Throwin’ up the set again today, dear reader.  I know you Get It, but there a couple of folks who frequent this website and  get all consternated and grouchy and bitch at me when I do this.

So listen.

You sit there in the flickering blue light of whatever screen you’ve chosen as your personal electronic pacifier, doom-scrolling through the usual carnival of performative outrage and algorithmic horseshit, and somewhere in the back of your reptile brain you still feel it, don’t you?  I know you must – the low, electric hum of something bigger than your mortgage, bigger that your politics, bigger than the latest flavor of ideological syphilis that’s eating the culture from the inside out.  That hum is the United States Armed Forces pulling two of their own – a pilot and a Weapon Systems Officer, call signs irrelevant because the only thing that matters is they were alive and behind enemy lines – out of the meat grinder of hostile territory like it was just another Tuesday.  And right alongside that hum, louder still, is the bone-rattling thunder of Artemis II’s crew riding a pillar of American fire farther into the black than any human beings have ever gone before, looping around the moon and staring straight into the face of the infinite with the same calm, psychotic competence that used to define test pilots and moonwalkers and every other magnificent bastard who ever looked at the horizon and said, Yeah, I’ll take that too. 

The rescue itself was the sort of operation that makes you understand why the rest of the world still whispers the phrase American special operations the way medieval peasants used to whisper dragon.  Night-vision, rotor wash, suppressed weapons, the whole lethal ballet executed with the kind of surgical swagger that looks, from the outside, like pure fucking magic and, from the inside, like months of rehearsals, contingency plans stacked on contingency plans, and the absolute refusal to leave anybody behind.  The pilot and the WSO – two men who climbed into a jet knowing full well the sky might try to kill them – got yanked back into friendly hands while the people who wanted them dead were still trying to figure out what the hell had just happened.  No press conference grandstanding, no made-for-TV speeches.  Just the quiet, terrifying efficiency of professionals who treat “impossible” the way the rest of us treat “Tuesday.”  You want competence porn?  This is it.  This is the real thing.  The kind that doesn’t need hashtags.

And then – Christ – Artemis II.

While the rest of the idiots of the species were busy arguing about pronouns and carbon offsets and whether the latest celebrity had the correct opinion on the Epstein files, four American  in a capsule built by American hands and American sweat rode the most powerful rocket ever launched by anyone, anywhere, and went farther than Apollo ever did.  Farther.  Let that sink in.  We didn’t just repeat history; we lapped it.  They crossed the translunar injection point, they looped the moon, they looked down at the pale blue dot that contains every war, every love song, every petty grievance we’ve ever had, and they did it while the whole planet watched like it was the goddamn Super Bowl.  The courage required is almost obscene.  Not the cartoon courage of movies.  The real kind: the kind that sits in a tin can on top of several million pounds of explosives and says, Light the fucking candle.

And here’s the part that makes the professional hand-wringers and the campus revolutionaries and the professional anti-Americans start clutching their pearls and muttering darkly about “militarism” and “nationalism” and whatever other ten-dollar words they’ve been taught to use as substitutes for actual thought: both of these things – the rescue and the flight – happened because this country, for all its flaws and contradictions and self-inflicted wounds, still produced people who are willing to strap themselves into machines of incomprehensible power and risk everything so the rest of us don’t have to.  They do it without asking for your approval.  They do it without caring whether the latest TikTok moralist thinks it’s “problematic.”  They do it because that’s who they are.

You can sneer if you want.  You can post your little memes about the military-industrial complex or the evils of space colonization or whatever fashionable nihilism is trending this week.  You can pretend that greatness is passé, that competence is suspect, that the only authentic response to human achievement is a knowing, ironic deconstruction.  Fine.  But when the rotors thump in the dark and the rocket lights the sky like the wrath of God, those noises don’t give a single shit about your deconstruction.  They just happen.  And they happen here, under this flag, because we still – barely, miraculously – have the balls and the brains and the sheer goddamn nerve to make them happen.

If those two things don’t make you want to go out front and wave an American flag, I simply don’t know what kind of anti-American pussy you are, but if we’re ever at the same bar, you’re paying for your own lukewarm rosé or Bud Light or kombucha or whatever your kind is drinking these days.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to stand outside and look up at the sky like a goddamn lunatic, because somewhere out there four Americans are still farther away from the rest of us than any humans have ever been, and somewhere down here two more of us just got dragged back from the jaws of the enemy by the best people this country still knows how to make.

And for one incandescent moment, the republic doesn’t feel like it’s dying.

It feels like it’s just getting started.

N.P.: “Do You Ever Get Tired?” – King Willonius