The Cowboy and the Commissars

take your good arm and just wang it down

If you drive around the western edges of the Mojave Desert in California, you’ll stumble into a bunch of places where you can stand near a runway and read placards about the people who did crazy-brilliant things there. They mostly look about like this:

But some look like this:

There are a lot of plaques for the dead at the Mojave Spaceport, the home of the National Test Pilot School — thirty miles up the road from the Skunk Works on Plant 42, which is not far from Edwards Air Force Base, the home of the Air Force Test Pilot School. This is where Chuck Yeager became the first person to fly in something that broke the speed of sound, broken ribs and all, with his piece of sawed-off broomstick. A bunch of people have done a bunch of shockingly dangerous flying here, but note the words Ron Bradley is remembered by on the plaque. This is a place where people have engaged in purposeful danger, hot and cold, risking but measuring. Boundaries are pushed for a reason.

California has been the place for purposeful boldness, or very much one of the places, the big piece of dirt where a bunch of people have pushed a bunch of boundaries and made new things: in Silicon Valley, in Hollywood, in the wilds of Bay Area literary culture. Whatever else the place has been, it’s been daring, innovative, and interesting.

You’ll continue your singing, Susan

I don’t know when it died, but it died. It’s dead.

I’ve been thinking about a meeting in California since it happened on October 10, but haven’t written about it until something solidified for me today — for reasons I’ll get to at the end. The California Coastal Commission met on that day to consider a request from SpaceX, through the Space Force, to add launches to its schedule at Vandenberg Space Force Base, up on the Central Coast near Lompoc. Here’s how Politico characterized the commission’s rejection of that request:

Elon Musk’s tweets about the presidential election and spreading falsehoods about Hurricane Helene are endangering his ability to launch rockets off California’s central coast.

The California Coastal Commission on Thursday rejected the Air Force’s plan to give SpaceX permission to launch up to 50 rockets a year from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County.

“Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet,” Commissioner Gretchen Newsom said at the meeting in San Diego.

They catch rockets, but they have to be crushed: mean tweets. You can watch appalling video of the idiot Gretchen Newsom here, at the monster Elon Musk’s terrifying website of hate, but here’s a screenshot to give you a taste:

WELL MAYBE IF MISTER BIGSHOT WANTS TO GO TO MARS HE SHOULD LEARN TO NOT BE HETERODOX ON TRANS ISSUES, STUPID NAZIS.

By the way, Gretchen Newsom’s qualifying expertise on coastal issues is that she’s a labor organizer for the IBEW. Electricians deal with ocean life through their labor union all the time, something something sea lions. She appears to not be related to the appalling governor, as far as I can tell, but post a comment if you have evidence of a family connection.

You can watch the whole October 10 meeting of the Coastal Commission here, but it’ll just piss you off.

So the problem with these people:

…is that Elon Musk said mean things about trans people and Saint FEMA. No accomplishment, no mere physical feat in the world of the actual, can overcome the weight of political noncompliance. A well-run spaceship company would maybe fail at firing rockets, which is not important, and definitely succeed in gushing at WONDERFUL TRANS PEOPLE, which is the absolute dead center of all measurements of success. That’s the burden and the goal. Good people have beliefs that the commissariat prefers. Lysenko was an amateur.

All of this clicked today after I watched this terminal buzzkill scene, which I assume was broadcast directly from a support group for the clinically depressed or the dayroom at an especially grim nursing home:

The grimly unpleasant person in the green pantsuit, whose obscure and probably meaningless identity can’t be determined, complained grimly that the monster Donald Trump…tells jokes. He’s a joke-teller. And that’s unacceptable. “Because some people find it humorous what he says. And think it’s just silly. But understand how brutally serious it is.”

A single minute of that nearly put me into a coma. “Doctor, America is flatlining!”

We have two diverging cultures. In one, the successor to many generations of bold and creative makers, people try to do things. In the other, an overlapping network of entirely parasitic and obstructive commissars scold and fingerwag and tone-police the people who are trying to actually do meaningful work. Via Stephen Pimentel:

A culture of professional scolds is gathering more weight than the culture of action that it increasingly suffocates. Either they’ll be pried off the body of productive society, or the suffocation will succeed. There’s no progress with this cultural deadweight in place. They’re literally impeding space flight over tweets about FEMA. And being mean about trans people, natch. The highest of all the crimes. Chuck Yeager’s wide-open experimental California has become Gretchen Newsom’s California, grimly antiproductive. That repulsive lady in the green pantsuit is carrying the disease in her mind, so you might not want to let it escape into the whole country.