American Lament

A new dinosaur was recently found in the desert region of Argentina. This has been the latest fossilized remains found of anything in Patagonia in the last few years, assuming that we do not count those who “disappeared” during, oh, I don’t know, the years of 1974-1990.

This dinosaur, of which there is an almost complete skeleton, certainly more than has been found of Nicole Richie, is thought to be an entirely new species. Scientists describe it as having a “neck very large in diameter” and being “strong and huge” which, alas, pretty much describes every single dinosaur I’ve ever ran into, usually along with other vivid descriptors such as “large, forceful teeth that can easily snap you in half” and “could crush you mercilessly like a balsa wood diaphragm.”

The funniest thing about this entire discovery is the name of the new dinosaur, which is the appalling “Futalognkosaurus dukei.” (It’s certainly no “brontosaurus,” eh?) Its name is derived from a native language meaning “giant chief of lizards” (it makes it sound like he sat around at local council meetings debating property tax reform or something…though come to think of it last time I went to a local council meeting there were several dinosaurs on the board), and the second part is named for (wait for it) the corporation that funded the dig; namely, the Duke Energy Corporation. That’s right, he may be eighty million years old, but he’s got a commercial endorsement to his name. Brilliant.

Ever since I was a child, I held a unique fascination with dinosaurs that bordered on the kinda gay. Now lots of kids love dinosaurs, but these fascinations usually are limited to trying to work up enough excitement at the only cool part of the museum. For my part, I had all kinds of dinosaur stuff, such as stuffed animal dinosaurs, dinosaur cartoons, dinosaur lunch pails, dinosaur 401(k), everything. And this was pre-Jurassic Park, when a kid that was into dinosaurs meant they may have had a future career as a paleontologist, not that they went to a matinee and wanted to run around the yard in a set of velociraptor shoes made in China, where, I hasten to point out, few dinosaurs lived due to the unfavorable exchange rate at the time.

Of course, dinosaurs are much more popular now; thanks to big-budget movies and a Discovery Channel that has yet to make Shark Week every week, dinosaurs are a standard children’s theme, along with random NASCAR drivers and PSPs. And it’s not hard to come up with a reason why kids (and adults, for that matter) are fascinated by dinosaurs—they’re huge, colorful beings that emit equal parts authority and senseless violence. Much like many other children’s interests, such as train engines and Bobby Brown.

And that’s, I think, the mystique of the dinosaur: we’re fascinated by them because we have concrete evidence that these creatures were huge, sadistic, things, able to destroy the strongest and sturdiest buildings that 4,000 years of human progress has been able to design, yet they’ve all managed to find a truly amazing and mystifying way to take a powder.

The classification of this particular dinosaur is notable for three things. One is that they have him pegged as a plant eater, which I find amusing for some reason. It’s hard enough to make humans vegetarians; I just can’t fathom a dinosaur plodding around the mists of prehistory with a makeshift placard proclaiming that meat is, indeed, murder. I don’t care whether you’re a roid raged T-Rex or a docile stegosaurus, you’re going to be more Type-A than Enron. (Apt comparison, too, since Enron made their money buying and selling dinosaurs before they started making stuff up and then giving a painful birth to Sarbanes-Oxley. Thanks a lot, dinosaurs!)

The second is the insistence that the dinosaur is part of the “titanosaur.” I don’t know if it’s because of the sheer number of names required for all the species of dinosaurs, or the fact that paleontologists are just incredibly unimaginative, but it seems like a lot of these names were basically created by handing a five-year-old a photo of the dinosaur in question and then calling it a day. There are dinosaurs called the supersaurus, the megaraptor, and gigantosaurus, and I can only assume there is a awesomesaurus and a spongebobsaurus as well.

The third is the fact that the scientists made a point of stating that the dinosaur died of “unknown causes.” As if being embedded under several yards of dirt for several dozen million years wasn’t enough. Maybe they need to call in CSI: Bedrock.

Paleontology is one of the few last wonderfully useless trades in the world. Oh, sure, sure, scientists and guidance counselors will wax eloquent about the great finds that contribute to the culture and history of mankind, but we all know it’s just a bunch of grown men and women who should know better beg for cold cash from unsuspecting trust funds so they can hotfoot it to exotic places and shift around the dirt long enough in the hopes of finding a big ole dino bone akin to that huge rib Fred tries to cram in the Flintstonemobile. Anyone who tells you different is either a liar or a jealous ornithologist.

