what has always made people give up safe and prosperous lives to seek out what’s over the next mountain. Go west, young man!”
There was something about the way those first European settlers were valorized by the proponents of Mars colonization, at a time in which migrants from countries suffering the effects of political violence and climate change were relentlessly villainized, that felt to me like an intimation of a future in which a tiny minority of obscenely wealthy people were free to colonize other planets, mine asteroids, escape the smoldering wreckage of the Earth, while the poor and the desperate would be made to seem like invading armies, barbarian hordes. Was this the future, this hardening of hearts against spectacles of mass suffering, mass death? Was this the end of the world, or how it would continue?
Another slide: a jubilant crowd on the Berlin Wall, waving German flags, behind them the Brandenburg Gate lit by fireworks, the fall of an evil empire. Art Harman stepped out from behind his podium, squared his shoulders, adjusted his cuffs with emphatic precision.
“I was there,” he said, “when that wall came down. The people in that photo, for the first time in their lives, there’s not a guy with a gun to their heads when they try to express themselves. That’s what it’s going to be like for the first people on Mars. We’re here. We’re free. You won’t have the government, the EPA, saying you can’t damage this or that endangered species. Not on Mars.”
On the screen, the Berlin Wall gave way to an image of the much-fetishized preamble to the United States Constitution. This right here, he said, was the endangered species we should be trying to protect.
“Here in America we have a self-perpetuating free society, because we know our rights. We can defend these rights ourselves. It’s not like that in most countries. Most countries, rights are offered like candies to a kid, and they can be taken back. In the Soviet Union, only the elite had rights, the guy with the gun. On Mars, we’re going to want to avoid that.”
His words echoed, quite precisely, the sentiment of the speech with which Vice President Mike Pence had outlined the vision behind the launch of the so-called Space Force, the new sixth branch of the US military, emphasizing the need for the increased militarization and privatization of space. “While other nations increasingly possess the capability to operate in space, not all of them share our commitment to freedom, private property, and the rule of law. As we continue to carry American leadership in space, so also will we carry America’s commitment to freedom into this new frontier.” It was all there: freedom, property, the rule of law. The sacral image of the frontier, a backdrop to it all.
I wondered how it was that so many Americans—educated, intelligent Americans—seemed to genuinely believe this stuff. Where did it come from, this conviction that their country was somehow uniquely possessed of a divine spark of freedom, a national genius for personal liberty? The only thing that seemed to me to explain the conviction also fatally undermined it: the fact that from cradle to grave every American was subject to a relentless barrage of propaganda about the special freedom guaranteed them by their citizenship. The answer, of course, was history, or rather the cultural products of its relentless mythologization. It was easier, in the way that all things were, to internalize this message if you were white—like Art Harman, like me, like everyone else in the room—and therefore less likely to be exposed to its negation.
Earlier that morning, on my way to get breakfast in Silver Lake, my eye had been drawn downward toward a small brass plaque embedded in the sidewalk on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Hyperion Avenue. “PRIVATE PROPERTY,” it read. “Permission to pass over revocable at any time.” I had stood there a long while, reading it over and over, marveling at the strangeness of the message, its small and insistent authority in the surface of the street. Though it was presumably meant in earnest, it seemed to me a strangely subversive thing, a nearly subliminal assertion of capitalism’s blank refusal of any boundaries to its territorial expansion. Someone else’s right to own the ground beneath my feet, the right to remove it from under me at any time: What sort of freedom was this? I thought of all those covered wagons in Art Harman’s slide, all