Forty years ago we sat around late into the evening, waiting for Neil and Buzz to go and take a walk. They made us stay up awfully late on a Sunday night, but that was OK, since I was only 8 years old, and it was summer, so I didn’t have to get up to go to school. Not that it would have mattered, of course. Like any kid back then (especially boys, I imagine), I knew everything there was to know about the space program. I honestly don’t recall whether we were watching Walter Cronkite or not for the actual landing or that first moon walk (I was flipping the channel every time the coverage on one station broke for a commercial; we didn’t have a remote control back then, but we didn’t need one, as I was sitting with my face practically up against the picture tube – radiation be damned).

I seem to recall ABC having good coverage back then too, with anchor Frank Reynolds chatting with Jules Bergman, who got to play with a really cool model of the command module and the “lem” that I would have killed to have had (much bigger than what I had, and all the little pieces came out and attached, so he could demonstrate, for instance, how the command module would separate from the service module, and then turn around to dock with the lunar landing module and pull it out. Hard to believe Jules has been dead for over twenty years now, and Frank died 26 years ago today.

As I recall, we hung out around the teevee all day (might have gone to church at some point back then), before the Eagle separated from Columbia and made its descent to the moon late in the afternoon. Little did we know at the time how much trouble they had, and how Armstrong had to fly the thing to the point where it was within a second or so of running out of gas. I remember them describing how they’d rigged up a sort of a camera on a clothesline thing that they would deploy so we could see Neil climb down that ladder, and make that final small step onto the lunar surface.

Ah, those were the days. We were still the good guys (Vietnam and that whole race thing notwithstanding), and that great American spirit, ingenuity, and “can-do” attitude meant we could do anything we set our minds to.

Now, it seems we’ll struggle to pass crappy health care reform legislation, the economy is in the crapper, we don’t actually “make” much of anything anymore, science is now godless voodoo to be shunned in favor of “intelligent design” (mosquitoes and deer flies? How intelligent is that?), and the people who are making billions in profits burning fossil fuels and selling parts for the internal combustion engine are paying off our politicians to prevent any chance of innovation.

The only thing we seem to have in common with the sixties at this point is the escalation of an unwinnable and unsustainable war in some shithole part of the world.

And, to top it all off, Tom Watson went and blew it (though finishing second at the British Open is no shame for anybody – at any age).

It all sucks. Oh, well, not really. I guess that’s just Monday talking.