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CATHEDRAL CITY, July 20, 2019 –- Fifty years ago today, Sunday, July 20, 1969, my parents and I, then five years of age, watched on a staticky black-and-white TV (like most good liberal Democrats, my parents refused to have a color TV in the house, cloaking their frugality as principled protest against the banality of television itself, and did not purchase a color TV until the spring of 1973 so they could see PBS in color) as Neil Armstrong alighted from the lunar module on the surface of the moon and declared his first steps there to be “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
My parents, those staunch liberal Democrats, watched, transported with awe, as Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin fulfilled the first half of the vow that John F. Kennedy had made before Congress on May 25, 1961 that the United States “should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
The moon landing, reflecting as it did America at her postwar apogee, also reflected our postwar faculty for attempting great enterprises. As Jack Kennedy himself said in his now famous “[w]e choose to go to the moon” speech at Rice University on September 12, 1962:
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things ..., not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”
Aside from militant tendencies on the fringes of the American body politic, tendencies that, whether on the right or the left, shared, and share to this very day, disturbing philosophical affinities with Mao Zedong’s insistence upon “putting politics in command” of every conceivable issue, the American public was broadly unified around Jack Kennedy’s call to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of the 1960s. The space program in general, and notwithstanding the traumatic events of 1968, the Apollo program in particular, unified American public opinion the way few things have before or since. We met Pres. Kennedy’s challenge, we rose to it, and that Sunday afternoon we saw it fulfilled, and America’s attention was riveted. What had begun under Dwight David Eisenhower and had continued through the administrations of JFK and LBJ came to fruition in the six month old administration of Richard Milhous Nixon.
Yet, even the Nixon administration, otherwise so morally and ethically challenged, took up the unifying and noble cause of the space program which the Johnson administration had passed on to it. Yet, the Nixon administration did not attempt to arrogate to itself the credit for what its predecessors had set in motion. For all his faults, Richard Nixon never attempted to weaponize the space program and use it as a stick with which to beat his political opponents.
What a contrast there is between Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, the last two Republican lawyers to occupy the White House, and the narcissistic, man-baby, traitor Donald J. Trump! If we were to attempt an expedition offworld on the Trump administration, the lead-up to such an expedition would inevitably be mired in scandal before the first circuit was printed, before the first blueprint was drafted, and before the first two pieces of metal or heat absorbing tile could be put together. Whoever would be assigned to oversee the project would inevitably be some sleazeball Trump crony, up to his neck in sketchy business practices, 10b-5 insider trading violations, or some sort of sexual misconduct involving underage girls or cabana boys. Worse still, there would be active Russian cyber interference in the project with a view to ensuring its swift and inevitable failure. And any such failure of the project would inevitably be blamed by The Donald on “obstructionist” Democrats.
In short, the project would wind up being pre-engineered for failure, and it would fail. The project would fail for a number of ineluctable reasons. First, it would fail because The Donald would demand that the project be weaponized to function as some sort of “Star Wars” orbital attack platform. This, notwithstanding the fact that for the last half-century, since the Outer Space Treaty came into force in October, 1967, all the spacefaring nations of the planet have either ratified the Treaty or otherwise agreed to be bound by its provisions. Unfortunately, since we know that the Trump administration doesn’t believe in honoring any of America’s commitments, as illustrated by Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords and the Iran nuclear deal, we could expect that the Trump administration would withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty for no good reason other than to appeal to the narcissistic, excessive, borderline criminal ego of The Donald, and the treasonable, white nationalist impulses of his uneducated base.
Second, any offworld expedition project would inevitably be hobbled by the kind of scandal that has routinely hobbled other parts of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization which has been the Trump administration since January 20, 2017. The project would soon find itself the subject of comprehensive investigations by the House Oversight Committee, and every other committee of jurisdiction.
The final, and probably most important, reason any manned American offworld expedition will die before it can reach the launching pad is that the Trump administration has managed to divide the American public so badly against itself that there simply is not the political will or resolution to undertake such a project.
When Jack Kennedy called America to summon up the resolution to make a voyage to the moon, American presidents were still believed to be men of probity; their sins, if any, were the venial sins of concealment or of the flesh which more civilized societies, notably the French, are more inclined to accept and forgive in their chiefs then are we Americans, steeped as we are in the worst excesses of evangelical Puritan Nonconformity. Today, however, the sins of our president are sins against nationality, against American values, and against the Holy Spirit itself; they are vast, inexpiable, and unforgivable.
It takes a man -or woman-of probity and of vision to embody the political will and the social resolution necessary to unite the country around a great national purpose. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., described Franklin Roosevelt as having "a second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament." Yet, Franklin took us out of the Great Depression and saw us safely through the darkest, sternest days of World War II. That is what a first-class temperament can do. The Donald, unburdened by any pretense of intellect, and possessing the worst temperament of all the 44 men to have served as president of United States, has not got the first scintillum of the leadership skills necessary to lead America back to the moon.
The original American space program succeeded in large measure because we were led by presidents (even Richard Nixon) who were altogether better men than Donald Trump will ever be, and because the space program itself was transparent and was viewed by the American public as noble, uplifting, and incorrupt. Indeed, the space program has brought us unimaginable advances in pure, basic science, in technology, and in advancing the frontiers of human knowledge and understanding. From such amazing artifacts of science as the Mars rovers, one of which, Opportunity, reduced the world to tears with the final message attributed to it: “[m]y battery is low and it’s getting dark,” to such mundane objects as the cellular telephone and nonstick pans, the space program has changed our mode of life for the better.
Unfortunately, the space program has not changed our politics for the better. Any new offworld expedition we may seek to mount will be doomed by the fact that the Trump administration has managed, in just 30 months, to corrupt and make contemptible just about every single one of our public institutions of self-government or of civil society. We are well on the road, on this 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, to becoming a failed state. We are failing because the notoriousest traitor ever to taint our body politic has set us up for failure. The very idea that the United States could mount a successful offworld expedition with Donald Trump and the Republicans anywhere close to the levers of power is simply risible. We had our chance to slip the surly bonds of Earth and dance in space on sunlight-dappled wings, to choose to go to the moon, and to make an attempt on Mars. We have flubbed that chance.
Our battery is low and it’s getting dark.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in a neighboring Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. His despair this day is palpable.
“Centurion, I find myself wishing for destruction before we can return.” - The Romulan Commander (played by Mark Lenard) in Star Trek TOS “Balance of Terror”
