RIP John Glenn

Among several similarly-themed cartoons posted on the Townhall website, this one by Mike Lester was my favorite (with the sky-hook just out of sight).

Mark Steyn offered some sobering thoughts on the dwindling supply of American heroes here. He quoted John Derbyshire: 

Soon they will all be gone: the last participants in the human race’s most astonishing, most audacious, most wonderfully inspirational adventure to date. 

Gone with them will be the memory of a U.S.A. that could accomplish such marvels, in those last years of heroic national vigor, before we turned our energies to guilt and rancor and divisive social crusades, and to persuading ourselves and each other that in the human sphere, everything is equal to everything else.

John Glenn must surely have wondered, as all the astronauts weathered into geezers, how a great nation grew so impoverished in spirit.

Our heroes are old and stooped and wizened, but they are the only giants we have. Today, when we talk about Americans boldly going where no man has gone before, we mean the ladies’ bathroom. Progress.