God and Big Government
I miss them both, but believe in neither.
A line that holds an unreasonable amount of real-estate in my head is this: “I do not believe in God, but I miss him.” Julian Barnes opens his autobiography with that sentence, and it sums up my own shifting relationship with religion quite well.
I hate to denigrate the quote by applying it to politics, but a corollary occurred to me in the last few weeks: I do not believe in big government, but I miss it.
I watched government do difficult things well, growing up in the 60s and 70s in the United States. I no longer expect those kinds of things from my government, but they were achievable fifty years ago.
I was alive, but too young to listen to, or care about, President Kennedy’s speech promising we were going to the moon. The hook that snagged my imagination on the space program was this set of booklets from NASA my parents signed me up to receive. I received them through my entire childhood. Actual mail, delivered to me, a little kid! And from NASA, no less (my sister used to tell people I wrote to NASA growing up, like a pen pal; I didn’t, but she got the idea from all those booklets). They followed the Mercury missions, the Gemini missions, and the Apollo missions, from the time I was three-ish years old until I was 11.
I wish my Mom or Dad were around to feed me some details about the booklets. I wish I’d KEPT those booklets. My primary memory of them is the stamps: each booklet had a large set of stamps with illustrations on them, mostly of the spacecraft involved. I’d dutifully remove the stamps, lick the nasty-tasting glue on the back, and then place the stamp in the little numbered rectangle where they belonged. Only after I’d put all the stamps where they belonged would I go back to the front of the booklet and read it.
I got one booklet for each separate mission—I think, this was a long time ago, folks, and there may not have been that many. The Mercury missions were one-man missions, the Gemini missions were two-man, and the Apollo missions were three-man. NASA flew six Mercury flights, ten Gemini flights, and seventeen Apollo flights. NASA sent me booklets through the entirety of the moon missions, and I kept them all lined up neatly in the bookcase of my room.
Lots of news coverage and breathless propaganda propped up my love of the space program. A TV got wheeled into our classrooms for all lift-offs and splashdowns. Our family sat down and watched live hours-long footage of space missions, shown on all networks simultaneously. When I got older, and the Apollo missions to the moon were underway, my Dad and I (mostly my Dad) built a large and detailed model of the Saturn V booster, with the Apollo modules perched on top. I remember the smell of the plastic cement, and the frustration of trying to get the decals on just right.
Once the model was complete, I’d replicate the maneuver where the command module detached, turned around 180 degrees in space, and docked with the lunar module. It was a dramatic moment, every time it happened in real life as we watched on TV. I recreated it hundreds of times with my plastic model. Even now, reacquainting myself with the specifics, it’s a pretty impressive maneuver.
These days, I’m not a big fan of the government being in the business of manned space flight. Too much money, too dangerous, and not nearly as much science per dollar as unmanned spacecraft. I’m fond of the '“faster, cheaper, better” era of NASA, when we sent out relatively cheap unmanned probes at a 90% success rate, like the legendary Voyager missions (now in interstellar space and still sending back data) the first Pathfinder mission to Mars, and the project closest to my heart, the Cassini mission to Saturn. Cassini dipped and dove around the moons and rings of Saturn, discovering new moons, new rings, and a staggering amount of sheer weirdness, like the ice geysers erupting from the “tiger stripes” on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn likely to contain life. In the first decade of the Oort Cloud (I’ve been writing this a long time), Cassini was still active, and I wrote about it often. Cassini’s heroic death-dive into the clouds of Saturn marked the end of an era.
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The other great work of the US government during my childhood—other than the Vietnam War of course, but we’ll get to that in a minute—is the Interstate system. It holds nearly as large a place in my imagination as the NASA moon missions. President Eisenhower (currently going up the charts every year as one of my favorite Presidents) signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, two years before I was born. As I grew up I watched it being built all around me, and we used the Interstate system more and more as it was built out, using it for our bi-annual trips from Iowa to Oklahoma to visit family, or driving out to Arizona to live in Mesa for two years.
I devoured the maps in our Rand-McNally Road Atlas (I still own a modern one) in the back seat of the car during long trips, learning the lore of the system (odd numbers run North-South, even numbers run East-West, three digit number are loops and spurs around large cities, yadayadayada) and the general layout of the country. Later on in my life, I used the Interstate for unnumerable road trips, and hitchhiking as well (I wore a groove in I-35, hitching the route from Des Moines to Minneapolis a LOT). It shows up in a number of stories I’ve written. I have recurring dreams about Interstates, specifically the dark, barren areas beneath the loops and bridges and interchanges.
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I don’t expect that we can accomplish things like the Interstate system or the moon missions anymore. Frankly, I don’t want us to. The Vietnam War and the Nixon administration ruined that spark of governmental optimism in me. I no longer trust the government to spend money wisely, or have my best interest at heart.
Government, in this modern political age, is about sending out checks in a timely and relatively efficient manner. I’m not making light of that mission. It’s what holds the increasingly tattered social safety net together in an age of rapacious capitalism. It keeps our schools and hospitals open, our elderly fed, our single moms help in keeping their heads above the poverty line. It’s an act of good, by a government frequently regarded with suspicion, in an age when government work of nearly any stripe is seen as a costly boondoggle or outright theft.
Even those check-sending aspects of our government are being stripped away by DOGE, the unelected and largely unvetted team of anonymous workers who are shuttering vast sections of our government, without the approval of the citizenry.
I’m not writing here today to condemn those actions, though I certainly do condemn them (and do so every weekday when calling my elected representatives). Rather, I am writing an elegy for a different way of thinking about government, a time when we looked to the government to help with the common good. I’m not blind, and wasn’t at the time, and I know that trust in government led to unfathomably evil acts in that time. The Tuskegee Experiment. McCarthyism. MK Ultra. The My Lai massacre. The Christmas bombings of Hanoi.
I don’t trust government much anymore, and no one else seems to either, for all sorts of differing reasons. But I was lucky enough to live in a time when government was not looked on as a necessary evil, but rather a partner in a great democratic experiment to lift us all up, by providing for a common good. I still believe in that vision, if not in the current administration’s ability to do so (I imagine the current administration has me on an enemies list). I’m thankful for being alive during a time when part of the government’s job was to make us better citizens, to provide for the needy, to build difficult things well, and in doing so, contribute to the making of a civil, engaged, and compassionate society.
Peace.