as an over-the-top sadistic childhood. 

Here is a system that is treated every day of the week to a parade of people overwhelmed with rage. And it refuses to face up squarely to what it is that makes them so mad that they would as soon strike you dead as look at you. 
Love is what regenerates us as a species. Is it so hard to believe that the absence of love turns us into degenerates? Love brings us to life. Is it so hard to understand that the absence of love kills? Love lifts us up to where we belong. Is it so hard to admit that the absence of love drags us down to the level of wild beasts of prey?

Why is that judges and prosecutors choke on the power of love?

Child abuse is at the root of all society’s ills. 
Human rights abuses, social abuses, abuses of power and money - all have their origin in child abuse. 
And yet the criminal justice system blithely acts as if the breakdown of love does not lead to the breakdown of social order. Love is not all that it’s cracked up to be! You can take it or leave it! 
Could it be because if the system copped to the awesome power of love, it would put itself out of business? 
Imagine if it did everything to ensure that every child received his share of nurture and affection, understanding and compassion, appreciation and respect. Who would grow up to be homicidally mad anymore? Crime just might be wiped out in a generation!

No, no, we can’t have that. Judges and prosecutors would have no one to throw the book at. And then what would they do with all the punitive hostility that eats away at them from the inside? Take responsibility for it? Well, now, there’s a game-changing thought! A judge who sits in judgment on herself!
You can see why it is easier for the judge to point a finger, without noticing those three fingers pointing back at her robed self. 

And so, no, your Honor, not everyone who is abused turns into a killer. You got that right, at least. 
Not all victims of abuse become violent killers on the streets.

Some become alcoholics and drug addicts and smoke or drink themselves to death.

Others internalize their rage and fill hospital beds with psychosomatic diseases and auto-immune disorders.

Then there are those who become black-ops killing machines and hit men for those in need of plausible deniability - or they go to law school and put their skill set to work writing legal memos in defense of torture.

There are those who walk the corridors of power and money and dictate Machiavellian policies that unleash waves of bloody repression in faraway countries, along with mass poverty, starvation, malnutrition and disease.

There are those who use bully pulpits on TV and radio to vociferously cheerlead the kinds of unjust policies that result in massacres of the innocents, in the form of the hemorrhaging of livelihoods and wholesale loss of homes or the degradation of national health, education and welfare or the destruction of the American Dream.

And last but not least, there are all those - and they are in the majority - who lounge in easy chairs and living room couches, or perch high on judicial benches, and passively acquiesce or actively rally around institutional forms of violence like war, capital punishment, torture and police and prison brutality.

When you’re right, you’re right judge. 
Not all victims of abuse become violent killers. 
But who’s to say that those who do are any worse than all the others victims of sadistic abuse who kill themselves, or become state-sanctioned technicians of murder, or slaughter tens of millions of innocent victims in foreign countries for no other reason than because their CO orders them to, or for that matter, just sit back in the comfort of their living rooms or the sanctity of their judicial chambers and blithely allow the state to go on killing in their name.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

A WORLD STILL HOOKED ON THE CROSS

by NEVILLE RAYMOND

We were late for a dinner party.

My wife and kids were in the back seat, and I was motoring over the 101 Freeway through the Cahuenga Pass.

And then I saw it, silhouetted on a hilltop.

A giant cross, radiating its silver light.

It was as if someone had cut a big round silvery moon into two ribbons, pasted them athwart each other, and stuck it in the night sky.

For an instant I thought, “How pretty.”

And then the significance of what I was seeing sank in, and I felt invaded.

Here it was a beautiful night. The sky was cloudless with a star glimmering here and there.

And there was this shape garishly plastered against the sky.

And it was the shape of a grisly apparatus of torture.

What the hell!


Who ever thought it was OK to shove this thing into my field of vision?

A grim instrument of capital punishment.

A barbaric artifact from a time when lawbreakers were publicly crucified and left to die a lingering, excruciating death.

Why was I being reminded of this spectacle - this - this grotesque obscenity?

Here I was, driving to a nice dinner on a tranquil night. The car was filled with the strains of the Pastoral Symphony. The wife and kids were quietly enjoying the ride.

Why did this stomach-turning thing have to raise its ugly head?


Was I the only one to grasp the significance of what I was seeing?

Was no one else outraged?

If this were a neon replica of a giant female breast, people would be up in arms.

If this was a neon model of a giant middle finger thrust into the sky, people would be pulling over in droves and sputtering into their cell phones.

