The Space Shuttle disaster is, of course, the lead story in today's Vanguardia. The headline is "Space tragedy", and there's a large photo of the seven dead astronauts. The Vangua's lead editorial makes this generally good point: "For a minuscule but influential sector of the population, especially in the United States, the present circumstances of international tension, with a war on the way and the permanent threat of terrorism, will feed all kinds of conspiracy theories, whipped up by the presence on board of an Israeli officer. Reality, however, seems to be much simpler: the margin of safety, even in aerospace missions, is not and can never be absolute." That is, accidents can happen and one just did and there's nothing to do about it except mourn the dead and ensure that that particular accident doesn't happen again. I do have a quibble with the editorial, though; the conspiracy theorists are not especially influential in the United States (except on the far left), but rather in Europe, where they make up a major section of the population. In Greece 95% of the people think we're going into Iraq not to get rid of Saddam but to grab the oil, and this belief is almost as widespread in Spain.

There is a news analysis article, however, by someone who signs himself "Andy Robinson, New York correspondent." This guy is an American anti-globo lefty who is big on Marcuse, Fanon, and Chomsky, since every American who he agrees with is always billed as "a student of" one of these three guys. What that really means is someone who parrots the same old slogans that somebody else made up in about 1967, or 1847. Robinson's screeds show up occasionally--he's the guy who wrote the ridiculous story on the King assassination that we mentioned a few days ago. His angle is always "United States = bad: the inside story of what's really happening". The title of his little piece is "Wounded pride". Here are a couple of paragraphs.

The images of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, shocked and impotent while the technological pride of the United States went up in white smoke the morning of January 28, 1986, were almost forgotten. After the rapid bombing of Afghanistan, in 2001 even smart bombs had regained their reputation, which had been lost after the errors of the Gulf War and the embarrassing bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade...

In the military theater, Uncle Sam's technological ego suffered another hard blow after a series of evidence became known, proving that father Bush's and CNN's spectacular state-of-the-art technological weapons didn't work. The laser-guided missiles got lost in the dust storms of the Iraqi desert: of the 970 projectiles fired at nuclear and chemical factories, none hit its target, and the Patriot missiles weren't able to shoot down Saddam's old Scuds.

Nevertheless, confidence in perfect technology had been recovered in recent years. Despite the estimated 3000 civilians killed in the Afghan war, the long-distance bombs and airplanes without pilots were considered potent examples of the reaffirmation of American state-of-the-art technology. A new version of the Patriot will play a key role if there is a war in Iraq. And under pressure from the military-space lobby led by companies like Lockheed Martin, NASA has even brought back the space nuclear program. The launching of two small nuclear rockets had been planned for May. "If one of them disintegrates like the Columbia, a lot of people will die of cancer wherever it falls," says Grossman.

My impression of Mr. Robinson is that he is one of George Orwell's nationalists. A nationalist may be fiercely loyal to a country or an idea, or he may fiercely oppose one, because of his emotions rather than logic and reason. A nationalist differs from a patriot in that a patriot wants to see his unit become stronger but does not wish ill on other units, while a nationalist's goal is to subjugate other units to his. ("Buy American" is patriotic, though stupid. "Don't Buy Japanese" was a fairly common bit of American nationalism in the early eighties. See what I mean? A patriotic sports fan wants to see his team win. A nationalist sports fan wants to see his team's rival humiliated. He doesn't care if his team comes in next-to-last if the rival comes in last.) The most important thing for a nationalist is the comparative prestige of his chosen country or idea. Orwell says that one may be a positive or a negative nationalist--one may decide, for example, that one hates Communism, and then will think about nothing else except destroying Communism's prestige. I think Mr. Robinson is something not all that uncommon on the American left, someone from the teacher / journalist / bureaucrat class who feels alienated from the American society that he has not been especially successful in and therefore resents those who have been successful within the system. He wants to do a hit job on what he almost certainly sees as American pride and arrogance, so he brings up not only the Challenger, which makes perfect sense, but the only partial efficacy of high-tech weapons during the Gulf War, which has nothing to do with the subject.