Look out Martians…Here we come!

You’d have to be one racist son-of-a-bitch to say something like this:: 

“And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.”

And yet, on January 20, 2025, the racist we elected president said just that.

For some reason we still have to remind ourselves that many of the foundations of this country were created in an overwhelmingly racist environment.  I know many trumpistanians will spend the rest of their lives trying to convince others that this isn’t true.  They’ll preach that Native American genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, Japanese internment, etc, were all part of God’s plan to make American great.  

In no other euphemism is this spirit captured better than in the phrase “Manifest Destiny”.  If you went to school in Michigan, you were certainly exposed to this painting, ironically called “American Progress.”  

This painting was used for years (it still might be) on the middle school state testing, so teachers all across the state spent a few days every year helping students analyze it prior to the test.  You can see a religious figure leading the charge across the plains as white folks looked west to escape the misery of the cities built in the chaos of early industrial capitalism.  Along the way they either wiped out or moved Native Americans out of their way, because obviously God wanted it this way.  White people were simply superior to dark skinned people…and the ones we didn’t enslave we were going to get out of our way.

It was in this climate that other articulations of this Great American Spirit manifested themselves in Social Darwinism and the White Man’s Burden.  In the first case, caught up in the scientific frenzy of the 19th century, white folks like Herbert Spencer, sought to remove the faith aspect of Manifest Destiny and replace it with scientific proof that white people were better than people of color.  You can watch my analysis of this from the hot tub here.  

Caught up in the zeal for just how great white people were, British poet Rudyard Kipling penned “White Man’s Burden” in a tribute for Queen Victoria, but it was bit much for the royals, so Kipling revised it, targeting Americans who were reluctant to continue massacring Filipinos after the Spanish-American War.  Kipling told us that, yes, it can be quite a bother subduing people of color, but it’s just the burden white folks in their superiority just had to bear.

Here’s how it opens:

Take up the White Man’s burden— 

    Send forth the best ye breed— 

Go bind your sons to exile

  To serve your captives’ need;

To wait in heavy harness

 On fluttered folk and wild—

Your new-caught sullen peoples,

  Half devil and half child.

Racist enough for you?

So who, in their right mind, would ever invoke euphemism’s like “Manifest Destiny” in a seemingly positive way ever again?  I guess we could argue whether trump is in his “right mind”, or if he even has a functioning mind at all, but in his inaugural address, invoke it he did.

Should humans go to Mars?  I think if you’ve been around for any of the last 500 years or so, you know that if there’s a horizon, humans are going to try to breach it.  Interplanetary travel is as inevitable as was trans-Atlantic exploration in the early 1500’s.  

It’s not the idea of getting to Mars that is offensive in any way.  We’re going.

Invoking “Manifest Destiny” as an impetus for such exploration must surely have the little green men of Mars very concerned.  Under a trump initiative to Mars, who here doubts that if, in fact, there is life on another planet, those folks will meet the same fate as Native Americans and Mexicans living in the West watching some misguided angel leading throngs of greedy white people into their homes?

How else can we make America great again?