In 1978, when I was in grade seven, I saw the movie Capricorn 1. Starring James Brolin, Sam Waterston and O. J. Simpson as astronauts being forced to fake a Nasa mission to Mars, the movie was a convoluted mess of conspiracy theories and bad acting. The astronauts, eventually learning that they were to be killed (“burned” through re-entry!), decided to escape from the desert TV studio where they had been imprisoned and forced to cooperate, and bring the truth to the world. James Brolin, hiding out in a cave while helicopters swirled overhead, killed and ate a rattlesnake. I thought the movie was absolutely awesome, and began to do all my school projects on how Nasa had actually faked the Lunar landing in 1968.
This led to me serving as captain of a debate team that argued the landing was a fake in front of the entire class. A voracious reader with absolutely no critical faculty, I was able to grab a bunch of headlines from all sorts of dubious sources, without the tiniest bit of understanding of what I was saying. This came out during the question period of the debate, when Mark Wingate, who was a noted troublemaker, asked me why America would go to all the bother of faking the landing. My response, which I delivered with dripping sarcasm, was “ I don’t know, Mark, why would they?” He would say that he didn’t have a clue, and then ask me again, to which I would issue the same response. This went on for at least five minutes.
Grade seven was a difficult year for me.
In short order, not only was the entire class against me, including the teacher Mrs. McCulloch– who was a bit of a bitch– but my entire debate team, too. When all the students were asked to raise their arms and vote for the team that they though won the debate, everybody in the class, including my own team, voted against me.
But I knew I was right.
At any rate, today, July 20th, 2009, marks the 40th anniversary of the “moon landing” and as a tribute, I would like to post two poems to commemorate the event.
The first poem, set to some angry drumming, is by Gil-Scot Heron, illustrating that not everybody was happy with the push to put a man on the moon.
Whitey on the Moon
A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon.
Her face and arms began to swell and Whitey’s on the moon.
I can’t pay no doctor bills but Whitey’s on the moon.
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still while Whitey’s on the moon.
The man just upped my rent last night cuz Whitey’s on the moon.
No hot water, no toilets, no lights but Whitey’s on the moon.
I wonder why he’s uppin me. Cuz Whitey’s on the moon?
I was already givin’ him fifty a week but now Whitey’s on the moon.
Taxes takin’ my whole damn check,
The junkies makin’ me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin’ up,
And as if all that shit wasn’t enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon.
Her face and arms began to swell but Whitey’s on the moon.
Was all that money I made last year for Whitey on the moon?
How come there ain’t no money here? Hmm! Whitey’s on the moon.
Ya know, I just about had my fill of Whitey on the moon.
I think I’ll send these doctor bills
airmail special….
to Whitey on the moon.
The second poem is by the late John Updike, and is an epistle to space travel.
An Open Letter to Voyager 2
By John Updike
Dear Voyager:
This is to thank you for
The last twelve years, and wishing you, what’s more,
Well in your new career in vacant space.
When you next brush a star, the human race
May be a layer of old sediment,
A wrinkle of the primates, a misspent
Youth of some zoomorphs. But you, your frail
Insectoid form, will skim the sparkling vale
Of the void practically forever. As
The frictionless light-years and aeons pass,
The frozen points that from Earth’s vantage held
Their mythic patterns firm will shift and melt;
No wide-dish radios will strain to hear
Your whispered news, nor poets call you dear.
Ere then, let me assure you, you’ve been grand —
A little shaky at the outset, and
Arthritic in the swivel-joints, antique
In circuitry, virtually deaf, and weak
As a refrigerator bulb, you kept
Those picture postcards coming. Signals crept
To Pasadena, where they were enhanced
Until those planets clear as daylight danced.
The stripes and swirls of Jupiter’s slow boil,
Its crazy moons, one cracked, one fried in oil,
One glazed with ice, and one too raw to eat,
Still cooking in the juice of inner heat,
Arrived on our astonished monitors.
Then, next, after a station break of years,
Fat Saturn rode your feeble beam, and lo! —
Not corny as we feared, but art deco —
The hard-edge, Technicolor rings, as thin
As cardboard, broader than Lake Michigan,
And casting flashlit shadows. Planet three
Was Uranus (accented solemnly
By anchormen on the first syllable,
Lest viewers think the “your” too personal):
A glassy globe of gas upon its side,
Its nine dark, close-knit rings at last descried,
Its corkscrew-shaped magnetic passions bared,
Its pocked attendants digitized and aired.
Last loomed, against the Oort cloud, blue Neptune,
Its counterrevolutionary moon,
Its wispy arcs of rings and whitish streaks
Of unpredicted tempests — thermal freaks,
As if an unused backyard swimming pool,
Remote from stirring sunlight, dark and cool
(Sub-sub-sub-freezing), by itself would splash.
Displays of splendid waste, of rounded trash!
Your looping miles of guided drift brought home
How barren cosmic space would be to roam.
One awful ball succeeds another, none
Fit for a shred or breath of life. Our one
Delightful, verdant orb was primed to cede
The H2O and O and N we need.
Your survey, in its scrupulous depiction,
Purged from the solar system science fiction —
No more Uranians or Io-ites,
Just Earthlings dreaming through their dewy nights.
You saw where we could not, and dared to go
Where we could scarcely dream; you showed
A kind of metal courage, and faithfulness.
Your cryptic, ciphered, graven messages
Are for ourselves, designed to boomerang
Back like a prayer from where the angels sang,
That shining ancient blank encirclement.
Your voyage now outsoars mundane intent
And joins matter’s blind motion. Au revoir,
You rickety free-falling man-made star!
Machines, like songs, belong to all. A man
Aloft is Russian or American,
But you aloft were simply sent by Man
At large.
Sincerely yours,
A fan.