When Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the man died last August, as Jim Treacher wrote at the time, Obama paid tribute, the only way he knows how. “This is not a Photoshop. This was actually posted on Obama’s official Tumblr page,” Treacher wrote:

Bless his heart; Obama probably thought he was being modest by appearing in silhouette.

Edwin Eugene “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr. was the second man to walk on the moon, following Armstrong out the escape hatch of the lunar module in July of 1969. Four decades later, as with Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin was little more than a photo prop for our 44th president:

On April 15, 2010, President Obama delivered his central speech on space policy at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.  Aldrin was given a ride on Air Force One to the speech.  Aldrin said tonight in front of a packed house in a National Geographic auditorium in Washington D.C. that he presumed he might have a chance to speak with the President about options for space during the flight to Kennedy.

But it didn’t happen. President Obama had nothing to say to the moonwalker and didn’t seem to want to hear anything from Aldrin on the long flight to Florida.  So Aldrin sat in the back of Air Force One and never saw Obama – until it landed.

When it landed, Aldrin said he was summoned to the front of the plane. But he found out it was not to talk about space policy.  Instead, President Obama wanted Aldrin to emerge from Air Force One next to Obama for a photo op.  The moonwalker was to be a mere prop.

Bryan Preston has the photos that emerged from the flight. Safe to say, Aldrin does not look happy.* As Bryan adds, “Aldrin believes that Obama’s current space priorities are a waste of the nation’s time, and after that flight, he knew that his own personal time had been wasted, too.”

But why would Obama need to talk to one of the few men still alive who had walked on the moon?

Obama had always had a high estimation of his ability to cast and run his operation. When David Plouffe, his campaign manager, first interviewed for a job with him in 2006, the senator gave him a warning: “I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I’ll hire to do it,” he said. “It’s hard to give up control when that’s all I’ve known.” Obama said nearly the same thing to Patrick Gaspard, whom he hired to be the campaign’s political director. “I think I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Obama told him. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

And no doubt, Obama thinks he knows more about space than Buzz Aldrin.

* And you do not want to make Aldrin unhappy.

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While the two-hour sixth season debut of Mad Men earlier this month played oddly coy about which year the series was set in, we now know that we’re witnessing Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce versus 1968.

Or perhaps it’s the other way around, given how the year of 1968 came close to tearing the country apart. In many ways, the events of that year shaped our current world in ways that are still playing themselves out, so it’s worth exploring just how badly the nation imploded. Apologies for the length of this post, but it’s merely a partial list of 1968′s horror stories.

Vietnam and the Cognitive Dissonance of the Liberal Elite

In the 1950s and 1960s, German émigrés such as Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, the former leaders of the socialist Bauhaus school of design of the 1920s Weimar Republic ,were busy building skyscrapers to house America’s corporate elites. To this day, Mies’ Seagram Building and Gropius’ Pan Am Building are lasting tributes to Weimar aesthetics on Park Ave. So perhaps it’s no wonder that American liberal elites were themselves embracing a Weimar-esque sense of dissipation and fatalism. JFK’s optimistic New Frontier worldview was supplanted by a collective malaise by depressed American elites by the late 1960s.

The cognitive dissonance of liberals not being able to process that JFK was the world’s most prominent victim of the Cold War was one cause of this malaise. Another was the ambition of LBJ’s Great Society, which had attempted to build on Kennedy’s space program and his nascent efforts at fighting communism in Vietnam with a series of Texas-sized domestic programs. LBJ’s goal was to recreate FDR’s New Deal, and as Rand Simberg has written, Johnson embraced NASA’s moon missions as an extension of FDR’s TVA program. But LBJ’s Texas drawl could never replace JFK’s polished Brahmin accent and style in the eyes of American liberal elites, who would come to turn on Johnson, devouring him for his outsized sense of ambition, and his patriotism.

As Patrick Moynihan had said in the early 1970s, “Most liberals had ended the 1960s rather ashamed of the beliefs they had held at the beginning of the decade.” But it’s worth flashing back to the end of the 1950s just to see how dramatic the transformation was. As I mentioned when I interviewed David Gelernter last year, chapter one of his 2012 book America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered In the Obamacrats) opens with a remarkable quote from William DeVane, the dean of Yale, in 1957:

Our national leaders for the most part are men of integrity, idealism, and skill; our literary and artistic people command an international respect such as they never had before; our scientists and engineers, especially the latter, are the wonder and envy of other nations; our teachers in our colleges and universities are learned and devoted.

By 1968, liberal elites in academia and the media were simply incapable of allowing such a sentence to pass from their lips, and their worldview would become ever more punitive in the years since: Former JFK/LBJ official turned public TV staple Bill Moyers recently denounced the Pledge of Allegiance on PBS:

Veteran journalist Bill Moyers told his viewers on March 29 that the next time they say the Pledge of Allegiance, they should “remember: it’s a lie. A whopper of a lie.” Bill Moyers’s “Moyers & Company,” which included the snippet, airs on taxpayer funded PBS.

