"Anything is Possible''

Is there any phrase more full of joy, more optimistic and more American than "hey, anything is possible''?

For people who grew up in this country in the 1960s and 1970s, that attitude was always part of the allure of space travel. We watched the countdowns and splashdowns of astronauts, and saw them walk on the moon, and thought, wow, anything is possible. We felt ourselves to be the can-do nation: our people had the right mix of fantasy and practicality. Our president could suggest, in all seriousness, that we send humans to the moon; and our government could bring to that wild dream the skills of sober, no-nonsense people: Engineers, pilots, military officers. That combination was our cardinal virtue, the basis of America's global success: We saw both the box and the value of thinking outside it. We could do both.

The disasters (the Apollo fire, the two shuttles lost) just made it look more inspiring. It's not a cheap and easy belief, the thought that anything is possible. It requires some guts to accept that the world could be anarchic and unpredictable -- to accept that the past is no guide to the future, and that common sense, tradition, and yesterday's scientific truths could be overturned. Maybe that was why we liked our astronauts bland and steady-seeming; why we expected them to speak in the flat, calm voice of military discipline, no matter what ("Houston, we have a problem'').

It was an act, as Tom Wolfe abundantly showed in The Right Stuff. But everyone likes to be convinced by a good act.

As a general rule, people like to think a role played in one part of life predicts a person's character in all the others. You think, here is a distinguished jurist, the head of a state supreme court. He will be a dignified and serious man in his personal life. When the guy gets caught mailing a condom to his ex-girlfriend's little girl, you're surprised. Or you think, the President of the United States is not going to be, as Nixon famously said, a crook. But Nixon was.

And you think of those unflappable Chuck Yeager voices, those thumbs up and confident smiles over tidy flight suits, and say, an astronaut is not going to go bat-shit insane with sexual jealousy. But the case of Lisa Marie Nowak pops up to tell you, Wrong again.

That anything is possible is a principle that applies also to our own minds, and to our emotions. It gives the lie to our idea that we can perfectly know another person, or ourselves. It says each accomplishment in our lives is just about itself -- that being president means you won an election; that being a judge means you went to law school and know how to network; that being an astronaut means you can go up into space and come back. And that none of these things can protect you from the other things you are, the other sorts of person that, after a little bad luck and some bad choices, you may become.

"I can't believe I'm doing this.'' Who hasn't said that? Why can't we believe it? After all, in life, anything is possible. Is there any phrase more full of terror, more pessimistic, more downright un-American?

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