But here was this ghastly testament to the savagery of a bygone era.

And people drove on as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

How come they didn’t realize that they were looking at an ancient version of a gas chamber or electric chair?

Didn’t they realize they might as well be staring at a syringe for a lethal injection, blown up larger than life and illuminated against the heavens?


And then I thought of all the other places where this obscene image was found.

Places of public worship.

Buildings where people go on Sundays to commune with the intelligent being that created life on earth.

At least the CIA has the decency to practice torture in remote places known as dark sites. No one is even supposed to know where they are.

Why are we still flaunting this grisly instrument of torture and death on our most hallowed structures?

Why is it that I cannot pass a place to do reverence to a higher power without finding it decorated with a shameful instrument that was designed to inflict excruciating pain and humiliation?

Isn’t it time we refined our sensibilities?

Isn’t it time that every time we see one of these things, we see an innocent man of Middle Eastern origin being strapped to a waterboard, or having his testicles hooked up to electrodes, or subjected to any of the degrading practices that meet the legal definition of torture?

If we could just recover the power of imagination, would we ever allow such a thing from the Dark Ages to deface our landscape?


And then I remembered the times we were living in.

It was just a few decades ago that the CIA fought Communism by recruiting barbaric warlords who were throwbacks to the Dark Ages.

The medieval wing of Islam was found to be a most useful ally in beating back a liberal, progressive agenda, the way that a mullah beats back a woman with the audacity to bare her face or drive a car.

Just look at how our homegrown Christian Taliban are mobilized to thwart enlightened reforms that would bring the U.S. into line with industrialized democracies in Europe and elsewhere.

I mean, come on. Who did I think I was fooling?

The problem wasn’t a silver cross in the sky.

It was humanity hanging from Old Ike's cross of iron.

It was the supreme rulers of the planet hung up on the bloodthirsty logic of human sacrifice.

It was a belief system that the sons of man had to be scapegoated and crucified en masse - whole economies bled to death, millions stripped of their livelihoods, turned out of their homes with no place to lay their heads, buried under mountains of collective debt, and left to die in godforsaken alleys and tent cities of hunger, illness and neglect.

And all for what? So that a tiny elect can be enthroned in its material idea of heaven?


No wonder ours is an age in which torture has made a comeback as the latest tool in the counterterrorist arsenal.

Really, when you come right down to it, it isn’t that much of a stretch to believe that torture keeps America safe.

It isn’t that far out of line to believe that torture saves American lives.

Not if you believe that an act or torture culminating in death can save the entire human race!

Sunday, September 6, 2009

WAR, TRUTH AND FREEDOM - THE ETERNAL TRIANGLE

By Neville Raymond

War, Freedom, Truth. Three concepts that are royalty in the world of ideas. If one of them is the king of kings, it would probably be Freedom. Freedom reigns supreme in our hearts and minds. And so it is not surprising that both War and Truth are anxious to pay court to Freedom and attach themselves to its cause.

Take the idea that we owe our freedom to the brave efforts of men who fight wars. World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - these wars were all fought to keep Americans free, or so we are told. If freedom has a price, it is paid in the currency of human blood. And so every Memorial Day we are treated to a barrage of articles and speeches about how all these wonderful freedoms that we enjoy here in America are brought to us courtesy of the enlisted men in the armed forces.

Then there is that other celebrated idea - that speaking the truth is a liberating act. We can all attest to this in some personal way. There is something refreshingly liberating about throwing off all social constraints and inhibitions and telling it like it is. In politics, there is the ideal of speaking truth to power. It seems that our rights and freedoms are being continually encroached upon by the powers that be, and so, in order to tell the state where to get off, it is necessary to speak truth to power. And of course, the need to speak to truth to power increases in proportion that the freedom of the press is muzzled. All you have to do is a little digging to realize that the corporate media carefully picks and chooses what it tells the public - because if it were unsparing with the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, the option to renew the system as we know it would not be picked up by the American people. I believe it was Napoleon himself - as powerful a political and military leader as he was - who was most candid in his assessment that truth-telling in the media had to be kept to a bare minimum. “If I were to give the liberty of the press, my power could not last three days.”

