Usually Charles Krauthammer writes about the lunacy of the liberal-left loons and how truly luney they are, which of course endears him to me, but this week, he writes about the truly luney: the moon, that is. It’s the 40th anniversary of the lunar landing. And he writes about how actually, that sadly distant moon landing—that sadly distant achievement—makes us the true loons, ironically.
To paraphrase what he said, I of course turn to the Beatles. We should get back, get back, get back to where we once belonged. (Come on you 45+ ‘ers. The year was 1969 for both the song and the landing. Be groovy and give me da props and da cred —errr …. some far-out karmic vibes, man.) Coincidentally, “Get Back”, the Beatles song, was the last track on the last album (Let It Be) they produced before they split up. If you knew that, you just might be a hippie.
Author Peggy Noonan agrees with Krauthammer. Of course this is a bit of unwitting interstellar Kumbaya. Krauthammer is rather solidly conservative and is, as we know from our reading of lunatic books regarding where men and women hail from, from Mars, while Noonan is only marginally conservative, and is from Venus. (See what I did there? Groovy, no?)
Krauthammer laments the abandonment of moon shots and their replacement with the now flaccid space shuttle, which orbits around… ourselves, looking in, at ourselves, over and over:
…To be more precise: almost 40 years spent in low Earth orbit studying, well, zero-G nausea and sundry cosmic mysteries. We’ve done it with the most beautiful, intricate, complicated—and ultimately, hopelessly impractical—machine ever built by man: the space shuttle. We turned this magnificent bird into a truck for hauling goods and people to a tinkertoy we call the International Space Station, itself created in a fit of post-Cold War internationalist absentmindedness as a place where people of differing nationality can sing “Kumbaya” while weightless. …
…let me throw forward this one: The space program of the past 32 years unconsciously mirrored a change in American psychology. Once, we saw ourselves as a breakthrough people, a nation with a mission to push beyond ourselves. Now, in the age of soft narcissism, we just circle ourselves. Which is what the shuttle does: It is on an endless loop, going ‘round and ‘round and looking down at: us. …
Of all the milestones to look back on in our most modern human experience, this is an interesting one, and not just because it was such a noble, grand thing —the very definition of “far-out, man”. An almost unreal achievement —in fact some still believe it was all faked (but like so 
many liberals, they’re possibly high on the ganja). It’s also because of one of the less noble but very real results of the achievement, which was to all but let that far-outward, forward-looking moxie go by the wayside, possibly overly secure in our knowledge that we’re merely capable of it, as if just knowing what we’re capable of is enough to move forward. And maybe that’s valuable information too, because of course it’s so completely wrong.
With the exception of the unmanned Mars landings and some repairs to the Hubble clunker, the moxie has been largely replaced with an inward looking selfishness, and materialism, and narcissism —and, in fact, on the over-analysis of the picayune, rather than on the fabulously large and unknown. The pernicious dictums of being “politically correct”, for example, which has practically taken over all serious dialogue about every damn thing. Increasing reliance on government rather than ourselves, as we increasingly give up trying to reach up and out. Over-emphasis on our personal “rights”. And on what we “deserve” (have you noticed, we “deserve” everything now?). And on made-up problems like “man-made global warming” (I think we start to make things up when there’s nothing more interesting). And I think all of that is partially because we’re so studiously looking inward at ourselves, over and over and over again, instead of looking up and out like we used to. We’re studiously navel gazing instead of star gazing.
It’s a “syndrome”— a truly 2000’s phenomenon. And it’s very un-fab, baby. Really un-cool.
Sometimes you have to get back, get back, get back so you can see how important it is to move forward, again. To go where no man has gone before. Outta sight.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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