“We coax it from the mouths of babes for the same reason our politicians wear those flag pins in their lapels – it makes the hypocrisy go down easier, the way aspirin helps a headache go away.”

It’s a cliché to write that the well was poisoned by Vietnam; as Gelernter wrote in America-Lite, the sixties peace movement preceded the escalation of our involvement there.  Early in America-Lite, Gelernter contrasts that 1957 quote from Yale’s William DeVane with mid-1970s quotes from liberal essayist E.B. White. “No one knows which way to turn and which way to go,” White believed in 1975. The following year, he would add, “Patriotism is unfashionable, having picked up the taint of chauvinism, jingoism, and demagoguery. A man is not expected to love his country, lest he make an ass of himself.” Almost 40 years later, Bill Moyers would take that sentiment to its punitive conclusion. In America-Lite, Gelernter notes:

The conventional view is that the civil rights movement and Vietnam and feminism are what changed the country. But the antiwar movement and modern feminism were consequences of the revolution. The civil rights movement sustained and expanded the revolution. For the thing itself, we have to look elsewhere.

* * * * *

Today, when Americans praise their own nation, they do it defiantly; that unselfconscious patriotic pleasure is gone. What caused the American mood to crumble between William DeVane’s statement and E. B. White’s? The civil rights struggle couldn’t be the answer; for one thing, it united rather than divided the country, except for the segregationist Old South. Maybe the bitter split over the war in Vietnam explains it. But that can’t be right; can’t be the whole truth. Antiwar protests were powered by the New Left and “the Movement,” which originated in Tom Hayden’s “Port Huron Statement” of 1962, before the nation had ever heard of Vietnam. And the New Left picked up speed at Berkeley in the Free Speech Movement of 1964 and early ’65, before the explosion of Vietnam. Bitterness toward America was an evil spirit shopping for a body when Vietnam started to throb during 1965.

1965 is when the sea change occurred in the writing of David Halberstam of the New York Times on the subject of Vietnam, which would set the tone for much of the rest of the MSM. As Roger Kimball wrote in the New Criterion after Halberstam died in 2007, Halberstam spent the first half of the 1960s, particularly while JFK was still alive, championing the importance of Vietnam as, in the words of Halberstam, “a strategic country in a key area, it is perhaps one of only five or six nations in the world that is truly vital to U.S. interests.” By 1968, he and much of the rest of the American news media would turn against the war.

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We’ll get to the image above in a just a moment. It was created to help promote the visionary space station proposals of scientist Gerard O’Neill in the mid-1970s, a glimpse of a hopeful, albeit technocratic future in the midst of an otherwise painfully long slog of a decade.

But first, let’s set the stage. In 1975, Pat Moynihan wrote, “Most liberals had ended the 1960s rather ashamed of the beliefs they had held at the beginning of the decade.” Their collective emotional depression — a malaise you might call it — was greatly exacerbated by the disparity between their dreams at the beginning of the 1960s, and the very different reality that emerged as they began to attempt to implement them.

As James Piereson noted at the beginning of “Lee Harvey Oswald and the Liberal Crack-Up,” the magnum opus 2006 Commentary article that served as the prototype for his book the following year, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution:

Liberalism entered the 1960′s as the vital force in American politics, riding a wave of accomplishment running from the Progressive era through the New Deal and beyond. A handsome young president, John F. Kennedy, had just been elected on the promise to extend the unfinished agenda of reform. Liberalism owned the future, as Orwell might have said. Yet by the end of the decade, liberal doctrine was in disarray, with some of its central assumptions broken by the experience of the immediately preceding years. It has yet to recover.

Along with the cognitive dissonance of the horrific death of JFK via a Marxist assassin, by 1968, liberalism was chastened by LBJ’s overreach. By 1966, he was attempting to simultaneously escalate JFK’s war in Vietnam and Kennedy’s small-scale anti-poverty programs to Texas-sized proportions. He also kept JFK’s vision of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade on track. As Rand Simberg noted, LBJ was far from altruistic on this matter – he saw the space program as a sort of giant TVA project which would help modernize the south, and distribute plenty of money into his constituents’ coffers.

But even before Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, liberals of the era had begun to turn their back on Kennedy’s vision of the bold New Frontier – including JFK’s surviving brothers. Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign ads and campaign speeches had a very different tone that tacitly rebuked his brother’s optimism. The following year, Teddy Kennedy was more explicit. He was quoted in the New York Times on the day after Armstrong and Apollo 11 took off for the Moon, as saying, “The Apollo program is for landing a man on the moon and exploration and should take another one to two years. I think after that the space program ought to fit into our other national priorities.”