And finally, there is the real-life observation that during time of war the suppression of free speech is at an all-time high. At best, those who speak out or engage in dissent are the first to have their patriotism questioned. At worst, they run the risk of being branded traitors. Even during peace time, we know that the Pentagon is a watchful censor, rigorously filtering out any sort of historical reality, embarrassing fact or human feeling - whether in TV news or Hollywood movies - that undercuts the righteous image and heroic aura that the military likes to project. Naturally all of this has been summed up in a statement that was made by a U.S. Senator back during World War I, which by now has become axiomatic: “The first casualty when war comes is the truth.”

For most of us, these axiomatic notions casually hang out in our heads, and they come and go without our being aware of how they lethally opposed they are to each other’s existence. We never realize that Freedom, War and Truth are locked into an eternal love triangle. Freedom cannot be legitimately partnered up with War, without shamelessly playing Truth false. And conversely, Freedom cannot be married to Truth without exposing its relationship to War as a sham. But as soon as you get them all in the same room, so to speak, the double-dealing and deceit can no longer be kept up. And as things begin to sort themselves out, you are left with an inescapable conclusion.
If war is the great defender of our freedom, then you would think that war would be the great champion of truth, for as Jesus said, you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. But that is hardly the reality. What you find instead, in a thousand different real-time contexts, is that truth is the first casualty of war - and nothing has proved more subversive to a culture of militarism than the practice of telling the truth.
So what you are left with is an institution like war, that is always claiming to defend our freedoms, and yet as a matter of practical policy is downright hostile to the truth, which, coincidentally, is the very thing that sets us free.

Sunday, August 30, 2009

A Birth Certificate Beats A Death Certificate Any Day

by Neville Raymond


In our American democracy, those who hold the keys to the White House can be said to fall into two groups.
There are the millions of citizens who dutifully show up at the polling booth. And when they cast their vote, it is invariably for someone who stumps around the country, telling everybody what they want to hear, and then doing just the opposite.
Then there is the handful of oligarchs who handpick the guy that the voters will rubberstamp as their next president. And it is invariably someone who shows up at the doorstep of their mansion or penthouse suite, hat in hand, promising to do whatever they want him to do - even if it is the exact opposite of what the people want.

Oh sure, you’re feeling bad right about now that you’re in the wrong group. As Mel Brooks says, it’s good to be the king - maker, that is. But don’t be too envious. The process is hardly as risk-free as it appears.
I mean, look at John F. Kennedy. The kingmakers put him into the Oval Office. He owes his political fortune to them. And yet he turns around and does something incredibly rash and stupid. Like issuing a directive to pull troops out of Vietnam. Or overriding the Federal Reserve to have the government print its own money interest-free. Or threatening to smash the CIA to smithereens. Sheesh! Talk about biting the hand that feeds you! What could the poor oligarchs do but salve their outraged sense of betrayal with an assassin’s bullet?

If you think about it, it has got to be their worst nightmare. They may know how to pick ‘em. But not necessarily how to make ‘em stick with the program. The problem with crowning a young, charismatic, eloquent upstart as the leader of the free world is his undeniable power to inspire the people. What if he starts believing in his own rhetoric? What if he is carried away by the momentum that he has whipped up in his millions of supporters? What if, God forbid, he lives up to the expectations of all the people who voted for him - and in doing so, stabs the oligarchs in the back?
Now that would be bad news - the kind that no network would ever want to broadcast, no matter how staunchly it adheres to the motto, if it bleeds, it leads! Surely there has to be way of cracking down on these presidential loose cannons before they do any real damage. Assassination is all very well and good - if you can pull it off. But just look at how messy the last one turned out. It’s almost fifty years later and they are still talking about it - and hardly anyone believes the government’s side of it any more!

Of course, you can always put a brain-dead dummy - or a heart-dead doormat - in the Oval Office. Someone like George W. Like little Mikey in the old TV cereal commercials, he’ll eat anything you put in front of him. He has a cast-iron stomach for any line of crap that would makes a normal person want to gag. But then look at where it gets you. You cheapen the high office of the presidency. And you wind up with the most despised President in the history of the United States.

There has got to be a better way. You would think that with all those think tanks at their disposal, the oligarchs would come up with a smarter solution. And perhaps they may have, at that. Go with a charismatic leader, if you have to. Get the people all fired up and ready to storm the Bastille. And then, to make sure that your man knows when to bring everybody back to earth with a thud, have an insurance policy up your sleeve. Something to hold over the President’s head if all that public acclaim and popular enthusiasm goes to his head. Something right there in the Constitution, in black and white, that would immediately get him fired from the job. Like what, you wonder? Well, how about that he is not born on American soil? That would do it. Then, if he should refuse to play ball - if he should dare to go so far as to actually reform the healthcare system or abolish the Fed or end the war in Afghanistan and Iraq or do any of those things that would uphold the Constitution and serve the interests of the American people - you have a slam-dunk mechanism for making sure he’s history. It doesn’t have to be anything as messy as a coroner, all bought and paid for, ready to sign off on his death certificate. It could just be some Kenyan official waiting for the signal to step forward with his original birth certificate.

