APOLLO SHRUGS:
That we had seen a demonstration of man at his best, no one could doubt — this was the cause of the event’s attraction and of the stunned, numbed state in which it left us. And no one could doubt that we had seen an achievement of man in his capacity as a rational being — an achievement of reason, of logic, of mathematics, of total dedication to the absolutism of reality. How many people would connect these two facts, I do not know.
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The response of Congress to Apollo 11 included some prominent voices who declared that NASA’s appropriations should be cut because the lunar mission has succeeded.(!) The purpose of the years of scientific work is completed, they said, and “national priorities” demand that we now pour more money down the sewers of the war on poverty.
If you want to know the process that embitters, corrupts, and destroys the managers of government projects, you are seeing it in action. I hope that the NASA administrators will be able to withstand it.
—Ayn Rand after attending the Apollo 11 launch, September, 1969.
“The Apollo program was designed by men, for men. If we do not acknowledge the gender bias of the early space program, it becomes difficult to move past it.”
—Tweet by the New York Times, today.
“The culture that put men on the moon was intense, fun, family-unfriendly, and mostly white and male.”
—Tweet by the Washington Post, yesterday.
The two northeast corridor newspapers are getting a strong negative ratio on their tweets. As James Barrett writes at the Daily Wire: “Washington Post Torched For Woke Apollo 11 Tweet.”
The Post’s Apollo 11 piece paints the team who put man on the moon as retrograde compared to the rest of the country. “The space program imagined the future. Yet the community of trim haircuts, shaved chins, white shirts (with contractors’ company badges emblazoned on their pockets) and pressed slacks, led by many veterans of World War II, seemed decades removed from the prevalent culture that was shaggier, angrier and sometimes stoned,” writes Heller.
Yes, because they were busy putting men on the moon, not sitting in the mud in Yasgur’s farm. Evidently, the latter is the more impressive accomplishment according to the Post. (But couldn’t the Post’s Sally Quinn have simply used a magic talisman to will the astronauts there?)
Related: “A top-scale rocket projection will cover the east face of the Washington Monument in honor of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 and when man walked on the moon. The 363-foot Saturn V projection is a first display of its kind for the Monument and will light up the historic site starting Tuesday at 9:30 p.m.”
They told me that if Trump were elected president, we’d see over the top sexism and racialism on full display in Washington — and they were right!
(Last item via Small Dead Animals.)
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): The “Golden Quarter Century” of stunning progress ended in 1971. Weirdly, that’s when the regulatory explosion took off. And it’s when economic inequality started to get worse, so it’s a two-fer for the left.