Being an astronaut can’t be easy. The hours are tough—especially when there’s no such thing as hours where you’re going—the training brutal, and then when you take one or two or eight drinks before lift off, the whole world treats you like a terrorist pit bull fighter.

It’s almost tempting to not be surprised by the recent stories concerning astronauts being drunk when boarding spacecraft over the past few years. There are very few high-pressure jobs where drinking is not seen as an acceptable sweet release from the stressful forces of their workday, and occasionally the liquid relaxation and the duties of their career are bound to cross paths. If truck drivers, airline pilots, surgeons, and (apparently) young female movie stars get tipsy on the clock, we shouldn’t be ultimately surprised when NASA’s finest fail the breathalyzer.

Society is filled with individuals who find various means to escape their lives through stimulants and/or depressants, whether it be due to a demanding career, a painful divorce, or crafting a particularly eloquent argument about how the Jews start all of the wars. The most common, and cheapest, way to do so is through alcohol, so it shouldn’t be a large shock that professionals take their bottle to lunch once in a while. Astronauts may be intelligent and relatively stable, but they are susceptible to the same addictive frailties as, say, car mechanics and former governors of Texas.

And it’s not like boarding a spacecraft and getting behind the wheel of an Elantra are the same thing. I mean, yes, yes, yes, they’re apparently navigating a billion plus dollars of taxpayers’ money, and it would be a bitch on your insurance bill after wrapping the Voyager around a maple tree, but it’s not like they are dodging pedestrians or turning on a dime in the stratosphere. There’s no concept of last call in space, either; there aren’t any cougars or double baggers to count as an occupational hazard when you can see the entire Great Wall and pink elephants all at once.

Still, being an astronaut is no easy task. It involves someone who is willing to 1) be an aircraft pilot for what appears to amount to 100,000 years; 2) be willing to be enclosed in a small pressurized plastic box for several months where your oxygen intake and temperature control are designed, implemented, and built by the fellow engineers who were passed over for a promotion by you; and 3) realize that if you eat the condensed space burrito shaped like a pellet for space lunch and you think you just might try a silent poot, everyone in Ground Control is gonna know if you miscalculate.

I think a large part of this story is the guilty pleasure we all get in knowing that someone who is supposedly infinitely smarter and infinitely better paid has the same level of self-control as the average assistant manager of the local Blockbuster. I mean, yeah, occasionally you’ll have the crazy jilted girlfriend driving around in diapers armed with pepper spray, and, I guess, you’ll run into rocket scientists whose current success ratio with manned spacecraft actually touching ground without exploding and killing all those aboard is become precariously close to the single digits, but NASA astronauts have an otherwise sober reputation as fearless heroes able to convert science and daring into lucrative senatorial careers.

And c’mon. You think all those cosmonauts were sober as judges when they climbed on board the Russkie Space Special? Hell, the only thing that sobers up a Soviet is being sent to the front. Plus, their alphabet is already backwards, so there are few effective sobriety tests available for them. And they all seemed to make it back OK, although to be fair there wasn’t much of an incentive to come back.

A greater threat to the NASA program, however, are rumors of sabotage. The Linda Nowak debacle from a few months ago whipped the doors of NASA wide open, allowing us to see that astronauts were just as jealous and batshit crazy as the rest of us. And sure enough, there is evidence that computers destined for the International Space Station were tampered with by a subcontractor. There hasn’t been any details released about this yet, so one can only guess. My guesses will be that it involves, at the very least, disgruntled Air Force pilots, South Asian hackers, or the French.

Of course, all this bad news comes just as NASA was planning for another launch, this time to Mars. It was business as usual at NASA headquarters, which I can only assume involves Jell-O shots and a round of Beirut. The launch seemed to go without a hitch, though it did appear for a while there like they were going 5 mph with the headlights turned off.

Most likely, all this will blow over fairly soon. Most people realize that the actions of a half dozen astronauts aren’t necessarily an effective representation of the organization as a whole. But most astronauts now are going to have to watch themselves, since the appearance of impropriety may be an impediment to their only change to leave this world. Remember, in space, no one can take your keys.

