By Matthew D. Tribbe
Throughout the summer time of 1969-the summer time american citizens first walked at the moon-musician and poet Patti Smith recalled jogging down the Coney Island Boardwalk to a refreshment stand, the place "pictures of Jesus, President Kennedy, and the astronauts have been taped to the wall at the back of the register." Such used to be the zeitgeist within the 12 months of the moon. but this holy trinity of Nineteen Sixties the US may speedy disintegrate. even though Jesus and John F. Kennedy remained iconic, by the point the Apollo application got here to a untimely finish simply 3 years later few american citizens mourned its passing.
Why did help for the gap software lessen so sharply by way of the early Nineteen Seventies? Rooted in profound clinical and technological leaps, rational technocratic administration, and an bold view of the universe as a realm vulnerable to human mastery, the Apollo moon landings have been the grandest manifestation of postwar American growth and appeared to turn out that the us may accomplish something to which it devoted its energies and assets. To the nice dismay of its many proponents, notwithstanding, NASA chanced on the floor moving underneath its ft as a fierce wave of anti-rationalism arose all through American society, fostering a cultural setting within which becoming numbers of usa citizens started to contest instead of include the rationalist values and imaginative and prescient of development that Apollo embodied.
Shifting the dialog of Apollo from its chilly struggle origins to greater developments in American tradition and society, and probing an eclectic mixture of voices from the period, together with intellectuals, spiritual leaders, rock musicians, politicians, and various daily american citizens, Matthew Tribbe paints an electrifying portrait of a country in the middle of wondering the very values that had guided it in the course of the postwar years because it started to improve new conceptions of development that had little to do with blasting ever extra males to the moon. No Requiem for the distance Age bargains a story of the Sixties and Nineteen Seventies not like any advised sooner than, with the tale of Apollo because the tale of the USA itself in a time of dramatic cultural switch.
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Extra resources for No Requiem for the Space Age: The Apollo Moon Landings and American Culture
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27 * * * If these paeans to Apollo’s meaning seemed to minimize rather than enhance the grandeur of the event, many of the immediate criticisms also failed to adequately grapple with the larger ramifications of the moon landing. Many of Apollo’s Left-leaning detractors, for example, broached similar themes, if more often in bitterness than in hope. Although skipping the “new age in history” pablum, they showed no such restraint when it came to pushing for similar technocratic approaches to social problems.
Look what happened,” he complained of the television coverage. “No black commentators, not one Negro sociologist or scientist. One network did show Duke Ellington playing the song he wrote in honor of Apollo 11. It’s like they were saying, ‘Yeah, there’s a black man playing music for whitey to do his important thing by. ”37 The space program became a particularly inviting target for more radical black voices. Rapping poetry over the occasional minimal conga beats, piano, flute, bass, and various other background accompaniments, for example, protohip-hop artists the Watts Prophets assailed the space program in three songs on their first two albums.
36 Even more fundamentally, Apollo reflected the postwar rationalist idea that the answers to life’s dilemmas and nature’s mysteries could be found via the rational accumulation of facts, and that clues to cracking the enigmas of existence could be found by searching outward, to the moon and beyond, where a clearer sense of the material makeup and origins of the universe would be gained. If the space race was undeniably driven by the personality of John Kennedy and the larger Cold War, the particular form this contest took in the 1960s—a race to the moon—had far deeper roots in the broader rationalist spirit of the era.