There is a huge piece of Chinese space junk — sorry, sorry, JUNKO-21 — landing somewhere soon, and I’m surprised it hasn’t spawned any novelty songs. When Skylab came down — before we figured out how not to dump 22 tons of uncontrolled metal on the planet — we had a novelty song about it.
Disco dreck with a guitar solo that wouldn’t be out of place in another genre. That was 1979, in the Fun Culture. But listen to the music used for NASA’s 1975 documentary.
If you go beyond the credits, it’s a fascinating look at an era generally ignored these days. We go from “Moon” to “Shuttle.” In-between were these guys, having to ride up to a crippled station and do hours of work outside to fix it.
It still seemed typical of the era. Not “adversity was overcome,” which was the previous message, but “we sent up a lemon,” which was how the country felt about itself in the 70s.
If you lived through that, you never wanted to go back. Not to sideburns and polyester pants and disco and urban decline and gas lines and inflation and the rest of it. But everything’s a cycle, and they never look the same. History repeats, but changes enough details so it doesn’t get a copyright strike.
With riots, rising gas prices, the strong whiff of inflation in the air, and frequent headlines about choo-choos (the massive Penn Central bankruptcy and the government’s creation of Amtrak marked the early 1970s), Biden and his handlers seem determined to see America reliving that decennium horribilis once again. In the meantime, click over to Lileks’ latest Bleat for the cultural clash of the dueling Skylab videos.
Related: On the flip-side, Jim Geraghty explores: Reasons to Doubt that America Is Reaching a Scheduled Nervous Breakdown.