Recently, there’s been some startling news from the astronomy world. It’s been announced that a planet capable of sustaining life has been discovered outside of our own solar system. This, of course, opens up all kinds of incredibly important scientific and social opportunities, especially those involved with the real estate market.

Granted, of course, this news is part of the ongoing and never-ending battle between journalists eying up a juicy story and experts trying to do their best to cautiously downplay expectations. In this case, it’s the same story being reported as either “A probability has maybe arisen that a planet has perhaps been found that is likely to be able to possibly sustain some form of potential life, perchance, at some point in the undetermined future” or “Green men photographed landing in the Yucatan, enjoying box seats at Yankee Stadium.”

The first acknowledgment to be tagged a hospitable planet is the presence of water, since water is a signal of life, something proven by the cultural significance and population surrounding the Ganges river, but then equally excepted by Lake Erie. Other indicators of life include the presence of an adequately bright star to revolve around and at least one major media market. Such planets are difficult to come by, since most are bloated gaseous bodies that just stopped caring after they got married.

Though, of course, the scientists are trying their hardest to downplay any undue excitement. It’s not like we’ve gotten canceled postmarks from the place yet or anything. And many astronomers are at pains to point out that their definition of a hospitable planet includes Mars, a planet not known for being a predominantly welcoming place, what with the only people who would conceivably want to go there are those that want to have the universe’s best off-season travel expenses, followed by the universe’s quickest death by asphyxiation.

Most people tend to forget that these heavenly bodies have starkly different attributes than our own. This new planet, for instance, orbits its sun every 13 days, meaning that there would be 28 seasons of American Idol for every one season we have to put up with here. Its star is part of Libra, the least imaginative of the zodiac (“Hey, I’m a mighty hunter.” “Hey, I’m a ferocious lion.” “Hey, I am used to determine the heft of an object in accordance with a table of standard weights and measures and also am the abstract representation of justice.” “Uh…yeah. Hey, Sag, let’s go buy that virgin over there some Jaeger shots.”) And our weight would be much larger; the planet’s gravity is about one and a half times stronger, meaning that no woman would ever set foot on this planet at any time, ever, unless she is in a situation where she simultaneously gets married and also never has to interact with another female ever again.

Think of it, though! A planet full of teeming possibilities! A billion new customers without worry from protectionist interference by the United Auto Workers! Or, if there’s no one’s home, a placid meadow of economic growth and material wealth! It’s something that can be almost universally anticipated by everyone. The religious have new souls to convert and new heretical branches to found; the environmentalists have a whole new planet to cry themselves to sleep about; industrialists have a whole new set of mountain ranges to crack open and scoop the contents out of; scientists have a whole new set of funding to tap so they don’t have to beat the global warming horse around anymore; science fiction writers have an entirely new genre to flog to death and eventually discard in the dustbin of Millennium Falcons and appropriately hyphenated Middle-Earths; and politicians have an entirely new society to find new and inventively creative ways to take a symbolic (or perhaps not) massive dump all over.

The parallels to the Age of Exploration are hard to pass up mentioning. Like centuries ago, there’s a level of excitement that, after hundreds of years of armchair imagination, slow, occasional drips of unverifiable yet illuminating information, and the distant, lustful wishes of newfound wealth and fame, finally came to fruition. Advances in navigation made it less likely that ships would become unceremoniously lost or sailors would die horrible deaths by drowning, mutinous violence, scurvy, or, alas, most likely, gonorrhea, inventions such as the carrack, the lime, and Puritanism made long-term voyages possible. Today, satellites, stellar probes, high-powered telescopes, and the congressional delegation of Texas have all made space exploration more of a reality than one mediocre episode in a dated anthology.

The flip side of the celestial coin, of course, is if we can’t inhabit this new Earth—it’s already taken. The chance of extraterrestrial life this close to our house is pretty small—you’d think we would have heard a minor league hockey game on the wi-fi or something by this time—but there’s always that infinitesimally small chance that we might meet up with someone or something. Chances are, it will be some walking fish or furry rodent-thing, just another item on the Dollar Value Menu. But there’s also the chance they have gained sentience and progressed as a civilization, building a complex world of social contracts, scientific advances, and fantasy sports leagues. But somehow, I doubt it. A civilization such as ours that has developed to the point where there is an evolutionary need for a cheeseburger pizza, well…I suspect they’re going to get to us first.