And that it would, quickly scaling back in the early 1970s. The moon missions concluded; followed by Skylab, which was perhaps best known for its disastrous launch in 1973 and its ignominious crash to earth six years later, rather than its actual manned missions, and the Apollo-Soyuz link-up, and then nothing. The Apollo technology was discarded, as NASA put all of its resources for manned spaceflight into the Space Shuttle, which Arthur C. Clarke would later write off as not even the DC-3 of space, but the “DC 1 and a half,” if I’m remembering correctly the phrase he used in an interview after the Challenger disaster.

Back on planet earth, by the beginning of the 1970s, what the Carter administration would describe at the end of the decade as a “malaise” that the 39th president and his fellow liberals suffered from was encapsulated in the 1972 book Limits to Growth, as Steve Hayward wrote in the first volume of The Age of Reagan:

["Limits to growth" was partly] an influence of the rapidly growing environmental movement, which, in its early days, was much taken with the 1972 Club of Rome book The Limits to Growth. The book offered a gloomy argument that natural resource depletion and rising pollution threatened mankind’s long-term future unless economic growth was slowed or stopped. The Limits to Growth had the benefit of fortuitously appearing at the same time that commodity shortages were becoming chronic. Newsweek magazine in 1973 ran a cover picture of an empty horn of plenty with the ominous headline RUNNING OUT OF EVERYTHING? Most of the commodity shortages of the early 1970s were the result of the Nixon price controls discussed in chapter 6, and by 1976 the Club of Rome repudiated its own argument, recognizing that conquering poverty and preserving world peace would require a lot of economic growth.

The idea of the limits to growth has remained a core concept of environmentalism nonetheless, and became the new visage of liberal guilt. For some varieties of the liberal mind, gloom is exhilarating, and the limits to growth offered a large-scale sequel to the Vietnam War. Carter embraced the limits to growth view in his inaugural address, noting that “We have learned that ‘more’ is not necessarily ‘better,’ that even our great Nation has its recognized limits.” Margaret Thatcher, among many others, noted the trouble with this, writing that Carter “had no large vision of America’s future so in the face of adversity, he was reduced to preaching the austere limits to growth that was unpalatable, even alien, to the American imagination.” Liberalism is historically an optimistic creed, and having open doubts about growth was a disaster for liberalism. In the space of a decade, the central governing challenge of liberalism had transformed from allocating abundance to rationing scarcity. National Review took note of this problem as the Carter administration unfolded: “The profound negativism of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party is alien to the American tradition. The Democratic coalition could be split like a coconut on these issues. The Republicans, if they presented themselves as the party of growth, optimism, and expanding possibility could surely seize the high ground from the presently deeply divided and artificial Democratic coalition.”

All in all, this was an awfully grim time for those who remembered the futuristic optimism of the early to mid-1960s. Until about 1977, when Star Wars, the first personal computers and the first video games reawakened a sliver of American technological optimism, other than Star Trek and reruns of Gerry Anderson’s sleek 1970 British series UFO, there weren’t many bright spots for those of us “who want to see doors slide open with a little ‘woosh’ sound,” as James Lileks once wrote on the 30th anniversary of the original Star Wars.

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“Sex in in outer space could be deadly, according to a new study from the University of Montreal,” the Daily Caller reports.

Particularly given that it’s a study that was completed in its star’s hometown, this doesn’t bode well for Star Trek ever becoming a reality, does it?

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“Deflecting Killer Asteroid Could Be Geopolitical Nightmare,” Space.com reports:

Humanity has the technical know-how to deflect a killer asteroid away from Earth, but whether the world can come together to pull it off in time is another matter.

A looming asteroid strike would be a global problem demanding a complex and coordinated response, experts say. Not only would nations need to set aside their differences and work together, but some would have to put their citizens at increased risk for the good of the planet, agreeing to allow the space rock to be steered in their direction from the predicted impact site.

“There are a million geopolitical questions that are really, really, really tough,” said Rusty Schweickart, co-founder and chairman emeritus of the B612 Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping protect Earth from asteroid strikes.

Really? But Paul Krugman told me that this was just the sort of cosmic challenge America needed to jumpstart its moribund economy. And build high speed rail!

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“NASA testing vintage engine from Apollo 11 rocket,” AP reports:

Like vinyl records and skinny ties, good things eventually come back around. At NASA, that means looking to the Apollo program for ideas on how to develop the next generation of rockets for future missions to the moon and beyond.

Young engineers who weren’t even born when the last Saturn V rocket took off for the moon are testing a vintage engine from the program.

The engine, known to NASA engineers as No. F-6049, was supposed to help propel Apollo 11 into orbit in 1969, when NASA sent Neil Armstrong and two other astronauts to the moon for the first time. The flight went off without a hitch, but no thanks to the engine — it was grounded because of a glitch during a test in Mississippi and later sent to the Smithsonian Institution, where it sat for years.

