Real World Solutions, Inc

(Originally published in the 12/2000 issue of the Rotary Aviation News)

  Sometimes you just have to accept that you are out of step with the rest of the world and be happy about it.  Shortly after my harangue about the Peanuts comic strip in the last issue, Mr. Schulz made his final exit and, if his fans are correct, is now the official cartoonist of the Heavenly Gazette.  The massive outpouring of praise for him on his retirement paled in comparison with that made after his death.  The event made the front page of most newspapers and each one tried to out-do the other in hailing his achievements.  A local theater group immediately began putting on a production called “You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown”. 

    As if to end all doubt that I was marching to a very different drummer, Congressmen start giving eloquent speeches about him saying things like “He gave America a unique sense of life and optimism”.  When they had exhausted their repertoire of superlatives, they posthumously awarded him the Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest award the government can bestow on a civilian.  And just before this issue goes to press, the US Postal Service announces a new line of stamps to honor him.

   Now you may be wondering why I have this fixation on Peanuts.  It may look that way so, at the risk of looking like a complete nut case, I’ll try to explain. In isolation, the misguided hero worship of Schulz or any one of a thousand other celebrities does not have a lot of significance.  But as I read this morning’s paper, I began to notice (for about the 10,000th time) that most everything we are told is transparently false.  Yes, I mean just about everything.

   Take for instance the front-page article about the local “drug problem”.  The nearest city of any size to me is Gainesville FL, home of the University of Florida where some of the students there spend some (or a lot of) time at all night clubs called Raves.  The article tells us that while there, they ingest all manner of drugs which they give their own pet names to.  Names like “Grievous Bodily Harm” (for GHB) and “Forget me Pill” (for Rohipnol, also known as the date rape drug).  The bold headline of the article is “Students Clueless About Club Drugs’ Danger” and it goes on to tell us that the kids are suffering all kinds of bad effects including death because they just don’t know any better.  It tells us of the heroic efforts of local, state and federal law enforcement to control the problem and how “more money is needed for the War on Drugs”.  Law enforcement officials are quoted as to how difficult it is to control because  “Kids are setting up their own sophisticated distribution networks”. 

    Like any good American, my first impulse after reading the article was to ask my congressman to increase taxes to fund the noble war.    OK, that last statement was just to see if you were paying attention.  What I really thought was this: If the students are really clueless about these drugs, why would they give them names like “Grievous Bodily Harm”?  And if their drug addled brains are so irreparably damaged, how are they able to outwit all these law enforcement agencies with multi-billion dollar budgets? 

   You can’t criticize the drug war without most Americans thinking that you abuse drugs but I will assume that after reading this newsletter for the past few years you know that my preferred method of getting high involves engines and airfoils rather than pharmacology.  I just happen to think that the war on drugs is misguided, doomed to failure and destroys more lives than it saves.  I’m also not too proud of the other “distinctions” the war has brought us.  The Clueless Students were on page one, but buried on the back page was a report that America had achieved another world first.  We recently passed Russia and are now number one in the percentage of population in prison.  Over 50% of our federal prisoners were convicted of non-violent drug crimes. 

      Still another article tells of the need to clamp down on drug use by prison inmates after corruption charges were filed against several prison officials.  Do you ever ask yourself whether you would want the kind of controlled society that would be necessary to be “drug free” if that goal can’t be acheived inside a prison?   Are we so afraid of what other people are putting in their bodies that we have to lock them up to protect our fragile sensibilities?  If so, it makes the words "Land of the free and home of the brave" ring kind of hollow.

    In other news, after years of delay and many billions in cost over-runs the international space station “Alpha” is finally in orbit.  I should feel happy about that.  I grew up dreaming of space flight and reading every science fiction book I could lay my hands on.  I imagined life in space as being ever so much more exciting than the mundane existence that life on earth seemed to be.   I’m not one to advocate giving up on ones’ dreams but I eventually found out that what I really longed for in those dreams was available right here on earth.  And in the cold hard reality of scientific fact, earth was the only place those dreams could be lived.  Other than some staggeringly beautiful views and a nice place to park our useful satellites, space has nothing much to offer mankind, at least with the technology available to us now.

     The space shuttle, for all its technical success, is in reality a colossal failure.  It was sold to us as a low cost reusable vehicle that would open the door to space.  It is actually the most expensive space transportation system ever devised.  Every flight of the shuttle costs between five hundred million and one billion dollars not counting the cost of any payload.  To put this in terms we can understand, if there were unlimited chunks of 24 karat gold in orbit around the earth, it would cost more to bring them back in the shuttle than they are worth.

Closer to home, Oshkosh, excuse me, Airventure 2000 was to be the date for Continental and Williams International to deliver on those NASA (taxpayer) funded contracts to design and build some great new engines that are purported to be the salvation of general aviation.  We were supposed to see them fly this year.  After two years of shamelessly hyping these projects, the EAA’s daily air show newspaper was strangely silent on the subject so I stopped by the Continental booth to ask about it.  Well, it seems that they have had “technical difficulties” and there is no low cost flying diesel yet.  But they did run it once in a test cell.  The fuel burn was higher than anticipated and the engine is about 100 pounds over the target weight, but no one is asking for our $10,000,000 development money back. 

