Now, NASA is painfully reconstructing the infrastructure that it dismantled back in the 1970s as it prepares to send astronauts to the moon via the Orion crew vehicle and the Ares launch rocket in 2020.
It's a bleak landscape, to be sure, but it's not unlike the one horror movies tried to dismantle back when the seeds of modern workout culture were sown nearly 40 years ago.
So today, as a summer "best of TomDispatch" pick, I've offered one of Johnson's last piece's for the site, "Three Good Reasons to Liquidate Our Empire," his call for the U.S. to begin dismantling what, back in 2004, he first termed our "empire of bases," those perhaps 1,000 or more garrisons, mega to micro, still scattered around the planet a decade later.
And then it was dismantled, vanishing back into the imagination.
As the Allies advanced, the Paris Gun was dismantled, taken back to Germany and destroyed.
It was dismantled, moved back and redesigned to fit a much smaller space.
Once that's constructed it will be dismantled, brought back to Washington and re-assembled.
A watch repairman sat in a corner, dismantling and putting back together a man's watch, for the crowd's amusement.
In fact, international aid to Chilean quake victims has been minimal given the huge overall need; and, while many of Chile's social programs are generous in comparison to others in South America, Sebastian Pinera, the billionaire conservative President of Chile, is intent on dismantling or cutting back on publicly funded social programs.
More worrying, perhaps, is the fact they have been three totally different types of losses, all coming on the back of dismantling Manchester United 3-0 in their own back yard.