Now engineers are learning to work with technical systems and propellants not used since before the start of the space shuttle program, which launched in 1981.

Of course, the worldview that made such engineering miracles possible a half century ago will remain firmly under lock and key at NASA.

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When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European crowd. Then the vastness of England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your feeling that the whole nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such things as nations? Are we not forty-six million individuals, all different? And the diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning – all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene. How can one make a pattern out of this muddle?

But talk to foreigners, read foreign books or newspapers, and you are brought back to the same thought. Yes, there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.

And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time. The suet puddings and the red pillar-boxes have entered into your soul. Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.

Meanwhile England, together with the rest of the world, is changing. And like everything else it can change only in certain directions, which up to a point can be foreseen. That is not to say that the future is fixed, merely that certain alternatives are possible and others not. A seed may grow or not grow, but at any rate a turnip seed never grows into a parsnip. It is therefore of the deepest importance to try and determine what England is, before guessing what part England can play in the huge events that are happening.

– George Orwell, “England Your England,” 1941.

An essay written during the Battle of Britain, which began, “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”

Today, highly uncivilized human beings live throughout England, trying to kill their fellow countrymen:

Britain’s violent crime record is worse than any other country in the European union, it has been revealed.

Official crime figures show the UK also has a worse rate for all types of violence than the U.S. and even South Africa – widely considered one of the world’s most dangerous countries.

The Tories said Labour had presided over a decade of spiralling violence.

In the decade following the party’s election in 1997, the number of recorded violent attacks soared by 77 per cent to 1.158million – or more than two every minute.

Entirely Unrelated: “For those unfamiliar with Mr. Young; he was mayor of Detroit from 1974 to 1993. In the beginning of his tenure Detroit was a mildly struggling Rust Belt city trying to deal with an economic slump; by its end Detroit was deemed to be the perfect setting for Robocop. It is a measure of just how bad things have gotten since that Mr. Young’s administration is seen as a Golden Age, but not as much as the one that Robocop now looks quaint.”

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If he hasn’t already, Hot Air’s Allahpundit would file this link under his patented “Dude” category: “Japanese scientists develop humanoid to keep astronauts company,” the London Telegraph reports:

The 13-inch android is scheduled to be completed by next summer and will be sent to the orbiting ISS shortly before astronaut Koichi Wakata arrives, according to officials of the Kibo Robot Project.

Currently being developed by a consortium of companies, including Toyota, Robo Garage Co. and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the robot will weigh around 2.2lbs and be able to recognise Wakata’s facial features.

It will then have the ability to communicate with the astronaut in Japanese and take photographs during their stay on the space station.

After Wakata has completed his six-month stay aboard the ISS, the robot will stay behind to send messages to schools in Japan and around the world.

Don’t miss the illustration that accompanies the story for the freaky-deaky illustration of the 13-inch robot’s appearance. He looks like he’d make a great tiny sidekick for Ultraman or Domo-kun.

Hey, 2012 is almost over — the clock is rapidly ticking on producing Blade Runner-quality replicants in time to meet the film’s 2019 setting. Let’s get cracking here, Japan.

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• “NASA warns Mayan apocalypse stories pose threat to frightened children and suicidal teenagers.”

– Headline, the London Daily Mail, Thursday.

• “NASA Scientist: Global Warming Behind Killer Heat Waves.”

– Headline, the Associated Press, August 5.

And speaking of doomsday cults and numerology…

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I posted this at Instapundit, where I’ve been sitting in recently, but I think it’s worth sharing here as well. Earlier this week there I linked to a series of Seagram’s ads that ran right around the conclusion of World War II and were titled, perhaps portentously for a series of ads merely hawking blended Canadian whiskey, “The Men Who Planned Beyond Tomorrow.”

But as I wrote in my Insta-post, sadly, the tomorrow those ads promised us is now in the past, as Bill Whittle further explores in a heartbreaking, yet must-watch video, which begins with the final victory lap of the Space Shuttle, followed by a beaming Wernher von Braun standing next to the first stage of the Saturn V, his mightiest invention.

“Oh, that? Just some stuff I built,” as the meme making the rounds goes. Bill then mentions Boeing’s enormous late 1960s SST design, which would have dwarfed the Concorde (which also isn’t available for passenger service these days). When the Boeing project was cancelled in the early 1970s, Whittle says in the video:

I remember my dad telling me, “Once you stop going forward, you start going backwards.” I was ten or 11, but this made me worry, because it made my dad worry. But that was it though, wasn’t it? We walked on the Moon, we lost our way home the day after.

In 2010, British academic Bruce Charlton posited, “I suspect that human capability reached its peak or plateau around 1965-75 – at the time of the Apollo moon landings – and has been declining ever since:”

This may sound bizarre or just plain false, but the argument is simple. That landing of men on the moon and bringing them back alive was the supreme achievement of human capability, the most difficult problem ever solved by humans. 40 years ago we could do it – repeatedly – but since then we have not been to the moon, and I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability.

