Six Crates of 7-Up

Anyone who is a fan of science fiction felt more than just a tinge of disappointment last week when Barack Obama cut funding for the Constellation program, NASA's multi-year effort to have manned missions return to the moon by the 2020s. That Obama did so is not surprising, though. One would expect nothing less from a proponent of American unexceptionalism, to borrow Andrew Roberts's term.

Whereas a Democratic president from an earlier generation, John F. Kennedy, once challenged Americans to reach for the stars, our current president prefers that the once-vaunted space agency study such pseudoscientific nonsense as "climate change" while China and perhaps India take the lead in manned space exploration. Obama's slavish defenders will doubtlessly claim that terminating the Constellation program makes good financial sense - a laugh, considering that the very same man has taken the federal deficit to unforeseen heights in his attempt to throw America onto the historical ash heap of international socialism.

As for the title of my entry, it comes from this unintentionally funny movie review of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, written by a crazy moon-landing denier. According to the bong-addled brain of this cinema-obsessed miscreant, Stanley Kubrick loaded The Shining with symbolic clues to indicate that Neil Armstrong and company never once set foot on surface of the moon, but instead had their lunar excursions filmed by Kubrick himself on a Hollywood sound stage. Among the "symbols": a scene in the Overlook Hotel where six crates of 7-Up are stacked up against a wall, which Captain Cannabis interprets as a reference to the seven Apollo missions to the moon, of which only six landed. Peace, love, dope. Well come to think of it, with Obama's gutting of manned space exploration, the sugar high from a can of 7-Up is about as close as we're likely to get to the moon anytime soon.

Back here on Earth, my own life is meandering along. My real-world career is keeping me busy, hence the slow pace of blogging over the last several months. But fear not, I am still trying to keep this blog going, even if I'm down to posting at an effective pace of just one entry per week. I should have several book reviews up over the next two months. In a few days I'll be reading Orson Scott Card's Hidden Empire, followed over the coming weeks by Harry Turtledove's The Golden Shrine, Theodore Judson's Hell Can Wait, Dan Simmons's Black Hills, and of course, Tom Kratman's The Lotus Eaters. While unexceptionalism may permeate the contemporary world of American politics, in the realm of speculative fiction new frontiers forever abound. What would John F. Kennedy think, or for that matter, Frederick Jackson Turner?