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Man Is a Nuisance in Space

by Neville Raymond

Forty years later, the idea of man on the moon remains as fabled (at least, for some) as the existence of the man in the moon. Now if only the rest of us could hear what Dr. James Van Allen was trying to tell us…

The 40th anniversary of the moon landing has come and gone, not without rekindling the debate on whether it actually took place. There is a lot to rehash on both sides. One way to decide the feasibility of manned space flights is to go to the horse’s mouth. James Van Allen. Remember him? He is the man who discovered the giant bands of radiation that ring the earth. He came to the world’s attention in the late 1950s, when instruments he designed in his basement lab and placed aboard the first U.S. satellite, Explorer I, registered the intensity of the radiation belts that are named in his honor. If anyone would know whether they pose an impassable barrier to space travel, you would think he’d be the one. Right?

So what does Van Allen have to say? Well, let’s see. A couple of years before his death he published an article in a journal of science and technology which questioned the validity of human spaceflight. Its title speaks volumes: “Is Human Spaceflight Obsolete?” Say what? Here is a pioneer in space science. And in the afterglow of what is arguably man’s greatest triumph, the manned mission to the Moon, he is wondering if manned spaceflight is over and done!

How can that be? Is he really saying that this Holy Grail – brimming with the heady wine of lunar conquest – is an unrealistic objective that serves no compelling cultural purpose or national interest? Is he really so sour on the whole idea that he claims it is not worth pursuing? Or is he, with the cunning of Aesop’s fox, trying to console us for the fact that manned spaceflight is presently beyond our technological reach?

This much we know. Even way back in the early 1960s, in the first flush of his discovery, when Dr. Van Allen was featured on the cover of Time, he had no illusions about the scope and intensity of the radiation that girdled the earth. He understood that it could very well be the flaming sword that bars humanity from entering into deep space. And after fifty years of space exploration, his jaundiced view of manned spaceflight indicates that nothing has since occurred to change his mind. But here’s the rub. He doesn’t come right out and say that man is never going to crash the Van Allen Belts to chase his dream of manned space flight. NASA would have his head on a platter for that. But he does the next best thing – he does his damnedest to discourage man from the very possibility of trying! Now that says a lot for someone who avowed, “I’m one of the most durable and fervent advocates of space exploration.”

Let’s see if we can sort this out from an everyday perspective. Have you ever tried to break up with a girlfriend who is like something out of Fatal Attraction? You’re not the sort of person who wants to hurt her feelings. Moreover, you don’t want her getting hysterical or going ballistic. How do you frame the message that deep-sixes the relationship?

You don’t call her impossible to live with, do you? You don’t say that you would sooner drink poison than marry her. You don’t blurt out that being around her makes you want to choke on your vomit! That could very well be true, as far as it goes. But you’re not stupid enough to say something like that. That would be cruel, impolitic – and besides, she might lose it and bean you with her handbag.

So what do you do? You take the time-honored approach that every sensitive soul uses. You know, the one spoofed by George Costanza in Seinfeld that can be summed up in five little words: It’s not you, it’s me!
“What do you mean,” she says with a touch of asperity. You would like to leave it at those five words, but you do owe her a little clarification. So you say, “I’m not in your league. I’m not game for a relationship. It takes too much out of me. Besides, I’m hard to please. I’m too touchy and easily bruised. I’m impossible to live with.”

You see how it is done? You use “I” statements and make yourself the source of the problem. You’re the fly in her ointment. You’re the one who’s not relationship material. It is thus in her self-interest to dump you – because hey, when it comes right down to it, you’re just more trouble than you’re worth.

When you look at how James Van Allen couched his opposition to manned space flight, you can’t help suspecting that he is guilty of this approach. He knew better than anyone else that the radiation rings named after him are death traps for any bio-organism stupid or reckless enough to venture through. Which is why forty years later space stations still give them a wide berth by orbiting well below them. But the Van Allen Belts are the least of our problems. Even if a way were found to do an end run around them, humans would still not be home-free. For these radiation bands are the final outpost guarding our planet from the solar wind, galactic cosmic rays and the like. To pass through the Van Allen belts would be like taking a flying leap out of the frying pan whose sides offer at least a measure of protection against the cosmic fire.

