As the Ferrety One can attest, I have long considered Sarah Palin to be the Lina Lamont of the Republican Party. I rarely pay much attention to what she says. But the other day, she said something that really irks me.
In an interview on Fox News the other night, she was commenting on President Obama's State of the Union Address. She didn't like it. Fair enough. But regarding the President's call for a "Sputnik Moment", she had this to say:
PALIN: That was another one of those 'WTF moments' that when he so often repeated the 'Sputnik moment' that he would aspire Americans to celebrate. He need to remember that what happened back then with the former Communist USSR and their victory in that race to space -- yep, they won, but they also incurred so much debt at the time that it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union.
Okay, a couple of minor points here. One is that, uh, Sarah, we won the Space Race. Yeah, the Russians launched the first artificial satellite, and dominated the early years of space exploration, but we got to the Moon first. Don't you dare slight our Country's achievement in that. And even though we've largely ceded the exploration of others in the last few decades, American technology -- spurred by and developed out of the U.S. Space Program -- continues to be an integral part of the European Space Station and in private space companies like SpaceX.
And the other is you can hardly blame Russia's Space Program for the fall of the Soviet Union. I was always given to understand that the Soviets put much more money into their nuclear arsenal and their military than they did to their Space Program, and that their military spending was what strained the Soviet economy to the breaking point in the 1980s. And wasn't Reagan's demand to "Tear Down This Wall" in there somewhere too? Surely, you're not going to deny St. Ronnie credit for destroying the Evil Empire! Say it ain't so, Sarah!
But the reason I'm irked goes deeper than that. I'm a science fiction geek who grew up in the late '60s and '70s. As such, Sputnik is part of our geekish Cultural Myths. Sputnik was the point where Space Travel changed from being "That crazy Buck Rogers stuff" to being something important, something even of National Importance. With the wake-up call that was Sputnik, we as a nation began taking science more seriously, taking science education more seriously, and dare I say it, taking us science nerds more seriously.
I never read much of any Ayn Rand in my adolescence; but I read a heck of a lot of Robert Heinlein; so did all the other science fiction geeks of my generation. And a lot of my fellow fans are pretty strong libertarians, as I'm sure you like to consider yourself, Sarah. When you deride the importance of Sputnik, you aren't just trashing some socialist boondoggle; you're trashing our collective history, something we take pride in; an you're spitting in the face of every Geek who ever picked up a copy of Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, or gloried in Rocket Ship Galileo.