In a few weeks time, barring bad weather, a coup d'état stemming from Monica Lewinsky's manifest failure to inhale, or (most likely) death from natural causes, the American public will be punished with the most-hyped intergalactic voyage since Josie and the Pussycats blasted off for outer space 20 years ago.
Alas, this shameless ratings ploy won't involve a bunch of shapely proto-riot grrls hitting their asses with tambourines while foiling the dark designs of overreaching extraterrestrials. The space oddity this time around will be saggy-skinned politician John Glenn, who back in 1962 became the first American to orbit the globe.
On 29 October, the very senior senator from Ohio will be helped into the space shuttle Discovery where he will spend up to 10 days undergoing experiments on the effects of space on the elderly. At the very least, scientists hope to settle once and for all whether it's possible for a 77-year-old man to fall and not get up in a zero-gravity environment.
As is usually the case with such tax-funded spectacles, official explanations are at best incomplete, at worst insulting. Despite NASA's protestations, the inclusion of a man dubbed Ol' Magnet Ass by fellow pilots way back during the Korean War -- the early-'50s conflict now best remembered for indirectly providing Alan Alda with a carefree retirement -- merely underscores the fact that of all the losers in the Cold War, no combatant took it on the chin harder than the agency responsible for Tang's market share, Challenger explosion jokes, and the backdrop of I Dream of Jeannie.
Back in the good old days -- when the Russkies threatened to turn the moon into a literal Soviet satellite republic and even a dumb monkey like Curious George was willing to risk his life for God and country -- selling space missions to the public didn't require much work. All boosters had to do was shrug, mumble a few words about the Bolshoi Ballet tap dancing down Pennsylvania Avenue, and back up the Brinks truck to the Capitol.
However, in the brand-spankin' new, post-Cold War One-World Order -- you know, the shockingly different place in which Protestants and Catholics shoot each other in Northern Ireland, Palestinians and Jews slug it out on the West Bank, and Aerosmith gets more than its fair share of airplay -- newer, more relevant gimmicks are needed to keep NASA's budget anywhere near the upper atmosphere. Who can forget the strategically timed "discovery" of "possible" Martian life forms a couple of years ago? What better scam to foist on the emerging Geritol Nation that is America than to send an old man into outer space? And if you can't get the late George Burns -- and who can these days? -- why not go with a crepuscular former-astronaut-cum-politician who is perhaps best known for being a member of the Keating Five?
Of course, when NASA announced Glenn's participation earlier this year, officials were as quick to deny his selection had anything to do with PR value as they were to concede that -- good morning, starshine! -- shooting a soon-to-be-retired senator into the Final Frontier had a helluva lot of PR value.
As one agency puppet put it, "To see [this] level of interest you would have to go back to the Apollo program." Indeed, not for nothing is Glenn's official role on the mission that of "payload specialist." Ash to ashes, funk to funky -- we know Major John's a flunky.
If any of this sounds familiar, it is: Glenn's selection seems eerily inspired by the "Deep Space Homer" episode of The Simpsons, in which NASA officials try to counter weak shuttle-launch ratings by including an "average man" -- Homer J. himself -- in the space program. Perhaps the only thing more disturbing than the idea that space policy is now being set by the network responsible for such small-screen supernovas as Woops! (a post-apocalyptic version of Gilligan's Island), Babes (three obese sisters tryin' to make it in a thin girls' world), and Good Grief! (Howie Mandel as a very zany mortician) is the fact that an obeisant press corps seems more fully on board than Dr. Smith ever did in Lost in Space.
"Are we going to cover this more than a normal old mundane shuttle flight? You bet.... As a human-interest story, the idea of a man that old wanting to go back into space and doing it is irresistible," Doyle McManus, Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, told the Cincinnati Enquirer.
"There is a great deal of interest in the story," sputtered ABC News automaton Arnot Walker. "One, the senator's age, the fact that he is a senator, [and] the fact that he is a former astronaut." Say, did we forget to mention that our retro Rocket Man is an old, male senator who was once an astronaut? Here's another irresistible potential angle: Did you know that Mars ain't the kind of place to raise the kids? In fact, it's cold as hell -- and there's no one there to raise them, if you did.
Curiously -- and hearteningly -- enough, NASA's ploy is showing signs of fizzling on the launch pad like, well, one of NASA's own launches. In a fitting development for a pseudo-event that will take place in a vacuum, the agency's antics have ignited an equal-and-opposite reaction from the great boob public.
To the extent anyone actually cares, it has inspired instead mostly comic and cynical reactions, such as a widely circulated samizdat top-10 list of changes at NASA to accommodate John Glenn (Cargo bay now converted into shuffleboard court ... little bowls of candy scattered around ship ... space pants now go up to armpits).
In fact, even the press has shown some healthy hostility at being cast as the dutiful, stay-at-home wife fretting over our hero's trip to the stars. In Glenn's home state, a Cincinnati Enquirer editorial mused whether his ticket to ride was a "presidential payoff for partisan service in helping to bury the Senate investigation into Clinton-Gore campaign-finance violations," before suggesting that the millionaire senator should first settle a very Earth-based matter: the $3 million debt left over from the wreck that was his 1984 run at the presidency.
Perhaps more to the point, other events of the moment are lighting up the sky so brightly that Glenn's Tom Swift Sr. show has been demoted to the Comet Kohoutek-level diversion that it is, a fact that clearly pains a man well past the point of caring about blow jobs and the use of cigars as sexual aids.
When asked by Life why his excellent adventure has been pushed off the front page and back to the classified section, where it battles Love Is ... for eyeballs, Glenn sagely hypothesized, "It's because I don't do drugs and I don't rape women between flights. That's what the media feeds on today."
Which suggests one more test NASA may want to conduct on Shuttle Mission STS-95: an experiment to ascertain, if it's true that in space no one can hear you scream, whether it's possible to drown out an old man complaining about how much worse the world is these days.
