The Wrong Stuff

Our national obsession is now Lisa Nowak, the astronaut who has given selflessly of herself to provide late-night talk-show hosts, tabloid writers, stand-up comics and the crowd at your office water cooler with weeks of fodder.
Nowak, of course, left her husband and kids to travel 900 miles across the country, allegedly to attempt a kidnapping or assault (possibly even murder) against a perceived rival for the fellow astronaut with whom she appears to have been obsessed. It’s unclear whether he ever returned her affections.
Nowak famously wore a diaper during her long car trip – as astronauts do during takeoff and landings -- to avoid bathroom breaks. She must have stopped several times for gasoline, though, during which time she could have relieved herself from both discomfort and the humiliation to come.
“It’s like this story came out of a 24 hour news improv group,” said Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show." “ 'Somebody give me a job, a relationship and item that’s inherently funny and … scene.' ”
What makes this story so interesting – and in a way frightening -- is that astronauts, because there are so few of them and they work in an environment with little margin for error, are assumed by necessity to be the best and brightest our nation has to offer. This was a decidely dumb and evidently irrational stunt.
Despite the two tragic space shuttle disasters, the program (which I have repeatedly argued here is a waste of money, time and resources) is generally run safely and effectively. More than a hundred missions have gone without a hitch.
The thought of loose cannons in the ranks hurts that confidence.
It may well be that Ms. Nowak is solidly put-together, professional person who suffered an unavoidable, medically induced psychotic incident. That’s up to doctors and the court to figure out.
I hope the larger picture isn’t that NASA, like many other federal agencies – FEMA and the EPA the most notorious of them – isn’t slipping into stagnation under an administration too bogged down in a losing war to pay attention to domestic affairs.
It’s never too much of an exaggeration to wonder how much benign neglect in this administration will eventually become malignant neglect, and we may not see the full effect for years to come, when a poorly selected, mentally unstable member of our most selective branch of service may seem in retrospect like a missed omen.