Atlantis, an odyssey

Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke collaborated in 1968 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the classical model of Homer’s human journey with the stunning music of Strauss’ Blue Danube and Thus Spake Zarathustra ushering us to the paradigm-shifting photo of the Blue Planet from Apollo 8.

This month, the Atlantis shuttle that was launched in 1985 for NASA’s space program made its final trip. We are familiar with the space program’s well-publicized explorations of space off the Earth’s gravitational pull. We are less familiar with the space program as a means to find space-based delivery systems of nuclear weapons to China and the Soviet Union.

The fear of the Soviet Union was real and pervasive, but its basis, as was revealed later, was more illusory, heavy on theatrics rather than on actual capability. Now, China targets a moon landing by 2030. Fortunately, its rocket technology was spent on sky fireworks rather than weaponry. But our Pentagon warriors are still deep in fear.

The United States, riddled by the explosions of journeys in internal space since the discipline of psychology and the practice of the couch took prominence, has most of its progressives turn into either esoteric inner peace, or the psychic journeys of altered consciousness. With the Unabomber and his seemingly Norwegian copycat taking individualism to its radical manifestation, the social aspect of concerted effort magnified by the space program, as compared to the individual genius that unfettered personal worth has come to be idolized and promoted by Wall St., awaits a new emphasis.

Atlantis, the lost city of Plato’s recollection or imaginings, comes from antiquity and has served humankinds’ utopian propensities, particularly with humanism’s Renaissance. Paradise Lost is deep in human yearning, Mesopotamia’s contribution at the confluence of the Tigris-Euphrates being the popular story of the garden, the snake and Adam and Eve.

The journeys from Satawal and Woleai, and the periodic journeys through the Metawaal Wool is a tradition of traversing the unknown with the passion of exploration. Perhaps it is time to revive that impulse in mapping the next stages of the Marianas journey.

Access to the land, as the invitation to the open sea, has always been an option of anyone in these parts. That is why many sees the emancipation of the rigidity of CNMI’s Article 12 as a symbol of jumpstarting its journey as a collaborative social entity.

That journey is three-pronged, a single thrust but with three discernable components.

The first is a thorough assessment of the islands’ survival options without undue dependence on the federal subsidy or being simply an appendage to military plans premised on fear of China and North Korea (did the same with Vietnam in the ’60s) as a rationale for “guarding” the mercantile sea lanes of South China Sea (translate, getting legal grounds to drill oil). What do we do with what we’ve got?

The issue of survival is not so complicated. It simply involves an inventory of natural, human, and technological wealth and projection of resource utilization, what to do with them in production schemes, the use of labor and devices, and the distribution of goods and services produced. There is too much utopian thinking of a lost or miraculous Atlantis that we are weighted heavily on our dagan on messianic expectations rather than engaging our brain proa in visioning our future and rolling our sleeves to paddle.

The science of decision-making comes as a second priority. Physically part of an island chain, we are communally cooperative. Ethnicity traces roots in Austro-Polynesian DNA, historically and consciously influenced by Europe through Iberia and the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the American experiment in participatory democracy. How experienced do we need to be to have confidence in broad participatory politics?

Eschew the party system of conflict confrontations. Let this generation’s wilting man’amko play their games of one-upmanship (it really gets bad when women play it, too, right, Chailang?) It is neither indigenous nor productive. It is a fallacy to think that parliamentary wrangling is the sole democratic model that promotes conflict of classes and competing interests. Commonality is more pervasive. Why not start there?

The emerging glocal character of the Planet Eaarth brings us to the cutting edge of global transformation, our third component. The secular city of the urban centers celebrated anonymie, and understandably so since we just emerged from empires where monarchs owned our bodies and souls. We now treasure privacy. Now we have city folks who look the other way while neighbors get mauled by hustlers and hoodlums. We are islands of assimilation and inclusiveness. Paradise gained is our option.

Alarmingly, a Chinese veggie vendor accosted, his means of livelihood burned, does not bode well if these islands are going to be transformed on the basis of what we have, rather than on the dream of what we should be, have been, or ideally meant to be.

Atlantis never was, but the dreaming goes on.

The Marianas: Space-Time Odyssey runs now into the old Roman question Quo Vadis? Time to get our young lambs and lions around the same table.

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[I] Vergara is a regular contributor to the [/I]Saipan Tribune’[I]s Opinion Section[/I]