I’d hooked up an old reel-to-reel recorder to the television. My father found a place near the Houston Heights that could press the tape into a vinyl record. My older brother drove me to the shop to drop the tape off. But, somehow, we never managed to pick up that record.
Tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. For millennia humans gazed longingly at the moon, but I’m not sure we ever fully grasped the reality that humans actually traveled there. It’s telling that "The Great Moon Hoax" and "The Apollo Hoax" are numbers seven and eight in a Google search for "moon landing."
To the Hittites, the moon was the god, Arma. To the Greeks, it was Selene, then Artemis. Some Native Americans thought the moon the wife of the sun. She played with the stars, their children, when the mean old sun was far away. Because the sun liked to eat the stars, they hid when he was about the house.
A rocket scientist named Abe Silverstein gave the name "Apollo" to NASA’s manned moon mission. He liked the image of the sun god riding his gold chariot across the sky. Despite our destination, a place long associated with feminine power and purpose, I suppose it was out of the question that we would name our rocket rides after a girl.
Connected often with time, desire, nurturance and the cycles of life and death, the moon has drawn our spirits with a strength equal to its pull on our oceans. It seems to many that love itself might be the color of moonlight.
Did going there destroy that illusion? Did we profane the sacred?
In John Keats’ brief introduction to Endymion, his epic retelling of a Greek myth about the moon goddess’ love of a shepherd, Keats wrote:
The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness, and all the thousand bitters which those men I speak of must necessarily taste in going over the following pages…
What Keats feared, and I do too, is a time of decadence and doubt, a post-innocence time that yet lacks the wise and full blessings of experience.
A couple of years before Armstrong arrived there, an obscure songwriter named Jonathan King had a surprising hit song, "Everyone’s Gone to the Moon." Its lyrics were rather incoherent and, well, mawkish. But King seemed to be singing of loss and alienation, of a sad and growing distance between people. Looking to the moon, we forgot to look into one another’s eyes.
Narrating live Armstrong’s moonwalk, Walter Cronkite and his astronaut co-anchor Wally Schirra may have inadvertently signaled the symbolic ambiguity of the moon landing when they missed the second part of Armstrong’s first words from the moon:
Cronkite: Armstrong is on the moon. Neil Armstrong, 38-year-old American standing on the surface of the moon, on this July 20, 1969.
Armstrong: That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
Schirra: I think that was Neil’s quote, but I didn’t understand it.
Cronkite: One small step for man, but I didn’t get the second phrase. Some one of our monitors here at space headquarters was able to hear that, we’d like to know what it was.
Armstrong: Yes, the surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.
Cronkite: That’s, ‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’
For whatever reasons, we have never been certain of that "giant leap."
Many felt at the time that the space program was a waste of money. The Right thought it extravagant. Many on the Left preferred the money be spent closer to home on poverty programs, education and health care.
The critics missed what adventure and achievement mean to a people’s spirit. At one time, NASA embodied our best qualities. Nothing seemed impossible. Then, forced again and again to justify its plans, the space agency adapted to the ways of Washington. It became a bureaucracy.
It is sad that Cronkite can’t be with us to celebrate Armstrong’s walk on the moon. When the lunar module first landed, he lost the power of speech. Finally, he said, "Oh boy," perhaps the most poignantly mundane phrase ever spoken on television.
I think Cronkite would tell us the problem is not that everyone’s gone to the moon. The problem is that too many of us stayed home.
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The Moon is just the first step.
One of the reasons I have always liked a lot of the sci-fi writers is the innate optimism they show by setting their stories at a point hundreds, sometimes thousands of years from now where we have progressed out into the stars without destroying ourselves in the process.
The Moon is just the first step.
I vividly remember where I was that nite. In a Holiday Inn in Tampa Fla where I would sign in at my second section of tech school the next day. MacDill AFB. 6 months later, after 18 months of technicial training, on 1-12-70 I was in Vietnam. A really massive change, from the utmost in human achivement to mans first and only real occupation; war.(In the entirety of recorded human history there have only been about 200 years without war somewhere)
For whatever reasons, we have never been certain of that “giant leap.”
‘Tis hard to leap when there is so much goddamned dead weight holdin’ you down….
Thanks Glenn,
I love the moon.
I think it was Bill Maher this week who lamented that the Moon Landing was the last lofty goal we set out to achieve.
I thought the correct quote was, One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind. Isn’t that what he actually said?
Especially when the dead weight is in charge!
I think that’s controversial. What I hear is “man,” not “a man.” But I think Armstrong’s said he meant to say “a man.” The sense I’ve always taken away is “a man.”
Thank you.
As I wrote about last week or the week before, in the “Years of Ash and Tears,” America’s retreat has been disheartening. But then, we have not all been in retreat, and in that there is hope.
