The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
‘The Wrong Stuff’
In the space of a few days, two billionaires took off into space — or possibly “space lite.”
The symbolism was hard to miss. The American West is burning. Germany and Belgium are drowning. The pandemic is raging unchecked on the planet with, at most, 24 percent of all humans vaccinated.
But if you have enough money, you can leave it all behind and maybe even look back and marvel at the beautiful blue ball. You can have an epiphany. “We are all one. Except for me. I’m pretty special.”
It’s a small step for man and a giant step backward for mankind.
Neither Jeff Bezos nor Richard Branson made a serious attempt to dress this activity up as anything but what it is: an attempt to create a new business sector. In that sense, they were one with Columbus and Magellan, who were looking for expedited trade routes. For Columbus, to paraphrase Diddy (back when he was Daddy), it was all about the Ferdinands.
It’s probably too late to strangle this idea in its crib, but that’s what should happen. Yes, Bezos’ rocket burns clean fuel, but there’s no way our outer atmosphere can handle even the large amounts of water vapor that would accompany a space tourism industry.
And that’s the plan. The rich guys’ defense against the ultra-elitism criticism is that they just need enough customers to bring the price point down.
Bezos came back to Earth with some ... interesting thoughts. “We need to take all heavy industry, all polluting industry, and move it into space.”
You don’t need me to explain how dumb that is, do you?
Doesn’t it make you appreciate Bill Gates a little more? I get that he’s not perfect, but at least he understands the problems are here on the ground.
Bezos, currently the wealthiest human being on Earth (when he’s here), has taken the warmth, openheartedness and concern for safety he shows for his Amazon workers and directed it at the rest of the world. Which is to say he has the lowest possible Forbes philanthropy ranking, having given away less than 1 percent of his wealth.
The heavy hitters who have given away 20 percent or more include Warren Buffet, George Soros and Ted Turner. Soon to be enshrined in their ranks is MacKenzie Scott, Bezos’ ex-wife, who has given away $8.5 billion of her $60 billion at a clip that resembles the inverse of a Kardashian shopping spree.
There’s a thread running through billionaire space travel, vaccine resistance and climate change. It’s our misunderstanding of freedom.
Bring up Bezos on social media, and a small but persistent group will defend his right to do whatever he wants with his money. Because it’s a free country, right? Which is also why you can’t make the unwilling get vaccinated (or even make them feel bad about it). Because it’s one of their freedoms.
Nominal freedom is why 16 state attorneys general are suing the federal government to block California from having its own vehicle emissions standards. Because if California has more stringent standards, automakers will probably make cars that adhere to them, which will interfere with the freedom of Kentuckyans and Arkansans to own cars that get 25 blocks to the gallon and have smokestacks for tailpipes.
What we learned from the pandemic is that even the presence — as opposed to the threat — of a real crisis isn’t enough to force changes in behavior. And what’s recent past is prologue. Everything we need to do to curb the climate crisis will bump against our granite-headed notions of freedom.
Holla at your boy Alexis de
Tocqueville who saw this coming in 1835.The curse of the newborn America, he wrote, could be individualism, “a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look out after itself.”
The drug of individualism, said AdT, was so potent as to cause people to forget not only their ancestors but their descendants. No past or future. Just me and what I want right now. “Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”
Freedom and individualism are not the same thing. You don’t have the freedom to bring a gun on an airplane or blow up — Ayn Rand notwithstanding — a housing project you don’t like.
Freedoms are basic things, which is why there are only five in the First Amendment, and they work only if we grant them to each other, not seize them for ourselves.
Let me end with the thoughts of two Americans who followed in the steps of Tocqueville. I speak of Brian Wilson and Mike Love who gave us the unspoken loneliness of the young woman who uses her Daddy’s car to cruise to the hamburger stand, “forgetting” about the library. When her Daddy takes the T-Bird away, the singer invites her to “come along with me, because we’ve got a lot of things to do now.” Mutuality over individualism.
I leave you now. My new T-Bird arrived from the Ford factory in space, and I’m going to drive it right back up there to Bezos’ hamburger stand.
Colin McEnroe’s column appears every Sunday, his newsletter comes out every Thursday and you can hear his radio show every weekday on WNPR 90.5. Email him at colin@ctpublic.org. Sign up for his newsletter at http://bit.ly/colinmcenroe.