Our apparatniks will continue
making
the usual squalid mess
called History:
all we can pray for is that artists,
chefs and saints may still appear
to blithe it.
--W.H. Auden, "Moon Landing"
Two days before the Eagle landed, William Safire sent a memo to H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon's chief of staff, that contained a short speech to be read "in the event of a moon disaster."
"Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace," Nixon would have intoned. "These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.
"These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding ...
"In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man. In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood ...
"For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind." (Safire intentionally echoed the line from Rupert Brooke's 1914 poem "The Soldier": If I should die, think only this of me:/ That there's some corner of a foreign field/ That is for ever England.)
Nixon thankfully didn't have to give that speech; 50 years ago, after Armstrong and Aldrin touched toe to moon, they went back to where they came from. Others followed, but no human being has walked on the surface of another heavenly body since Gene Cernan in 1972.
A lot of us who remember that first moon walk thought we'd see space travel become routine within our lifetimes; that surely by the turn of the century we'd have shopping malls on Mars, flying cars, and computers on our wrists. One out of three is better than nothing.
We used to think the future would be a shiny place, full of wonders and free of dread. But we were children then, who thought progress inevitable and regression impossible. We could only get better as a nation, as a species. Mankind would boldly go seek out new worlds and covenants. We would come in peace, an olive branch in our talons.
I'm not surprised when people don't believe we ever went to the moon because they watched some YouTube video or heard a rumor about Stanley Kubrick. Truth is plastic and malleable--it can be stretched and bent and twisted. Our sense of reality is limited by the inadequacy of our senses. We perceive but a fraction of what's going on in the cosmos. Ignorance is unlimited; our appetite for certainty can be exploited. In our everyday lives, competence seems such a rare thing. How are we to believe that such a miracle occurred?
Except we did believe it. Wouldn't it have been a bigger miracle to fake it all--to hire the technicians and the camera operators and create the footage and have no one ever come forward, whistle in mouth, to tell us all about it? (Kubrick tried; he put Danny in an Apollo 11 sweater in The Shining. He changed the number of the evil hotel room in Steven King's novel from 217 to 237 because the moon is 237,000 miles from the earth!)
No, we see what we want to see, believe what we want to believe. We needn't be bullied by facts or empirical evidence, which in the end is no good unless it vouchsafes our fondest wish. That is how we got here, with a future full of fire and fury and chaos.
But it was even scarier in 1969. There was the war in Vietnam.
On the day of the moon walk, in the midst of an ongoing race riot, white gang members ambushed a Cadillac carrying a black family on their way to a department store to buy supplies for a fishing trip as it stopped at a railroad crossing in York, Pa.
When 27-year-old Lillie Belle Allen got out of the car to plead "Don't shoot," she was gunned down. (Her murder went unsolved for 30 years. In 2001, 10 men were indicted for her murder, one of whom, Charlie Robertson, a young police officer at the time of the riots, had just been elected mayor of York. Robertson was eventually acquitted; the other nine served time for involvement in her death, two for second-degree murder.)
Sixteen days after the Apollo 11 crew returned to the earth, four members of Charles Manson's "Family" invaded 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles, a house rented by film director Roman Polanski and his wife, actress Sharon Tate. They murdered Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant, and four others. (Polanski was away on business in Europe at the time.)
After the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson had formed the U.S. National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. It released its final report in December 1969, concluding that "[v]iolence in the United States has risen to alarmingly high levels. Whether one considers assassination, group violence or individual acts of violence, the decade of the 1960s was considerably more violent than the several decades preceding it and ranks among the most violent in our history. The United States is the clear leader among modern, stable democratic nations in its rates of homicide, assault, rape, and robbery ..."
It felt like the center could not hold. But then the moon mission marked the culmination of the martyred JFK's call to service. It occasioned awe all around the world.
But it was also, as poet Auden sensed, largely a stunt, a way of demonstrating the superiority of American scientific and technical capabilities, of putting our Cold War adversaries in their place. Our political points made, we lost interest and went back to being what we are. Except for the men who walked on the moon; they all came back a little mad and starry.
Neil and Buzz kangaroo-hopped on the moon, and I thought things had changed.
I was a child. We just go on making history.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 07/21/2019