A.E.R.I.P.

The only humans ever to walk on the moon were pilots first, scientists and engineers second.

It’s now 2017. Gravity’s rainbow, so promising on the upswing, on the way down comes only smog-scaled. Earth’s atmosphere is about some 400 kilometers (and that’s being generous) tall, less than the distance from Cologne to Berlin. The airplane does far more day-to-day disruption of that non-eternal fragile depth of nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide, than the rockets ripping through. There are different kinds of infinities. The sky is not one of them. The illusory eternal 3D into which the fuselage penetrates has proved the merest wrapped skin on a sphere.

To the pilot, civilization was once toylike, fragile and even tender, a model railroad world in miniature going about its little work. But today’s higher altitudes show the traveler what wartime pilots already saw, swelling populations of energy sucking metropolises turning the night surface into flame, other planes encroaching everywhere on the view. On earth most landscapes are now disrupted by comtrails. It is not the bird the aeroplane now emulates, but the swarming drone.

Meanwhile the rocket continues to puncture the atmosphere, and even return, apparently in a much more realistic gesture to the infinite than what the airplane still now performs. But the rocket’s obscure and simplistic metaphorology only phallacizes the drone, whose relation to the hive is the opposite to freedom. Insisting on the fragile sky and its shallow depth, there is at first glance nothing to believe in with the rocket. The rocketeer purports no secrets. Dreams are not of transcendence but of literal escape. The rocket speaks the truth of its destructive force, without shielding fantasies of social progress. Perfected as a weapon by Nazi scientists, it pretends to do without humanism, and thus claims freedom from the delusions. But the rocket’s apparent imagination of its eternal thrust has only distributed, and left our orbital space encrusted with, space junk, much of it now radioactive.

Carefully separated to illustrate those social classes we might forget when exposed to the imagined infinite of the high prairie, today’s air-travelers pass around the planet egged by the rocket’s junk shell, Howard-Hughsed into a pseudo-normality complete with functioning class system, preferably aisle-seated, definitely not looking down to see the feminist pilot signaling SOS. from that atoll way back in 1937. But today’s progressives could do worse than publicize Amelia Earhart’s probable end; the technology that lifts us, lets us down.