Reflections on The 40th anniversary of the Moon Landing: One Giant Leap to Nowhere?

The 40th anniversary of the Moon Landing was a good time for those of us of a certain age to reminisce. We looked at that silvery orb in the sky that night
a bit differently. But we also looked at ourselves with new eyes too.
Norman Cousins, who addressed a Congressional hearing about what going to the moon meant, where he said, 'The significance of Apollo was not so much that man set foot on the moon but that he set eye on the Earth.’

We certainly had the wonderful photos to prove that the earth was indeed a tiny blue fragile looking planet set against a sky of infinite blackness. But after 1969 not much else happened. We still found ourselves in too deep in the VietNam war. Nixon did not change his policies as a result. The so called technological "victory" over the Soviet Union did not much to change the determination to confront their eastern bloc neighbors if they showed any signs of breaking free of their communist yoke.
Schools just added Neil Armstrong to the list of great American explorers who made history. Probably the best outcome was the use made by politicians to make us believe in ourselves as capable of solving enormously intractable problems such as world hunger. How many of us heard that phrase--"if we can go to the moon..then.."
and stopped listening to it after it was repeated too many times and issues such as radically unequal education and housing persisted.

The moon project was then dropped. I heard from one commentator recently all the technology was sort of placed in deep freeze, the teams of engineers that were assembled the variety of resources supporting a manned landing all were dissolved as if the entire enterprise had been nothing but a show. Funding for NASA sank like a stone. As Tom Wolfe wrote in the New York Times the moon landing was "one giant leap to nowhere"

As Wolfe writes the funding for NASA went "from $5 billion in the mid-1960s to $3 billion in the mid-1970s. It was at this point that NASA’s lack of a philosopher corps became a real problem. The fact was, NASA had only one philosopher, Wernher von Braun. Toward the end of his life, von Braun knew he was dying of cancer and became very contemplative. I happened to hear him speak at a dinner in his honor in San Francisco. He raised the question of what the space program was really all about. Therefore we must build a bridge to the stars, because as far as we know, we are the only sentient creatures in the entire universe. When do we start building that bridge to the stars? We begin as soon as we are able, and this is that time. We must not fail in this obligation we have to keep alive the only meaningful life we know of.

Unfortunately, NASA couldn’t present as its spokesman and great philosopher a former high-ranking member of the Nazi Wehrmacht with a heavy German accent.

As a result, the space program has been killing time for 40 years with a series of orbital projects ... Skylab, the Apollo-Soyuz joint mission, the International Space Station and the space shuttle. These programs have required a courage and engineering brilliance comparable to the manned programs that preceded them. But their purpose has been mainly to keep the lights on at the Kennedy Space Center and Houston’s Johnson Space Center — by removing manned flight from the heavens and bringing it very much down to earth."

But even had Werner Von Braun had better credentials to be the kind of Captain Kirk like visionary for the new age of space exploration it is doubtful that any air would have pumped back into the space program. If a venture is conceived as a PR victory it stays a PR victory. Kennedy's words we "choose to go to the moon not because it is easy but because it is hard"--an appeal to man's never ending search for challenge--rings hollow today--the reason --we have ignored doing some easy things because it is too hard to do the hard work of organize a vision around our common humanity--our essential brother and sisterhood. Without that vision the people indeed do perish as do missions however brave and magnficent as the moon landing.

Salinger--Overly Protective Literary Parent or Litigious Recluse? You Decide

In a strange legal twist, J.D. Salinger the author of (arguably) the most read book by babyboom generation The Catcher in the Rye has now successfully challenged an effort to censor a So called sequel to the book. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) explains
that the new work is entitled 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, and "depicts Holden as Mr. C., an irascible 76-year-old still spouting the same vitriol about "godamn phonies" and nursing the same distrust of the world around him. But this is not a sequel penned by Mr. Salinger, now 90, whose last published work appeared in June 1965. And if the author, a Swedish publisher named Fredrik Colting, is to be believed, it is not a sequel to the original. Rather, he maintains that the book is "literary commentary on 'Catcher' and the relationship between Holden and Salinger." To that end, a fictive Salinger makes an appearance as a character in "60 Years Later."

The judge ruled in Salinger's favor --disagreeing with the defense position that the Swedish author was attempting a work of literary criticism and upholding Salinger's attorneys who argued that Holden's character was "copyrightable."

"..literary critique in the form of a novel is not unheard of. Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea" retells "Jane Eyre" from the point of view of Bertha, the madwoman in the attic. Rita Copeland, a comparative literature professor at the University of Pennsylvania, calls it "a deep exploration of the political, social and racial issues that underlie Charlotte Brontë's novel. Of course Rhys' book is a great novel, but it's also an important 'reading' of 'Jane Eyre,' of the Caribbean side of the story in Brontë's novel and of the European relationship to the West Indies."

The ruling seems bizarre and will likely be overturned on appeal--(if of course Mr Colting has the funds to appeal) since there is no question that Salinger owns Caulfied in the way that Shakespeare owns Macbeth and Hamlet--only that author could have created the actual character and only his rendering is authentic. Colting has not disguised the fact that he is writing the story not Salinger. But the counter logic would suggest that since no one but Disney can market Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck in the verbal realm--Salinger's rights are akin to those of Disneys. But we are hitting here the limits of the legal imagination that can make a distinction between marketable Mickey Mouse and not so marketable Holden Caulfield.

But the more important lesson from this is perhaps the way that Salinger sees himself at this point in time. The WSJ characterizes his posture well:

"Mr. Salinger is notorious for his protection of his creations. He has denied movie directors the rights to option "Catcher" and turned down licensing deals that could have turned Holden Caulfield into a mass-marketing bonanza. We should add he bitterly fought British author Ian Hamilton from publishing his biography."

According to the WSJ "60 Years Later" mostly centers on Mr. C. (70% of the book is devoted to him) and includes only a few snippets of the Salinger character; the climax of the interaction is sketched out in one of the final chapters. Without Mr. C., the book could not exist. Without Salinger, it still paints a vivid portrait of how Holden stayed huddled in his cocoon and remained a boy in a man's body."

Is Holden really Salinger? I guess we will have to read the book to find out...