We’re Going to Mars, and We’re Bringing the Stars and Stripes With Us

“We may pursue our present life into the actors, launching American pilots to grow the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” President Donald Trump said Monday in his next annual address. Words problem. And those thoughts matter more than most.

Manifest Destiny is one of those 19th-century ideas — like the Monroe Doctrine that helped maintain our hemisphere completely of German and Asia animals for two generations — that became extremely unattractive among the America-hating lefties who long-marched through our institutions.  

It must have been 30 years ago that I went to see a Thomas Jefferson imitation who either quoted or paraphrased Jefferson’s emotions that Americans would need several hundred years to fill in the globe from ocean to shining sea. That would have been around 1800. Not very 50 years afterward, we welcomed California into the coalition and went about the critical business of filling in the region and closing the frontier — a goal accomplished in 1893, according to historian Frederick Jackson Turner.

A year or so prior, I had a conversation somewhat along this line with a coworker of mine in San Francisco. Scott was a good guy, very sharp — Boomer, Air Force vet, gay but not queer, Democrat but not radical — we’d bonded over our mutual love of bad horror movies and anti-PC politics. This was just two years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union when Mother Russia was at her lowest ebb. Scott suggested to me that we buy Siberia. ” Americans do better when we have a frontier,” he said not at all joking,” and Russia needs the money. “

I told him — again, not at all joking — that the whole thing would be” strip malls from end to end within 50 years. “

Americans lost something when we closed the frontier… something very American. The frontier challenged us, sometimes killed us, and its untamed geography helped make us the no-bulls **t, freedom-loving people we are, or at least aspire to be. I wonder sometimes if it’s no coincidence that the only uniquely American form of statism — progressivism — took root in the national psyche just as we ran out of new worlds to conquer.

With nothing to tame, it’s as though we started trying to tame one another, instead. ” SAD! ” as POTUS 47 might say.  

Well, there’s a new world to conquer, courtesy of Elon Musk’s ambition to take humanity to Mars.

Make no mistake, SpaceX is going to Mars with or without the imprimatur of the United States of America. But by promising to “plant the Stars and Stripes” on Mars, Trump reminded us that Manifest Destiny is not dead, that there are still frontiers to tame, and most importantly, that Americans are still capable of great daring.  

Like our British cousins before us, I’m certain that any control we enjoy over our Martian colonists will be both tenuous and short-lived. And that’s OK because America is an idea, an idea already carved into ( and forged from ) one new world and, someday sooner than many reading this today would believe, perhaps another.

Almost six decades years ago we went to the Moon” for all mankind. ” But Apollo — and I’m not running down Apollo at all here — was essentially a vanity project, a mission to show the world that we were better in vision, technology, and most of all in spirit than the Communists.

But in colonizing Mars, we’ll be doing that but also so much more. Trump understands as Musk does that for America to succeed, America has to grow. Musk says he wants to establish a self-sustaining colony on Mars because” We don’t want to be one of those single-planet species that go extinct. If we are a multi-planet species, then the light of consciousness is not extinguished. “

And if those brave explorers bring with them the Stars and Stripes, the torch of liberty will shine on, too.  

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