Since You've Been Gone
The astronaut who's been in space for a year hasn't missed all that much
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NASA Astronaut Frank Rubio recently returned to Earth after spending a record-breaking 371 continuous days in space, mostly aboard the International Space Station. The Russian spacecraft Soyuz returned him safely to Kazakhstan at 3:54am ET on Wednesday. Rubio had to be carried from the Soyuz because he had lost so much muscle mass while experiencing the relative weightlessness of space.
Here on Earth, we have seemingly lost our minds. When he left, Theresa May had just been chosen Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Now she is the British equivalent of a Scaramucci, a unit of time capricious in its brevity. As Ferris Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” In Rubio’s case, he was the one moving fast, orbiting 5 miles per second around a planet orbiting the sun 67,000 miles an hour. While Rubio was up there doing a science, we were down here, bumping into each other with our eyes closed, someone yelling “Marco!” and someone else yelling “Debate me!”
When Rubio left Earth, Marjorie Taylor Greene was that crazy congresswoman from Georgia who worried about Jewish space lasers, and Nancy Pelosi had executed an orderly handover of intraparty power to the next generation. An anti-Biden tide — the so-called red wave — was supposed to replace slim Democratic majorities with fat, secure Republican ones.
Someone must have told God our plans, because the Democrats held the Senate, and a guy with a hammer tried to assassinate Nancy Pelosi but instead bonked her husband Paul on the head. The assassin was briefly thought of as a gay prostitute by, get this, Elon Musk, who bought Twitter and renamed it X for reasons. Meanwhile, it took 15 deliciously chaotic votes and one non-metaphorical floor fight to elect Kevin McCarthy to replace Pelosi as Speaker. Now Majorie Taylor Greene, having helped navigate an uneasy peace between McCarthy and the Freedom Caucus, is one of the most powerful elected officials in Washington, and because he committed an apparently unpardonable sin of bipartisanship, McCarthy’s days as Speaker might be better measured in Scaramuccis.
McCarthy’s days as Speaker might be better measured in Scaramuccis.
Oh yeah, who is going to tell Rubio about Lauren Boebert getting kicked out of Beetlejuice? Not it.
Not everything has changed since Rubio left us in early September 2022. We’ve had 53 school shootings this year, Republicans are still mistaking the humanitarian crisis on our Mexican border for a criminal invasion, and our planet is still cooking. Though I have to hand it to Rubio. He returned right after the heat broke. After the hottest summer in Earth’s history, highs now are back into the mid-90s.
When Rubio left, Molly Ball made Florida Governor Ron DeSantis the cover story in Time magazine. He was the red state It Boy, the half-blood prince who was supposed to lead the Republican Party out of the Trump years into the 1950s where there were no trans people and Dick and Jane just had pictures of Jane washing dishes.
What a surprise it must be for Astronaut Rubio to learn of Trump’s 91 indictments in four criminal cases. And how must that surprise be compounded by learning that far from wiping Trump off the political landscape, these indictments have cemented his frontrunner status in the Republican Party, relegating DeSantis to understudy. The heir has apparently gone out of his tires as the Republican debates have taken on the resentful irrelevance of the kids’ table at Thanksgiving in which the older kids take turns trying to get Vivek to shut up. Not all attention is good attention.
The heir has apparently gone out of DeSantis’ tires.
We think we should be done with him by now, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. There was another heir apparently unable to stop him at first because not enough people clapped. Then another heir apparent fell because apparently not enough people were with her. We keep getting tripped up because what we think is apparent turns out not to be real at all. We keep expecting what doesn’t happen to happen. Even now, it’s hard to accept that he really won, but he did, and I don’t even have to use his name for you to know who I’m talking about.
Even after the indictments, even after his successor was anointed by Time, he remains stubbornly chosen by the Republican Party as its leader. Joe Biden offered himself as a “transition candidate” to lead us through the Trump Era. Now many demand that Biden move aside and hand off history like a baton to the next generation even as we are still stuck in the Trump Era. Biden’s job is only half done. So flummoxed we are at Trump’s stubborn reality that we take out our frustration at Biden, as if his absence would rid us of Trump.
Welcome back to Earth, Astronaut Rubio. Not much has changed here. When you left we thought we had achieved escape velocity from the Trump Era, but he’s still commanding all the attention, even when he’s offstage. We are still in the transition.
Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Email him at jason31170@gmail.com.
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