Another Fart in a Whirlwind
An expensive fart, an eighty-five million dollar fart in a whirlwind no one needs. The Star Wars test suffered an ‘anomaly’ which my dictionary defines as a ‘deviation from the normal.’ But that can’t be true because normal in this program is failure.
Star Wars wasn’t needed when conceived nearly twenty years ago in a world that still had a viable cold war, mainly because the Russians, who were our only possible nuclear foe at that moment, could easily have overwhelmed Reagan’s dream with multiple warheads.
Then of course the wheels came off the Soviet threat and walls and curtains came a tumbling down, much to the chagrin of our fat-cat defense contractors who had just begun to smell the bacon frying. A dead issue, a stillbirth. Regrettable, but so it goes and Lockheed and Raytheon would just have to find (or wait for) another pork barrel.
If Star Wars had been a Broadway show . . . but then, who can ever tell?
No script could have foreseen George W., who was at the time contentedly cl…