Anyone who remembers first seeing those early Hubble images of the mindbendingly huge but eerily graceful fingers of cosmic gas that have become known as the "Pillars of Creation" will be sad to see our massively expensive, relentlessly conked and deeply treasured orbiting telescope end its 20-year mission as light-year peeping tom.
Amid our years-long slog knee-deep in the carnage of innocents, all in the name of making the world "safe for democracy", wouldn't it be more pertinent to make the world safe from us?
This week the Book Club's entree, The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century, puts the 28th President - and specifically his crusading internationalism - back in debate contention.
Not that Woodrow Wilson's legacy has been gathering dust lately.
In the blue, blue Christmas of 1980 (Lennon murdered, Reagan elected), I strolled down to the corner of Octavia and Market where San Francisco's Libertarian Bookstore filled out a creaky clapboard storefront, and bought as a gift for a soulmate a huge poster of the President-elect standing in movie-cowboy persona, pointing a six-gun at the camera and smirking over a block-font caption: "Thanks for the votes, SUCKERS!"
As his two-term administration drained away the '80s, a lot of his constituency must have tasted brine from that mock rebuff. Despite riding to victory with the help of religious fundamentalists - just discovering the advantages of political savvy - and small-government conservatives, Reagan, all homespun guile and thin-veneer integrity, paid only lip service to social agendas, and blew taxpayer money like a hillbilly rocker in a Cadillac dealership.
Last week, in a post at TPM, Paul Begala made the correct observation that successes of Reagan and even Barack Obama can be pinned to their talent building coalitions - especially bonding for united effort wildly disparate groups who'd normally be poison to each other. If so, should we fear Obama's administration will string out the Reagan template fully - and abandon positions favored by his mixed following in favor of a generalized, "machine" platform that more reflects the traditional, monied interests of his party?
Chances for peace in the Middle East have been stagnating for so long now, any hopes for busting the logjam rest on perversely encouraging signs of fracas between Israel and its strategic sugar daddy, the United States.
So, since President Barack Obama and Israel's on-again, off-again Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu emerged from their first meeting today looking less than palsy-walsy, it could be a sign things are looking up.
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