...into Loony Tunes from a commenter at the Aussie Oppressor's site:

Wile E. Coyote is a mythic fusion of Sisyphus and Tantalus. He is doomed to labor eternally at a task that he can never complete, tormented all the while by the presence of the sustenance he craves (the Road Runner) just outside his reach, but close enough to see, hear, and even smell. He is continually subjected to agonizing pain and massively crippling injuries, but he can never die; instead, he heals instantaneously and is forced to continue his hopeless efforts.

In short, Wile E. Coyote is in Hell -- a Hell as cruel and sadistic as anything that Dante envisioned.

also,

You have to feel for Sylvester, too - once he finally gave up on the bird, he settles down, has a kid, then spends his declining years plagued by hallucinations about a giant mouse. Poor bastard.

and

The thing that REALLY steams Me about the RR cartoon is not just that the coyote always loses (though that's annoying to this canine fan), but that he's an engineer or at least a technician. You get the message that technology will never solve any problem.

I think the USSR had a cartoon which had a wolf chasing a rabbit, but the rabbit was the inventor and his inventions WORKED.

Why did the damned commies do something right that we didn't?

I am an engineer BECAUSE of Mr. W.E Coyote. I think he truly is a wonderful role model for todays kids just as he was for me. He pounds home the concept that as an engineer much of what you build will NOT work the first time. This teaches kids that they can hurt themselves if they do not think about every outcome and TEST their device under every condition. The last thing he teaches is NEVER give up. You will fail but that isn’t a problem, it just sets back your schedule. You can always go back to the drawing board and think outside the box.
The damned commies lived in a laa laa land with lollypop houses and cotton candy clouds where every thing works the first time and there are never any problems. (Have you ever read Marx? spit...) We teach our kids the hard lessons of life. Yes, you want the Coyote to win but you also know that if he did, he would lose his reason for inventing and thus his reason for living. He would feed his body but his soul would soon starve. That is why so many techno geeks love the RR cartoons, in some ways it is so real. Ever engineer must, by definition, engineer his way out of a job. An engineer is employed to solve problems and when they solve the problem they lose that job. Fortunately in the real world there are always more problems to solve. But in the RR cartoons there is only one Road Runner and the Coyote knows it. That is the true character conflict.

The problem with Wile E. is that he does give up too easily. He doesn't give up on his goal, but he does very little tweaking of any particular concept--when it fails, he goes back to the drawing board and the ACME catalogue and tries something completely new, instead of analyzing what went wrong and atttempting to improve on it (yes, there are rare instances here he makes multiple attempts with a particular ACME product, but they're the exception that makes the rule).

This is actually quite similar to NASA's approach to developing cheap launch, unfortunately.

comments are good, but for a fine point - the coyote does NOT 'heal instantaneously' - oftimes we will see him 'after' in a cast, with a sling, or [re-]designing from his hospital bed.

Perseverance!

In college, I was fortunate to attend a lecture series by Genechi Taguchi. Because it was his first lectures there, my fellow classmates were actually my normal professors. Taguchi began the lecture by claiming the difference between US and Japanese engineers were that the former were scientist and the latter were engineers.
Such a comment received instant rebuke by most of the professors. “How dare you suggest that we don’t teach our students engineering?” When finally he got a chance to respond Taguchi made a similar argument to yours, Rand.

He said (paraphrasing): In Japan, when confronted by a problem in a process, engineers look at the current design and find ways to improve the current system to make it work. The results are measured, predictable, and end up being a better version of a similar system. In the USA, when confronted by a problem in a process, engineers change the process and replace it with a newer design. The results take a while to come about but typically provide improvements in many areas over the previous process.

Taguchi did not mean it as insult. Rather he continued to explain how this theory explains why the USA is able to stay ahead of the rest of the world. The US constantly changes the state of the arts in engineering. He also explained why after a time, the Japanese production companies eventually surpass US manufacturers.

His example was with audio. We had the vinyl records and cassette tapes. The problem was the quality of reproduction using these systems. In the 80s, people turned to Sony and other companies to by products that improved the ability of records and cassettes to reproduce the original sounds. But in the US, engineers released the Compact Disc, able to reproduce sound better than any previous system, capable of longer shelf life, and capable of storing more music and data then previous methods of recording. Alas, we gave up on perfecting a previous technology and simply invented a better one.

Like you, I've seen similar parallels between NASA and RSA. NASA is looking to improve spaceflight with stuff like nano and MEMS technology. RSA simply builds more powerful versions of their current rockets and adds more redundant systems to the Soyuz on top.

I think it was David Brin who made the disctinction between "forging" and "honing" in technology. forging-oriented technologists are always coming up with new approaches, and usually throw together the first iteration of it that works at all. Soon they want to invent something else. Honers take the stuff forgers developed, and keep making it better. Both have their places. Americans tend to be forgers, Japanese tend to be honers.

I've seen quite a few of the Russian cartoons. The wolf was often characterized as a low life dock worker - oops, I mean a respected member of the working class. The rabbit escapes by cleverness - sometimes technical, sometimes artistic. It's brains and/or soul over brawn. Not a bad role model.