Rod Liddle, The Spectator, September 2018:
"...In truth,
the moonshot was quintessentially about American triumphalism and almost
nothing else — the good of humanity was not a consideration, except insofar as
more successful rocket technology at last put the US ahead of the Soviet Union,
behind which repulsive country it had lagged alarmingly, well into the 1960s.
It was two fingers to the Russkies and a reminder to the rest of the world that
the US was the greatest country on earth. In short, as President Kennedy knew,
it was the only thing which could trump Sputnik, Laika and Yuri Gagarin. It won
the space race...."
Matthew Walther, July 17 2019:
“...The significance of Apollo also has nothing to do with
the speculative images of "space" with fake color embellishments that
we put today in front of children who do not know the names of trees and
flowers. Nothing could be less awful, in the old-fashioned sense of the word,
than today's space program.
I would like to suggest that the moon landing was above all
a triumph of our aesthetic instincts. What Goethe began at Weimar in 1789 ended
on August 15, 1969. Apollo 11 was the culmination of the Romantic cult of the
sublime prefigured in the speculations of Burke and Kant, an artistic
juxtaposition of man against a brutal environment upon which he could project his
fears, his sympathies, his feelings of transcendence...”
W H Auden, August 1969:
Moon Landing
It's natural the Boys should whoop it up for
so huge a phallic triumph, an adventure
it would not have occurred to women
to think worth while, made possible only
because we like huddling in gangs and knowing
the exact time: yes, our sex may in fairness
hurrah the deed, although the motives
that primed it were somewhat less than menschlich.
A grand gesture. But what does it period?
What does it osse? We were always adroiter
with objects than lives, and more facile
at courage than kindness: from the moment
the first flint was flaked this landing was merely
a matter of time. But our selves, like Adam's,
still don't fit us exactly, modern
only in this---our lack of decorum.
Homer's heroes were certainly no braver
than our Trio, but more fortunate: Hector
was excused the insult of having
his valor covered by television.
Worth going to see? I can well believe it.
Worth seeing? Mneh! I once rode through a desert
and was not charmed: give me a watered
lively garden, remote from blatherers
about the New, the von Brauns and their ilk, where
on August mornings I can count the morning
glories where to die has a meaning,
and no engine can shift my perspective.
Unsmudged, thank God, my Moon still queens the Heavens
as She ebbs and fulls, a Presence to glop at,
Her Old Man, made of grit not protein,
still visits my Austrian several
with His old detachment, and the old warnings
still have power to scare me: Hybris comes to
an ugly finish, Irreverence
is a greater oaf than Superstition.
Our apparatniks will continue making
the usual squalid mess called History:
all we can pray for is that artists,
chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.
Artist: Tom Gauld
so huge a phallic triumph, an adventure
it would not have occurred to women
to think worth while, made possible only
because we like huddling in gangs and knowing
the exact time: yes, our sex may in fairness
hurrah the deed, although the motives
that primed it were somewhat less than menschlich.
A grand gesture. But what does it period?
What does it osse? We were always adroiter
with objects than lives, and more facile
at courage than kindness: from the moment
the first flint was flaked this landing was merely
a matter of time. But our selves, like Adam's,
still don't fit us exactly, modern
only in this---our lack of decorum.
Homer's heroes were certainly no braver
than our Trio, but more fortunate: Hector
was excused the insult of having
his valor covered by television.
Worth going to see? I can well believe it.
Worth seeing? Mneh! I once rode through a desert
and was not charmed: give me a watered
lively garden, remote from blatherers
about the New, the von Brauns and their ilk, where
on August mornings I can count the morning
glories where to die has a meaning,
and no engine can shift my perspective.
Unsmudged, thank God, my Moon still queens the Heavens
as She ebbs and fulls, a Presence to glop at,
Her Old Man, made of grit not protein,
still visits my Austrian several
with His old detachment, and the old warnings
still have power to scare me: Hybris comes to
an ugly finish, Irreverence
is a greater oaf than Superstition.
Our apparatniks will continue making
the usual squalid mess called History:
all we can pray for is that artists,
chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.
Artist: P.S. Mueller