AND THE KILLIN’ GOEZ ON AND ON AND…
Citizen Glen W. Smith and the Firepup Freedom Fighters:
Another gift of reason and insight from Brother Smith…my God man, I swear that you are single-handedly keepin the art of the essay alive in this age of electronic anesthesia.
Please read my comment to Christy’s previous post…I too fear this period of “…decadence and doubt, a post-innocence time that yet lacks the wise and full blessing of experience.”
Thanx again Brother Smith.
My father was a human factor specialist with the Apollo space program and worked in zero gravity as a test astronaut. We watched the landing on a Zenith tv too (my great uncle was a Zenith dealer and I still recall putting the remote on mute and hitting one of two buttons on the side to make the color more green or red.
Thank you for your loving tribute to Luna. I add these phrases from the Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, including the demotic spells (Hans Betz)
thanks for this Glenn –
hey Norske – found an applicable Cronkite quote this a.m.:
I agree with your comment in Christy’s thread. It has reached the point where it is not an exaggeration to say the media is encouraging extremist violence — rationalizing it as fair and balanced coverage.
The hypocrisy is rank.
Once again, thanks so much for your kind comments. And, of course, your insights into the matters at hand.
That is a great quote from Cronkite. Thanks so much for that.
You are the first person I’ve encountered who has also read the “Greek Magical Papyri.” Makes me feel better to know there are others….
I’m guessing that like me you ran across that in Glenn Greenwald’s column, “Celebrating Cronkite while ignoring what he did.” Apparently all Glenns are possessed of great insight… Smith, Greenwald, Campbell.:-)
The one thing I remember about the Moon Landing was that the world was one that day.
Wichita Linemen, all….
Yes, that is so true.
Well, I’ll be serendipitied…
Glenn Research Center, a NASA center in Cleveland, Ohio
That’s where the guy who named “Apollo” “Apollo” wound up working.
I found it via the always fabulous but under read Batocchio
hope ((you)) had a great birthday – lots of firedogs were looking for ya on the threads
Zeus worked there?
Thanks! Alas, another one come and gone. Where DOTH the time go?
Okay, that, plus “I’ll be seredipidied as me laughing much too hard for a lazy Sunday…
Like Manuel from Barcelona, I speak English very well, I learn it from a BOOOK.
If I was Apollo I think I’d be little miffed with the Romans over this.
The moon landing was the crowning achievement of what we now call “The Greatest Generation”. The sacrifices they made on battlefields was culminated in their quest to provide meaning to pointless, destructive war by studying, researching, creating new technologies to take man to the stars. It was a gift I think they meant to leave to their progeny, but somehow politicians and bean-counters got involved and now we get more war and less striving for the stars.
I watched the landing too on a small black and white TV and was never the same. It was truly magical and I’m glad it was part of my life.
Perhaps why the sun set on the Roman empire?
It’s accurate to say we might not be communicating via the intertubes if it wasn’t for the space program.
Or perhaps it was just unusually chilly that year.
Hey, he spent half his time deep in the ocean, right?
That explains it. Even an Olympian needs to keep a low profile with so many hungry critters swimming around.
True. The “computer” they used to calculate the descent to Tranquility Base was state-of-the-art and had less prcessing power than a calculator wristwatch. But look where it lead. The space program was stuffed full of things we now take for granted, that came about because of R&D for it’s own sake.
I respectfully disagree. I think we’ve become too detached from the natural elements surrounding us–hence, the disconnect from how destructive we are to the Earth.
And–I think it was Ann Landers who said, “TV is proof that people would rather look at *anything* rather than each other.”
Having grown up with the Space program, I once was in awe of the achievements in space travel.
I have even met Neil Armstrong and was in awe of him and his presence.
With that said, I’m odd person out here in that I look around me at all the suffering–people losing their houses, people going without food, people going without healthcare, the homeless, and on–and I can’t justify the millions being spent on the space program anymore. I think that money should be used here on Earth.
(ducks for cover)
Boogie, I see you point and second it. I think there’s ned to be balance, and while pure science is so freaking awesome, we need to look to ourselve and resolving some earthly issues….
And a lot of people were drinking and toasting with something called Moon Punch; I heard it was a knock out.
the money from the space program is used on earth. that’s where the benefits of the research have gone. one major problem with “using money here on earth” is that people will spend $1000 dollars to move a button to a more convenient place on their SUV, rather than $1 getting someone someplace else enough water.
Stirling is right. The money wasn’t spent on the moon. Remember, Apollo took place during the peak of Great Society spending. We had a space program and butter, too.
This very day I heard a radio conversation about how fast the SUVs will be a thing of the past as oil prices inevitably go seriously higher, even as happened when $4 was about the tipping point. One more occasion to wonder if our consuming, selfish habits can also seriously change.