Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich (Photo: www.newt.org)
All politicians are, to some extent, powered by raw self-belief. Then there is former Speaker and Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich who feasts on it.
You might have noticed that very frequently Gingrich spreads his arms to make a point. That is a subconscious behavioral attribute of someone who rides wave after wave of self-belief. He is a surfer on the ocean of ambition. However, the boundaries between positive thinking, delusion and lunacy are rather porous.
During a speech in Cocoa, Florida, on January 28, Gingrich said, “By the end of my second term we will have the first permanent base on the moon, and it will be American.”
Of all the grandiosity that Gingrich should be slammed for, his proposal to colonize the moon should be the least slam-worthy. It is at least entertaining.
His statement is loaded with so much presumption and grandiosity that I cannot help but applaud him. When you analyze his statement, you are struck by several things in it. To begin with, he has concluded that he will be the nominee of the Republican Party. That is presumption number one.
Presumption number two is the belief that he would defeat President Barack Obama. Even he knows that that is easier said than achieved. Presumption number three is that he would be so good in his first term that he would win a second term.
Simultaneously, there are many other presumptions that relate to putting together an intensely complex plan to colonize the moon with all its attendant technological pieces in place before his second term ends. There are also those presumptions that relate to the cost of such a mammoth undertaking, not to mention its profound political implications. And yet Gingrich has pole-vaulted over all of them to promise a colony on the moon.
Of course, as a president he can always edit that ambition and be content with a small shed somewhere on the moon and declare it to be the first step towards building a base to be inhabited by Americans at some future date.
There is a character in north Indian folklore called Sheikh Chilli to describe someone who dreams up grandiose schemes. It is meant to describe someone who inhabits a world of fantasy where castles are not only built in the air but occupied. I am on a shaky ground about the precise origin of the legend of Sheikh Chilli but this is the one I grew up with. So I am sticking to it. Gingrich reminds me of that.
Gingrich has said that once the base is built some 13,000 Americans can shift there and petition the US Congress to become an American state. What it means is that at its heart, Gingrich’s grandiosity seems merely about extraterrestrial territorial expansion, which to my mind, is a rather petty ambition.
That said, I think a human colony on the moon is an eminently laudable objective.