Any starry-eyed aspirations that man may have about space travel had to be nipped in the bud. Van Allen wanted us to know that the romance of man on the moon was doomed. He knew that it could not and would not happen – at least, not in the 20th century. But he also knew that he couldn’t just blab the truth. There was too much invested in manned space travel. Billions were riding on Apollo. And the pride and prestige of a whole nation was on the line. After all, America did have the bragging rights for a man on the moon.

And so Van Allen did what every man knows to do, when he wants to break off an unworkable relationship that may come back to haunt him. He didn’t make it about the impossible hazards of deep space. He makes it about man himself and the impossibility of keeping man happy and comfortable in space! He doesn’t come out and say, “Deep Space is hell. There are so many nasty particles floating around that man doesn't stand a snowball's chance.” He flips it around and makes it all about this fantastically high-maintenance creature called man. He insinuates that man is not deep-space material. I believe the exact words that Van Allen used were “Man is a fabulous nuisance in space right now.” Then, in case anyone missed the point, he spelled it out: “He’s not worth all the cost of putting him up there and keeping him comfortable and working!”

It was cleverly done! Man is advised to stay the hell out of the cosmic kitchen. Not because no organism alive can take the heat but because man is a delicate flower that is more trouble than it’s worth! Even his use of the word “nuisance” is a giveaway. It comes from the same root as noxious. Deep space is the most noxious environment bar none! And yet, not daring to make it about that, Van Allen makes man the noxious one, the one who is a nuisance! Forget about all the wrong stuff that permeates space. Man lacks the right stuff to make it there! As much as he dreams of space from afar, the intimacy of real contact will kill him in a heartbeat! He is too thin-skinned to weather solar storms and solar winds. All that "Right Stuff" moonshine may make for a stirring Hollywood movie, but honestly, man is too much of a mama’s boy to cut his apron stings to mother earth and withstand the full brunt of galactic cosmic rays and solar radiation.

What then is Van Allen’s solution? It is a space-age version of what a man says to a woman when he wants her to believe that she can do better. Let space be probed by rugged machines! That was the way to go, Van Allen told anyone who would listen. Man should step aside and let machines take over! Seriously! The Moon doesn’t need men of flesh and blood. She is better off with explorers made off sterner stuff – like titanium and steel! She deserves explorers that are rigid and impervious, with shiny hard edges and sleek sides. She needs robots that can withstand all the heat that the sun dishes out in an airless vacuum! Not delicate darlings that are felled by the first micrometeorite that comes along. Not fragile cells that are fried by the first blast of solar wind. Not sensitive tissues that curl up and die on the unprotected lunar surface. When it comes to the foreseeable future of space exploration, man is a non-starter, biologically speaking. But robots? Robots are just what the good doctor Van Allen ordered! They have no tissues to damage with all those cosmic rays! They have no cells to mutate, no muscles and nerves to overrun with armies of solar particle events!

You have to hand it to our intrepid scientific discoverer. He carried off a fine balancing act. He was too smart to raise NASA’s hackles by going with Plan A: “You’re not going to get man out of low earth orbit!” At the same time, he wasn’t going to keep his mouth shut. And so he went under the radar with Plan B: ”Just get the idea of man in deep space out of your head!”

As it turns out, he was right on the money. The tight security that you would have to arrange for a George W. Bush to pay a visit to a theater of war in the Middle East is a stroll in the park compared to all the elaborate precautions that you would have to take to put a man into the hostile environment of deep space. Lead shielding many inches or even many feet thick. Highly pressurized suits that cripple movement. Air conditioning units that are prohibitively unwieldy! The list goes on and on! With that kind of payload no rocket is ever going to get it up! Faced with that kind of insurmountable challenge, even a rocket scientists has to throw up his hands in despair!

Let’s face it. No matter how complicated the inner workings of a robot may be, it is nowhere near as complicated as putting a man into space. The fact is that man in deep space is nothing less than an albatross around NASA’s neck – a gargantuan headache – a nerve-wracking effort that will tax our technological abilities and financial resources to the breaking point and leave us with nothing to show for it! Who needs that?

Or as old Van coyly put it, “Man is a fabulous nuisance in space!”