The Twilight of the Gods >>

Soon, America, the greatest nation on the face of the earth, the last best hope of mankind, will be grounded indefinitely from space. The shuttle, now unstable and obsolete, stands as a titan, a nephilim of an age when men wore fedoras and built their dreams from solid steel, now forever banished to the dusty museums...deemed unworthy of survival, as it was built for tomorrow now amidst a people of today. That skyward spire stood for decades as a monument to an age when our nation’s ambitions were so white-hot, that after pulling them from the furnaces of our imaginations we could only caress them on the silver screen.

Farm boys and children of the Cold War were weaned on fearless hopes of stellar conquest, planted flags, scientific wonders, and the glory of a better tomorrow. For in that brave new world, torn between two opposing powers, struggling with the fact of their own immense strength and ideological visions, we stood on the precipice of a new dawn in human civilization; an endeavor led and won preeminently by the United States of America.

Gone before us was the Neolithic gift of fire, Columbus’ discovery of the New World, Magellan’s Voyage, the taming of the American West, and the Summit of Mt. Everest. And what does it proclaim about us as a nation, whose people epitomized the indomitability of the human spirit like no other nation before us, to have remanded such a dignified craft as the Space Shuttle to a line-item strike? All in order to make way for a failed Stimulus that will leave nothing in our collective memories, neither material nor gallant?

Yet more lasting still is an erect American flag, standing in the high untresspassed sanctity of space. And Neil Armstrong’s footprints (if anything is left of them amidst the wind and stardust) will and should forever serve as a lasting reminder of greatness, the ideals that achieve it, and as a stern warning that the future of mankind is not for the faint of heart...

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The FCC interrupts this station on behalf of myself, President Barack Obama, to announce that all funding for space exploration will be diverted to attaining an additional healthcare bureaucracy that will address the fundamental challenge of our time; feeding old people. After all, I am not only like Abraham Lincoln, but also like Jack Kennedy as well. Ah. Now where the heck is my blackberry. Oh yes. And remember: YES WE CAN!

>End transmission<
 
JFK > BHO   

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