Of course, the standard line is that humans stopped going to the moon only because we no longer wanted to go to the moon, or could not afford to, or something…– but I am suggesting that all this is BS, merely excuses for not doing something which we cannot do.

It is as if an eighty year old ex-professional-cyclist was to claim that the reason he had stopped competing in the Tour de France was that he had now had found better ways to spend his time and money. It may be true; but does not disguise the fact that an 80 year old could not compete in international cycling races even if he wanted to.

Is he right? Well, as Whittle notes, compared with the aerospace engineering of the 1960s, these days, we should all be worried that we’re going backwards – or at the very least just technologically spinning our wheels.

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James Lileks on Neil Armstrong:

I heard a BBC report on his death, and I hoped they started with “Fly Me to the Moon.” or some other piece of grown-up music. What I heard used  Thunderclap Newman’s “Something in the Air,” an interminable piece of simpering hippy tripe sung in a helium voice, because it was 1969, man. The dawning of the Age of Aquarius, and all that. As if the world was suddenly united. As if people back home weren’t rolling their eyes and complaining about the cost.

Sorry: they don’t get to claim Neil Armstrong. They don’t get to own the Moon Shot. The effort to put a man on the moon was everything the counterculture 60s repudiated: technology, military skill, national pride, American optimism, the sense that the Frontier has to be conquered so we can find a new one, and go there too.

Read the whole thing.

You know else doesn’t get to claim Armstrong? The man whom David Gelernter describes as the personification of his thesis that confident, muscular America of the mid 20th century has been diluted by the New left into what Gelernter calls “America-Lite.”

(more…)

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Details at NBC:

Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, died Saturday, weeks after heart surgery and days after his 82nd birthday.

Armstrong commanded the Apollo 11 spacecraft that landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, and he radioed back to Earth the historic news of “one giant leap for mankind.” He spent nearly three hours walking on the moon with fellow astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin.

More as it comes in.

Update: Ed Morrissey adds:

CBS has a longer video from a 60 Minutes profile from several years ago, which I’d recommend.  Armstrong’s humility and calm comes through very clearly in his interview with Ed Bradley.  CBS also gets the famous first words from man on the Moon correct: “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.“  Armstrong said later that the (a) got swallowed up by the transmission, and that the statement was one that underplayed his individual role in the moment while noting the monumental leap it meant for the whole human race.

Many American children grew up idolizing Armstrong, Aldrin, and all of the other astronauts who risked their lives — some of whom paid the ultimate price — in order to push our boundaries into the cosmos.  My father worked in the space program for almost 30 years, including the Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle phases, and so perhaps even more than some, I thought of these men as giants.  We had the most well-known of them for a very long time, a blessing that perhaps we’ll only appreciate in retrospect.

Armstrong wasn’t a colorful, folksy character like Chuck Yeager, but he had an amazing record as a test pilot, flying the X-15 before his Gemini and Apollo missions. And he had titanium cojones as well, as this anecdote described by Bill Whittle in a memorable edition of PJTV’s Trifecta recalls,  in a segment on the modern, sensitive, enlightened NASA that’s working hard to take the man out of manned spaceflight:

Related: Everybody knows this is nowhere.

Update: The future and its enemies, 1969-style, as recounted by Steve Hayward:

By the way, I can’t help but recall that liberals, who had begun the moon program under John F. Kennedy, had turned against it by the time of Armstrong’s first steps in 1969.  Here’s how I recalled it in Volume 1 of The Age of Reagan:

Read the whole thing. As I said last year (quoting from additional material from Hayward’s The Age of Reagan), the year before the moon landing — even before its multiple disasters (MLK and RFK shot, the ’68 Democratic convention) — the cultural exhaustion was palpable on the left.

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“Is There a Limit to How Tall Buildings Can Get?”, the Atlantic asks.

With or with a space elevator on top?, we query in return.

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It was during the summer of 2004 that John Kerry had his infamous unforced error, when he made an interstellar violation of the “politicians wear silly hats at their own risk,” and had himself photographed wearing a cleanroom “bunny suit” while visiting NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The resulting images produced arguably the most memorable gaffe of the 2004 presidential election, that year’s equivalent of his predecessor being photographed in an Army tank.

Today, Reuters rejects the 2008-era halo photos of Obama for something a bit more defining of his character, in a photo that’s already going viral:

Ace dubs it “The Photo of the Year,” and adds the perfect caption to it:

“I am new enough on the national political scene
that I serve as a blank screen on which
people of vastly different political stripes
project their own views.”
– Barack H. Obama, The Audacity of Hope

There’s a caption contest for the above photo at the Tatler; feel free to add your own captions in the comments below as well.

