hyper

I'm seventy-five. I was around during World War II--when the USA pretended that the Nazis were good guys and the Japanese were sub-human evil beings, when black people in the USA were in effect still slaves, and when the USA used its two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

My head hurts tonight in a strange way. Maybe I'm old enough to die and get out of here. Not that I don't love humanity, and life itself. But I'm worn out with the USA, and tired from having spent most of my time and energy arguing against what I see as evil.\

But if I am going to die soon, I want to get this said before I go.

For the last few years I have lived in Germany. I teach there: a civilised place, an intelligent and thoughtful and moral people. Maybe the scourge in their past helps them--us, I should like to say--to be moral.

The USA has never accepted any of its shames: its many vicious, murderous shames. Native American genocide. African and African-American slavery (both: the children of African slaves--often, like Thomas Jefferson's children--were African-American, or Afro-European slaves). Nuclear bombs in Japan. And all the USA's manufactured wars of aggression, in Korea, in the 1958 invasion of Lebanon, against Cuba, in Vietnam with lots of napalm, in Grenada, in Iraq with Colin Powell burying live Iraqi kids in the sand with bulldozer-tanks, in Iraq again, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan with murderous drones, in Syria.

And now: sometimes I am outraged by us, or disgusted; sometimes I am just angry, or embarrassed, or perversely amused. But this time I am outrageously pleased.

The good-old-broke USA has spent billions--maybe trillions--of junk dollars designing and testing a 'hypersonic' plane. Not 'supersonic'--beyond the speed of sound--but hyperbolicly 'hypersonic.'

'Superfast' means something like 'most fast,' or 'fastest.' But 'hyperfast' means ' 'over-fast,' or 'too fast.' And wow! This thing was 'hypersonic.'

It was. And on Thursday it ran away from its trackers.

The plane that could travel at 13,000 miles per hour--21,000 kilometers per hour--would have let the USA military drop bombs on its enemies, anywhere in the world, in less than an hour.

On Thursday morning the Pentagon's best team of idiots launched one of these things, testing it.

They only had two of them. The first aborted itself after nine minutes, and disappeared into the Pacific Ocean. Two hundred thousand homes for poor people sank with it.

The second launch--this Thursday's--lasted thirty-six minutes. And then the thing escaped from the tracking radar: ran away. Where to? Did it go too fast for the radar to follow it? Did it burn up--at more than 2,000 degrees centigrade--in the outer atmosphere? Did it just run off somewhere on its own, maybe to a more civilised planet? Or did it land somewhere'' in Siberia? Antarctica? In an ocean?

It could have landed, of course, in someplace like Washington. An appropriate landing place. As the little girl used to say in the "Katzenjammer Kids" comic strip, "they brought it on themselves."

So: goodnight. If I am here tomorrow, I'll look to see if the USA's 'hypersonic' extravagance cause a sunami somewhere, or just blew up, or maybe found its way home to Washington, or maybe found its way off into outer space. And if I'm not here tomorrow, maybe I'll meet it out there somewhere.

Bert Hornback