“John Glenn returns to space!” the headlines screamed, and I found myself screaming back, “I don’t care!” I guess it’s a generational thing: I wouldn’t understand.

Why did so many people—especially children of the Baby Boom—care that this man, who has spent his entire life feeding out of the public trough (with a little dessert from Charles Keating), took one more joyride at our expense? Or rather: I can understand why they might care (after all, I care about this a great deal myself), but why were they so happy about it? Where were the conservative protests against the waste of taxpayers’ dollars? Where were the liberal cries of elitism (after all, you don’t see NASA offering rides to former astronauts who didn’t go on to be U.S. senators)? Where were the Republican outcries against an obvious election-year ploy by a Democratic administration? Where, finally, were the omnipresent scientific experts, to point out that you can’t test the effects of space travel on the elderly (or conduct any kind of experiment, for that matter) on a subject group of one? The silence was deafening: In space, no one can hear you scream.

Those who had lived some portions of their lives before the advent of the Cold War and those of us who grew up in its closing throes seemed less likely to get worked up by John Glenn’s “triumphant” return to space, and there’s a reason: The space program screams “Cold War boondoggle.” Its one justification was that the Soviets were doing it, and so we had to do it, too. (Tang and the freeze-dried ice cream that the Smithsonian sells in the gift shop at the National Air and Space Museum are only justifications ex post facto.) But now the Soviet Union is gone, and the Russians are “borrowing” money from us to continue their (mis)adventures in space.

A week or so before John Glenn’s “heroic” return to space, a Chicago radio show host interviewed a spokesboopsie for NASA. (One of only six political appointees at the agency, she had previously worked for Vice President Gore.) In a display of true heroism, the host tried to get her to answer a simple question: Why have a space program at all? Well, she replied, we need it in order to build a permanent space station. But, the host persisted, why do we need a permanent space station? Well, obviously, in order to conduct long-term experiments in space. But why do we need to perform experiments in space? Because the technology that went into the Hubble Telescope is now being used to provide us with clearer mammograms. (Sorry, Tang, breast cancer is the new flavor of the month.) But if we needed that technology, couldn’t it have been developed without a space program? Well, yes, but . . . So, the exasperated host concluded, isn’t the real reason we go into space simply because it is there? Well, yes, of course, and isn’t that exciting?

I called a friend and colleague whose latest book deals largely with the destruction visited on America by school consolidation, the Interstate Highway System, and a large standing army—all central projects of the Cold War—and asked him what he thought of John Glenn’s “historic” return to space. Well, he demurred, I have a soft spot for the Mercury Seven astronauts. But that’s the whole point: With the fall of the Soviet Empire, major mistakes such as the Hubble Telescope, and charges of mismanagement in the early 90’s, NASA realized that its days were numbered, and it has been searching wildly about for a justification for its continued existence. It has finally found one: satisfying the nostalgic yearnings of Baby Boomers who long for a return to the familiar days of their youth. Cape Canaveral is our new circus, and we can look forward to a string of celebrity space flights that will beguile us with visions of a future straight out of Star Trek, while taking our minds off of the very real future that is dawning all around us, a future of national dissolution, economic collapse, barbarism, and the potential end of our civilization. It’s a future that we’re unwilling—and increasingly, unable—to face, which is why we’ll gladly sit, glued to the TV, like so many democratic Neros, fiddling with our remote controls while the Fourth Rome burns.