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“Missile Defense Staff Warned to Stop Surfing Porn Sites:”

The Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency warned its employees and contractors last week to stop using their government computers to surf the Internet for porn sites, according to the agency’s executive director.

In a one-page memo, MDA Executive Director John James Jr. wrote that in recent months government employees and contractors were detected “engaging in inappropriate use of the MDA network.”

“Specifically, there have been instances of employees and contractors accessing websites, or transmitting messages, containing pornographic or sexually explicit images,” James wrote in the July 27 memo obtained by Bloomberg News.

“These actions are not only unprofessional, they reflect time taken away from designated duties, are in clear violation of federal and DoD and regulations, consume network resources, and can compromise the security of the network though the introduction of malware or malicious code,” he wrote.

But they’re pretty much right in line with the mindset of their current bosses.

Interesting though, that even as NASA espouses political correctness over actually accomplishing something, the Missile Defense Agency appears to be jettisoning the notion of the Right Stuff for Animal House.

Miss Foreign Affairs could not be reached for comment.

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Sad news from NPR:

In 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. She blasted off aboard Challenger, culminating a long journey that started in 1977 when the Ph.D candidate answered an ad seeking astronauts for NASA missions.

Ride died today in La Jolla, Calif. after a 17-month battle with pancreatic cancer, her company said on its website.

She was 61.

According to her official biography, by the time Ride decided to apply to become an astronaut, she had already received degrees in physics and English and was on her way to a Ph.D in physics from Stanford University.

According to her NASA biography, Ride went back into space in October of 1984. She was assigned to another mission after that, but it was scrapped after the shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986.

(Via Charlie Martin at the PJ Tatler.)

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Our latest Silicon Graffiti video was inspired by one of the key themes in the late Allan Bloom’s 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom wrote that by the middle of the 20^th century, American universities  had essentially become enclaves of German philosophy. As a result, “the new American life-style has become a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic for the whole family,” according to Bloom. Last year in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman famously asked, ‘Can Greeks Become Germans?’

Why not? If we could, any nation can. This video looks at how and why that happened, and the results — or at least scratches the surface of those concepts, inasmuch as any six minute video can.

And when you’re done watching, check out David P. Goldman at his “Spengler” column (and that nom de blog dovetails remarkably well with our theme, doesn’t it?) on “Philistinism and Failure,” and follow David’s link to Fred Siegel from the April issue of Commentary, for his brilliant article on “How Highbrows Killed Culture,” for much more on this theme.

A handy, portable, easily embeddable YouTube format of the video is available here. And click here for three years worth of earlier editions of Silicon Graffiti.  The script of this week’s show, with plenty of hyperlinks to the books and blog posts that inspired it, follows on the next page.

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[Ray Bradbury had] written the most famous book ever about Mars, and in his middle age he was invited to come over to the Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena to watch the pictures come in from the first earth vehicle to get there.  It was very early in the morning, maybe around five o’clock, and the pictures started arriving.  They were amazingly good pictures, and the scientists in the JPL were very excited.  Some were drinking champagne.  Others were even crying, they were so proud and excited.

In the middle of it all, Bradbury told us, “some TV journalist shoved a mic into my face and he growled at me, ‘well, Bradbury, how do you feel?  All these years you’ve been writing about Mars, dreaming about Mars, talking about Mars, and the first earth ship lands on Mars…and there’s no sign of life anywhere!  So tell us, how do you feel?’ ”

And Bradbury, to his enormous credit — and this brought a lot of us in his audience to tears — said, “I looked into the TV camera and I said ‘Fools!  Fools!  There IS life on Mars.  It is US’.”

Amen, bro.  That’s what America’s all about.

– Michael Ledeen, “There’s Life on Mars?”

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Near the end of 1968, NASA, still reeling from the deaths of the crew of Apollo 1, launched an ambitious mission to orbit the moon. There wasn’t a functional lunar module available for the mission — that would be tested on Apollo 9 — but NASA had a working Saturn V and a working Apollo command-service module, and took an extremely ballsy gamble for the first manned mission, of mating them together, and lighting the fuse. In retrospect, given the disaster that crippled the Apollo service module on Apollo 13, which used the LEM as a lifeboat– it was more than a little dangerous, even by 1960s-era NASA standards. But ultimately, this mission allowed Apollo 11 to meet JFK’s deadline of landing a man on the moon before the decade was out.

While all of the missions after Apollo 1 and before Apollo 11 are somewhat forgotten, Apollo 8 in particular shouldn’t be.  As Catherine Bly Cox and Charles Murray wrote in their classic 1989 book Apollo: The Race to the Moon, Michael Collins, who would eventually circle the moon himself as the command module pilot on Apollo 11, understood the epochal significance of this earlier mission:

Reflecting on it years later, Mike Collins wondered whether the most historic moment in the Apollo Program might have occurred not on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men on the moon, but at 9:41 A.M. C.S.T., December 21, 1968. On that morning, Collins was CapCom. If it hadn’t been for a bone spur requiring surgery the preceding July, Collins would have been up there himself—he had been a crew member on Apollo 8 until the surgery had made him lose too much training time. Collins had been reassigned to a later mission, Apollo 11.