Occasionally, we are treated to a piece of news from the scientific community that makes us feel just ever so slightly better about ourselves, not because of our own betterment, but because it makes someone else look even worse than ourselves. A concept that is so obvious in its existence and acknowledged by society at large is validated by the highly anticipated scientific study, and experts from all sides fall over themselves to comment their enthusiastic agreement. In this case, experts are falling over themselves about people who fall all over themselves.

A new study finds that many college-age students have become increasingly narcissistic in their worldview, believing that much of the accomplishments in their life are due to their own innate abilities rather than the happy accident of mundane existence that most of us encounter with heady dissatisfaction. College-age people today apparently go through life as if beating your ten-year-old nephew at beer pong is the cultural equivalent of D-Day.

This can hardly be surprising. There is apparently something called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (the developer of which no doubt is a pantsload of fun on blind dates) that tracks how important people feel they are. It has been on a meteoric rise lately, reflecting a general trend of self-centeredness. This, of course, is a great scientific finding, in that it displays a fundamental shift in psychological thinking about interpersonal relationships.

By which of course I mean there is no change at all. Having the oldest people in the room call everyone who has ever been young a bunch of self-centered jacklegs is not exactly the Bolivarian revolution or anything. Calling college punks egotistical is one a few steps away from having fourteen cats and complaining to pretty grocery store clerks about how they just keep on changing how money looks back and forth and you just don’t know what’s what anymore.

The survey that determines this ranking asks the recipients a series of questions that hopefully peg their level of conceitedness. It asks rather standard questions, from “Do you believe you deserve all the good fortune that comes to you?” to the more telling “If you controlled the world, would you make the production and airing of those Safe Auto commercials a crime?” and “Are you the father of Anna Nicole’s baby?”

Most researchers attribute it to the incredible increase of self-esteem programs in the past few decades, such as getting schoolchildren to chant in unison “I am different!” and making them sing songs of empowerment, such as “Mary Had A Little Lamb, But If She Was As Good As Me She Would Own The Entire Flock” and “The Wheels On The Bus Go Round And Round For Those Not As Rich As Me To Own A Lexus.” Even in high school, teachers are encouraged (presumably because parents cannot) to advise their students that everyone is special, a statistical impossibility that only exists within the confines of the guidance counselor’s office.

The cult of self-importance has its occasional anecdotal evidence everywhere. New York City has recently toyed with the idea of banning iPods, cell phones, and other distracting devices for pedestrians crossing the street. Apparently, it’s become an issue where people are so involved in their own little world that they fail to see a large yellow cab the size of most middle-aged bears moving roughly the speed of a Patriot missile come towards them. To me, it’s a case of to the victor goes the spoils, but there are a few bleeding hearts out there, mostly insurance actuaries, who object, so I guess I’ll have to take the untenable position of opposing hit-and-runs on selfish technophiles.

The meteoric rise in popularity of euphemistically detailed “social networking” sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, that allow users to create electronic shrines devoted to themselves. This should be a humbling pursuit for many, but it seems slightly creepy that most people tend to be proud to proclaim that the single greatest cultural achivement of Western culture in the last century is manifested in Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion.

What the really interesting part of all this is that most of the people involved in the study and the reporting of its findings are largely from the Baby Boomber generation. This is the generation that upon given the same things as the generation did before them (an economy waiting to explode, a universal culture waiting to be exploited, a war in southeast Asia) and managed to turn them into vanity projects of their own (A Social Security pyramid scheme, Wavy Gravy, and Platoon, respectively). They at least can blame most of this on their parents, who bought by truckloads a Scouting manual on child care written by one Dr. Spock, who imparted such parental guidelines as “Give your children everything they want, for any reason whatsoever” and “Never object to anything your child does that detracts from themselves in the slightest bit, including but not limited to most forms of manslaughter.” In response, many iconic members of the generation grew up with a misallocated sense of entitlement, engaging in a relatively libertine lifestyle, avoiding the consequences, and then reaping what they sowed by either becoming President or initiating a study as to how much worse the next generation is, both of which accomplish the task of engaging in self-indulgence while simultaneously deflecting blame onto others, either in the form of college-age freeloaders or Scooter Libby.

Still, you can’t really blame today’s young adults for feeling how they do. When the world comes crashing down and they’re the ones that have to deal with it, they will have no one to blame but themselves. And how could you ever be more important than that?