EPISODE 14, in which blowouts occur

y phone woke me up around nine, about half an hour after the birds had gotten me up. I'd only had five hours of sleep and my head was screaming from Friday night's pub crawl. My mom was on the other end of the line. "There was a space terrorist," she said, hushed. I was dubious at best, because re-entry is clearly not the best time to attack a shuttle, but I got up and stumbled my way to the TV. I knew right away there was no space terrorist, because my TV had been left on ESPN and they'd have picked up ABC's feed if another major attack had taken place. Instead, over on CNN they had the science guy, Miles O'Brien, handling things basically on his own.

After reading all afternoon about Bush's "humanizing" speech, I've come to the conclusion that O'Brien was the most human person on TV yesterday, at least among the professional ranks. While Bush put on his "I'm so sad that I don't know what to do after my remarks" face and erstwhile game show goon Anderson Cooper, somehow a CNN anchor and not an insurance firm, did his best Aaron Brown "such a shame" headshake impression after every story, O'Brien was grave but level. He never made a show of any of it.

This will be the story now. The new term has just started and I expect this is what we'll be relating things to in Political Psychology, if not necessarily Internet and Democracy or Mass Media Practice. There will be no critical analysis of Bush's doom tubes speech, none of note at any rate. There will be no attention paid to his would-be African AIDS and hydrogen cars initiatives, as eyes turn toward his professed support for the continued space exploration. My hope is that if his State of the Union rhetorical mis-steps are overlooked, his appeal to God on Saturday won't be. Rather than taking the near-secular approach Reagan used in 1986, Bush very obviously chose to invoke Isaiah. From where I sat it seemed a pointed attempt to appear inclusive of space flight's first Israeli astronaut. What that and his comment about the astronauts all being "safely home" fail to take into account, at the very least, is the death of Indian-born Kalpana Chawla, a Hindu. I don't expect Bush to get called on this and if he is, I expect the criticism to be shouted down. It doesn't matter who he puts off, the reasoning will go, because he's comforting the nation.

By the way, 40 people died in a train collision in Zimbabwe yesterday. Somehow I doubt anyone's debating the future of the Zimbabwean train program today.

Manned space flight is going to be iffy now, not only because people are generally fearful creatures but also because we've only got three shuttles left. We can't get more because too many people see NASA as a boondoggle as it is. We may be looking square into the eyes of a privatized space industry, at least in the United States. In China, they're suddenly a notch closer and definitely ready to climb.

Beyond the obvious reasons, I didn't want to start the semester like this. I'd planned this whole thing where I dissect Bush's State of My Agenda address and compare bits and pieces to the annoying doctoral track people in my Poli. Psych. class, or my tire that exploded in Dearborn on the way home from a hockey tournament. I wanted this month to be about layering Michigan Tech's Winter Carnival over the war to come. Unfortunately, when news breaks it tends to break all over everything. This is the month of Columbia: A Shuttle Tragedy® or Disaster: The Columbia Tragedy® or Tragedy in the Sky®. There is no escape.

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Aaron Veenstra is the managing editor of Etc. House Productions and a Master's student in Journalism at the University of Wisconsin.
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