Dan Popp
John Glenn was no hero of mine
By Dan Popp
The righteousness of a righteous man will not deliver him in the day of his transgression.... (Ezekiel 33:12b, NAS95)
In the Sixties, astronauts were our most highly exalted heroes. Fearless adventurers, smart, fit, skilled – and possessing nerves of steel and a split-second intuition for staying alive when things went haywire. Altogether we called it "the right stuff." Astronauts were the frontline fighters in the coldest of cold wars, the race to the Moon.
And John Glenn, who died recently at the age of 95, was one of that select band. I can't tell you why his name is remembered above the name of the first American in space, Alan Shepherd. Or above the Russian who preceded them both, Yuri Gagarin. But Glenn was celebrated perhaps more than any American astronaut except Neil Armstrong.
Then he became a politician.
John Glenn spent 24 years representing Ohio in the US Senate. That's too many years, first of all. But what he did in the Senate was just about what any Democrat infected with Marxism does there. He bought votes with my money. He redistributed. He used the force of government unconstitutionally and unconscionably.
My definition of a hero is someone who fights for the lives of the innocent. John Glenn voted against a ban on partial birth abortion. Twice. On the issue of fetal murder he was "pro choice."
I don't even care to get into the mess with the Keating Five. It's his "solidly progressive" public record that prevents me from adding my accolades to those already heaped upon him. A few hours in orbit, inspiring Americans; a quarter-century in the Senate, shafting America.
His final ignominy was to use his power as a Senator to bully NASA into putting him into space again as a senior citizen. A total joyride, while we picked up the tab for him to relive his glory days. That's not hero stuff in my book.
No, I come to bury John Glenn, not to praise him. Those whom we hold in high esteem take something of our spirit down with them when they fall. If John Glenn's life means anything to us, it means that there is no escape velocity for the axiom that "power corrupts."
The space race was the mother of all government boondoggles. Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon siphoned away enormous amounts of labor and resources because, ostensibly, we had to claim the Moon or the Russians would use it as a base from which to nuke us. Or something like that. "National defense," don'tcha know. But when we finally stepped on the lunar surface in 1969 we magnanimously claimed, "We came in peace for all mankind."
One of those things is a lie.
Stop to ponder the irony: We had to defeat Communism because Communism is godless, and it takes away private property and personal liberty. Yet many of those who fought Communism, including at least one airman on the "Final Frontier," later exercised godless statism, and eroded the protections of private property and of life itself.
I wish John Glenn no evil. I hope he's resting in peace. But he was not a man we should hold up as an example – not if we consider his whole life. Lamentably, his heroic deeds as a young man are cancelled out by the leftist barbarism he later embraced. Ohio and America are the worse for his service.
Let our heroes be those who never waver in the cause of righteousness.
© Dan Popp
December 12, 2016
The righteousness of a righteous man will not deliver him in the day of his transgression.... (Ezekiel 33:12b, NAS95)
In the Sixties, astronauts were our most highly exalted heroes. Fearless adventurers, smart, fit, skilled – and possessing nerves of steel and a split-second intuition for staying alive when things went haywire. Altogether we called it "the right stuff." Astronauts were the frontline fighters in the coldest of cold wars, the race to the Moon.
And John Glenn, who died recently at the age of 95, was one of that select band. I can't tell you why his name is remembered above the name of the first American in space, Alan Shepherd. Or above the Russian who preceded them both, Yuri Gagarin. But Glenn was celebrated perhaps more than any American astronaut except Neil Armstrong.
Then he became a politician.
John Glenn spent 24 years representing Ohio in the US Senate. That's too many years, first of all. But what he did in the Senate was just about what any Democrat infected with Marxism does there. He bought votes with my money. He redistributed. He used the force of government unconstitutionally and unconscionably.
My definition of a hero is someone who fights for the lives of the innocent. John Glenn voted against a ban on partial birth abortion. Twice. On the issue of fetal murder he was "pro choice."
I don't even care to get into the mess with the Keating Five. It's his "solidly progressive" public record that prevents me from adding my accolades to those already heaped upon him. A few hours in orbit, inspiring Americans; a quarter-century in the Senate, shafting America.
His final ignominy was to use his power as a Senator to bully NASA into putting him into space again as a senior citizen. A total joyride, while we picked up the tab for him to relive his glory days. That's not hero stuff in my book.
No, I come to bury John Glenn, not to praise him. Those whom we hold in high esteem take something of our spirit down with them when they fall. If John Glenn's life means anything to us, it means that there is no escape velocity for the axiom that "power corrupts."
The space race was the mother of all government boondoggles. Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon siphoned away enormous amounts of labor and resources because, ostensibly, we had to claim the Moon or the Russians would use it as a base from which to nuke us. Or something like that. "National defense," don'tcha know. But when we finally stepped on the lunar surface in 1969 we magnanimously claimed, "We came in peace for all mankind."
One of those things is a lie.
Stop to ponder the irony: We had to defeat Communism because Communism is godless, and it takes away private property and personal liberty. Yet many of those who fought Communism, including at least one airman on the "Final Frontier," later exercised godless statism, and eroded the protections of private property and of life itself.
I wish John Glenn no evil. I hope he's resting in peace. But he was not a man we should hold up as an example – not if we consider his whole life. Lamentably, his heroic deeds as a young man are cancelled out by the leftist barbarism he later embraced. Ohio and America are the worse for his service.
Let our heroes be those who never waver in the cause of righteousness.
© Dan Popp
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