   The story was even stranger over at Williams where we taxpayers ponied up about $36,000,000 to develop a new lightweight and low cost turbojet engine.  They had some of the most lavish displays ever seen at Oshkosh but I could not get anyone to even acknowledge that the contract ever existed.  The only information I could get was that an operational engine was about 3 years away.  But the story got even weirder.   Next door to the Williams display was an even flashier one from some company called Eclipse.  They apparently plan on marketing a corporate jet which would (hopefully) cost less than the beautiful mock-ups on display.  I could care less about corporate jet mockups with flawless pearlesent paint jobs and gee whiz control panels but there was one interesting statement in their literature.   It announced an agreement between them and Williams to use the jet engine under development exclusively on Eclipse aircraft.  OK, I know 36 million dollars is nothing these days but, call me old fashioned, I believe in the sanctity of a contract.  Not only did we not get what was promised, they sold what we paid for to someone else.  The only reference the EAA made during the show regarding the Williams – Eclipse deal was some nebulous gobbledygook about “The ever changing events in the world of aviation”.  It’s good to have the EAA out there looking out for our interests.

    Getting back to my morning paper, the Gainesville Sun reported on a near disaster avoided by some vigilant Department of Environmental Protection officials.  It seems that a popular local playground for kids was found to have traces of arsenic in the soil.  All the playground equipment was constructed of wood treated with a compound known as CCA.  This is commonly referred to as pressure treated wood which has been in use for well over 50 years.  Virtually every house built during this period in Florida (and every other state) uses this kind of wood and it is the standard building material for docks, outdoor picnic shelters, decks and most anything made of wood and exposed to the weather. 

    Well, it seems that “detectable levels of arsenic” were found in the playground soil and it was assumed that the source was the pressure treated wood structures on the playground. There was no discussion about what the levels were, whether they exceeded normal levels found most everywhere or if these levels posed a health risk.  The DEP had a job to do (and budgets to justify) so the playground equipment was bulldozed into oblivion and hauled away leaving a vacant field for the kids to play in.

     The reason for rambling on about these seemingly unrelated events is not to imply that the world is on some new trend and going to hell in a hand basket.  Contrary to popular belief, things have always been pretty much the same. Technology changes but people are people no matter what time they live in.  I came to this conclusion after returning from Vietnam with a renewed interest in studying history and was amazed to find that, here too, most everything I had been told, was false.

But I digress.  The reason for this rant, as usual, is my pathological need to see the reason or pattern behind everything, including life as we know it.

       When trying to explain a mystery, one of the best methods of scientific inquiry is to start by posing a hypothesis that would explain what is observed.  That’s not where it ends of course but it is a necessary first step. I have considered a lot of scenarios and as uncomfortable as it makes me, the best fit is the “Conspiracy by Sinister Organization” theory.  Nothing else explains the lunacy and chaos that passes for normalcy.  Explaining life as we know it is a fool’s errand and this spiel has probably stretched my credibility to the limit, but what the hell, if you don’t try, nothing happens. Here’s my hypothetical view of the Sinister Organization’s strategy:

    If you take away my playground and tell me it’s for my own good, I’m going to be confused and unhappy.  If you lie to me about why I am being sent to fight in a war, I’m going to be disillusioned.  If you take more than half the money I make at gunpoint with no legal recourse (try refusing to pay taxes), I’m going to resign myself to being a slave of government.   If the groups and organizations I join that promise to look out for my interests sell me out, I’m going to feel betrayed.    If you do enough of these kinds of things and do them often enough, sooner or later I’ll accept them as normal and won’t even notice anymore. And if there are a few people who persist in noticing, they will most likely be dismissed as crackpots or troublemakers. At this point the Sinister Organization has more or less achieved its goals.

    It’s a pretty bleak picture and one that I feel powerless to do anything about much of the time. But I maintain that something in the human spirit is not compatible with this state of affairs. People may avoid confronting the glaring contradictions and arbitrary nature of what passes for “normal”, but somewhere in the back of their heads, alarms are going off.  I can’t help thinking that the mental strain of trying to ignore them must be enormous.  What surprises me is not that some people crack under the pressure and become cult whackos, mass murders or Jodie Foster stalkers, what amazes me is that more people don’t.  Maybe this explains the purpose of spectator sports, game shows, soap operas, etc.  Maybe these diversions are the only thing keeping a lot of people sane. Perhaps the Sinister Organization uses them to keep the threshold of pressure just below the point where things fall completely apart.  More fun to break and ride the horse than to kill it. 

    There is an up side to this story however. I don’t really know the identity of the organization, but I  do see that it is not un-opposed.  The opposing organization is equally anonymous. They do not advertise, are not registered as a non-profit organization, do not have a website and have no official membership list.  And yet I am as sure of their existence as I am of my own. 

    If I were to separate people into groups, only three would be needed.   Group A would be those in the Sinister Organization. Group B is a relatively small group who hears the “back of the head” alarms and start to question life’s contradictions. Group C, by far the largest, is made up of sports fans. 

    It is the all too rare chance encounters with those in group B that make life the joy it is for me.  Not all these encounters are face to face, in fact they tend to be the exception.  More often than not, I recognize them by the clues they leave behind, sometimes in a book, or a song, or a movie.  And the reason I thought you might not mind reading through this disjointed rambling is that among group B, there seems to be a disproportionate number who are drawn to flying things. 

   Part of the appeal that aviation holds for them must be the consistency that it requires.  It doesn’t matter what position you hold, how much wealth or power you have or how politically correct you are.  If you ignore the immutable laws of aerodynamics, your own limitations, or the airworthiness of your aircraft, you will pay the price.  If you acquire the skills, understand the machine and objectively evaluate all the factors affecting flight, you will be rewarded with some indescribably wonderful experiences.   If only all of life could be so pure.