✈ Boeing used to be a symbol of Up Wing America. No longer.

Also: A Quick Q&A with … infrastructure analyst Brian Potter on Project Apollo 🚀

Quote of the Issue

“The national conversation about the American Dream is so detached from the underlying reality that it has become incorrect. We are confusing pockets of real struggle in American life with the broader canvas of the American experience.” - Michael R. Strain, The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It)

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The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised

"James Pethokoukis is one of the most enthusiastic and knowledgeable techno-optimists in the U.S. today. If anyone can show the conservative movement how to embrace the future, it's him." - Noah Smith, economist and publisher of the Noahpinion newsletter

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The Essay

The final Boeing 747

✈ Boeing used to be a symbol of Up Wing America. No longer.

Most of us would be pretty shocked if Amazon started regularly losing our orders, or if Apple notebooks, iPhones, and iPads began an unfortunate habit of igniting. Both companies, after all, are known for being efficiently run and producing quality goods and services. Unsurprisingly, Amazon and Apple landed in the top ten of the 2023 Axios Harris Poll 100 measuring the reputations of American companies.

Boeing wasn’t polled, but recent surveys show public confidence in the aerospace company — long known as the manufacturer of the safest and most advanced commercial aircraft in the world — has taken a hit from a series of safety problems, including an incident earlier this year when a door plug was sucked off an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 mid-flight. Yesterday, dual Senate panels held hearings about Boeing’s troubles.

It’s hard to overstate what a powerful symbol of American industrial prowess Boeing has long been, especially going back to the introduction of the 747 in 1970. That aircraft launched the age of the jumbo jet. It could carry more than twice as many passengers as its predecessor, the Boeing 707, and had a much longer range. Increased capacity and fuel efficiency helped democratize air travel. The 747’s massive size and famous hump at the front of the aircraft make it instantly recognizable across the world — especially when a 747 was operating as Air Force One.

The cultural power of the 747 was on full display in Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, the 1982 non-narrative film directed by Godfrey Reggio with music composed by Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke. As I wrote last summer:

Using various visual techniques such as slow and speeded-up motion, this “tone poem” juxtaposes scenes natural and artificial to suggest a world of daunting and unsustainable disequilibrium. Koyaanisqatsi begins with the ancient Great Gallery rock mural of Horseshoe Canyon in southeastern Utah and then cuts to the fiery chaos of a Saturn V launch, then followed by long, languid scenes of the Grand Canyon.

One of the film's most famous sequences, a continuous two-and-a-half-minute shot, emerges from its mission to depict a world ravaged by industrialism and consumerism. In this iconic scene, a United Airlines 747 slowly taxis towards the camera, gradually growing larger as it crosses a runway distorted by shimmering heat waves.

Does that scene make you despair for our planet, as its creator hopes it does, or does it make you marvel at the wonders of human imagination and ingenuity? For me, “Koyaanisqatsi doesn’t have the intended effect. The Boeing 747 and Saturn V were, in their own way, as beautiful as the rock murals and natural wonders such as the Grand Canyon, clouds, and oceans.” Film critic Roger Ebert made much the same point in his film review, riffing off Shakespeare: “All of the images in this movie are beautiful, even the images of man despoiling the environment. … What a piece of work is a man! And what expressways he builds!”