* * * * * *

As CapCom, it fell to Collins to pass up the word. “Apollo 8,” Collins said into his headset. “You are go for T.L.I. [Trans-lunar Injection]” From the spacecraft, Jim Lovell answered, “Roger, understand. We are go for T.L.I.”

Collins, a man with a sense of both poetry and history, felt even as he spoke that the words weren’t enough. Here is one of the most historic things we’ve ever done, may ever do, he thought to himself, and there ought to be some recognition of it. And what do I say? “Apollo 8, you are go for T.L.I.” But in the MOCR, that’s the way you said, “Mankind, the time has come to leave your first home.”

* * * * * *

For many of the people in the Apollo Program, Apollo 8 was the most magical flight of all, surpassing even the first landing of Apollo 11. For some, like Mike Collins, Eight’s momentous historic significance was foremost…or as FIDO Jay Greene put it, Apollo 8 was the time that they stopped “just running around in circles. Apollo 8 went some place.”

Another aspect of Apollo 8 shows how different the culture of 1968 was for the majority of Americans from elites working in the government to everyday citizens, even with the assassinations of RFK and MLK, riots, and the strong whiff of the hard left’s radical chic in the air. In a moment that presumably had to be signed off by multiple layers of NASA brass and possibly the Johnson White House as well (or maybe not: as Cox and Murray wrote, “it came as a surprise to the controllers in [Mission Control]“), on the day that was then-called Christmas Eve,  the crew of Apollo 8 read from the Book of Genesis as their tiny capsule orbited the moon.

No, really!, Dave Barry would likely say at this point, during a moment when sensible modern readers might assume the writer  was tweaking their collective lower extremity.

To get a sense of a culture can be completely transformed in less than half a century, here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia’s page on topic:

On December 24, 1968, in what was the most watched television broadcast at the time, the crew of Apollo 8 read in turn from the Book of Genesis as they orbited the moon. Bill Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman recited verses 1 through 10, using the King James Version text.

Bill Anders 

“We are now approaching lunar sunrise and, for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

Jim Lovell 

“And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Frank Borman 

“And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas – and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.”

Of course, these days, for better or worse, NASA no longer directly flies manned missions into earth orbit, let alone the moon. Even before its self-grounding, the corrosive effects of political correctness had sapped the can-do spirit of The Right Stuff as charted in the early days of NASA by Tom Wolfe and Bly and Murray. Compare the above with  this story, which is now making the rounds:

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has landed robotic explorers on the surface of Mars, sent probes to outer planets and operates a worldwide network of antennas that communicates with interplanetary spacecraft.

Its latest mission is defending itself in a workplace lawsuit filed by a former computer specialist who claims he was demoted – and then let go – for promoting his views on intelligent design, the belief that a higher power must have had a hand in creation because life is too complex to have developed through evolution alone.

David Coppedge, who worked as a “team lead” on the Cassini mission exploring Saturn and its many moons, alleges that he was discriminated against because he engaged his co-workers in conversations about intelligent design and handed out DVDs on the idea while at work. Coppedge lost his “team lead” title in 2009 and was let go last year after 15 years on the mission.

Opening statements are expected to begin Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court after two years of legal wrangling in a case that has generated interest among supporters of intelligent design. The Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian civil rights group, and the Discovery Institute, a proponent of intelligent design, are both supporting Coppedge’s case.

“It’s part of a pattern. There is basically a war on anyone who dissents from Darwin and we’ve seen that for several years,” said John West, associate director of Center for Science and Culture at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute. “This is free speech, freedom of conscience 101.”

The National Center for Science Education, which rejects intelligent design as thinly veiled creationism, is also watching the case and has posted all the legal filings on its website.

“It would be unfortunate if the court took what seems to be a fairly straightforward employment law case and allowed it to become this tangled mess of trying to adjudicate scientific matters,” said Josh Rosenau, NCSE’s programs and policy director. “It looks like a pretty straightforward case. The mission that he was working on was winding down and he was laid off.”

Coppedge’s attorney, William Becker, says his client was singled out by his bosses because they perceived his belief in intelligent design to be religious. Coppedge had a reputation around JPL as an evangelical Christian and other interactions with co-workers led some to label him as a Christian conservative, Becker said.

In the lawsuit, Coppedge says he believes other things also led to his demotion, including his support for a state ballot measure that sought to define marriage as limited to heterosexual couples and his request to rename the annual holiday party a “Christmas party.”

