01.17.11

The Sputnik Moment when your brain stops working

Posted in Made in China, Phlogiston at 2:24 pm by George Smith

In yesterday’s NY Times, Nicholas Kristof rolled out a tiresomely regular usage — the Sputnik shot as some manner of wake-up call to US revival.

It comes right at the end after a hand-wringingly sincere worry over the Chinese education system and our failing in this area:

But the real challenge is the rise of China’s education system and the passion for learning that underlies it. We’re not going to become Confucians, but we can elevate education on our list of priorities without relinquishing creativity and independent thought.

That’s what we did in 1957 after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. These latest test results should be our 21st-century Sputnik.

Kristof knows because he’s been there. Like Tom Friedman.

The fancy and fine class, very often the opinion makers, are always in China. All truth can be found there. That’s just a fact.

Here’s Friedman from late last year:

“Well, folks, Sputnik just went up again: China’s going clean tech.”

By making more melamine, exceptional coal burning and keeping the motor vehicles out of town when the world comes visiting.

I satirized it in this:

DD’s rule, perhaps a little like the ‘law’ about the appearance of ‘Hitler’ in any political argument:

The appearance of the word Sputnik or any reference to a Sputnik kind of moment in any argument signals the person who dropped it needs a pie in the face.

In other words, it means — at worst — the brain has stopped working. Or the person writing or saying it has run out time and needs to wind up with something hack and superficially gnomic-sounding.

Here’s a collection of ‘Sputnik moments,’ courtesy of Google.

Geez.

The usage is intelligence insulting, among many things. It imagines the United States now is somehow, perhaps even only remotely, still the same place with the same powers the year after I was born.

That’s to laugh.

In 1957 the United States had much much stronger middle class. And it hadn’t deindustrialized. It was not an exhausted nation and not yet engaged in pointless and endless war in countries in which Americans have no interest or stake.

Yep, grade school education sure sucks in the US. So do many things in comparison to specifics taken from other locales.

Here’s a usage:

Watch out! The rocket has fired and the capsule separated! The Wall Street-engineered economic crash of 2008 was a Sputnik moment for the rest of the world.

File along with other great calls to resurgent achievement, gone until the next column runs:

1. What we need is a Manhattan Project to [fill in the blank].

2. If we could put a man on the moon, surely we can [fill in the blank].

Click those links, folks, for the extended laughs.

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