And there you have it — in 1968, NASA astronauts could say to the folks back home that “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” and wish them a Merry Christmas, and with the notable exception, as Wikipedia notes, of…

Madalyn Murray O’Hair, an atheist, [who had] responded by suing the United States government, alleging violations of the First Amendment. The suit was dismissed by the Supreme Court due to lack of jurisdiction.

…The vast majority of Americans seemed to have survived the experience relatively unscathed.

That this same culture could also send men to the moon was purely a coincidence, right? Besides, our NASA has more important things to do than actually get off the ground with manned human spaceflight.

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Tom Brokaw dubbed my parents’ generation “The Greatest Generation” as a way to make up for how badly their kids trashed them in the late ’60s and 1970s. But if you want to know how great, and wonderful and what sheer perfection Boomers think they themselves are, you need only ask them. Take this article from Philadelphia magazine (please), Exhibit 1,237,322 in Boomer Triumphalism. No, this is not — I don’t think! — a parody:

We’re tired, anyway — tired from having changed the world.

We did, you know. We took the stark button-down black-and-white world we were born into and Kodachromed it, tie-dyed it, made it a rainbow of races and genders and candy-colored Spandex bike shorts. You think our force lay in numbers, but you’re wrong. It lay in the vision we had. You can’t comprehend that, because you’re [Gen X] so low-key, so small-scale, so It’s about intimacy. No. It’s not. Thomas Jefferson had it right: It’s about happiness.

If you’ve ever had an honest conversation with your mom or dad, you have us to thank for it. If you get time off from work to take care of a new baby or a sick relative, you’re welcome for that. Getting a tax rebate for making your house more energy-efficient? Bike lanes, pocket parks, hate-crime laws, legalized pot, death-penalty moratoriums, organic food, space telescopes, genome-decoding — don’t you see what we were doing? We were taking the American dream to the max, pushing to its limits the pursuit of freaking happiness.

And then the party’s over, everybody wakes up with a massive hangover, and the check must be paid, as Mark Steyn wrote last year:

Like America’s political class, I have also been thinking about America circa 2020. Indeed, I’ve written a book on the subject. My prognosis is not as rosy as the Boehner-Obama deal, as attentive readers might just be able to deduce from the subtle clues in the title: “After America: Get Ready For Armageddon”. Oh, don’t worry, I’m not one of these “declinists”. I’m way beyond that, and in the express lane to total societal collapse. The fecklessness of Washington is an existential threat not only to the solvency of the republic but to the entire global order. If Ireland goes under, it’s lights out on Galway Bay. When America goes under, it drags the rest of the developed world down with it.

When I go around the country saying stuff like this, a lot of folks agree. Somewhere or other, they’ve a vague memory of having seen a newspaper story accompanied by a Congressional Budget Office graph with the line disappearing off the top of the page and running up the wall and into the rafters circa mid-century. So they usually say, “Well, fortunately, I won’t live to see it.” And I always reply that, unless you’re a centenarian with priority boarding for the Obamacare death panel, you will live to see it. Forget about mid-century. We’ve got until mid-decade to turn this thing around.

Otherwise, by 2020 just the interest payments on the debt will be larger than the U.S. military budget. That’s not paying down the debt, but merely staying current on the servicing – like when you get your MasterCard statement, and you can’t afford to pay off any of what you borrowed but you can just about cover the monthly interest charge. Except in this case the interest charge for U.S. taxpayers will be greater than the military budgets of China, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain, Turkey and Israel combined.

When interest payments consume about 20 percent of federal revenue, that means a fifth of your taxes are entirely wasted. Pious celebrities often simper that they’d be willing to pay more in taxes for better government services. But a fifth of what you pay won’t be going to government services at all, unless by “government services” you mean the People’s Liberation Army of China, which will be entirely funded by U.S. taxpayers by about 2015. When the Visigoths laid siege to Rome in 408, the imperial Senate hastily bought off the barbarian king Alaric with 5,000 pounds of gold and 30,000 pounds of silver. But they didn’t budget for Roman taxpayers picking up the tab for the entire Visigoth military as a permanent feature of life.

And even those numbers pre-suppose interest rates will remain at their present historic low. Last week, the firm of Macroeconomic Advisors, one of the Obama administration’s favorite economic analysts, predicted that interest rates on 10-year Treasury notes would be just shy of nine percent by 2021. If that number is right, there are two possibilities: The Chinese will be able to quintuple the size of their armed forces and stick us with the tab. Or we’ll be living in a Mad Max theme park. I’d bet on the latter myself.

Or as Steyn wrote a few years earlier,  “What’s the point of creating a secular utopia if it’s only for one generation?”

(Headline by Lileks; Philadelphia magazine story found by Kathy Shaidle, who writes, “Baby Boomers: this is why we hate you and can’t wait until you all die.” The clock is ticking…)

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