The Next Few Generations

Compelled for some reason to watch a few old Star Trek episodes rather than escape the shrieking voices with heavy drink, I found myself fascinated anew- not by the plots, which are as ingrained as Beatles lyrics, but by the rare hits and mostly misses of the technological future the franchise predicted. Of course the toggle switches of the original show gave way to the holograms and touch screens of subsequent series- but we have that stuff now which I would assume means that the 24^th century is beyond anyone’s grasp as to how humans will traverse time, space and dimension.

But what is truly archaic from a 24^th century standpoint, if I may be so presumptuous, is the relationship between the sexes. Yes, the progressive nature of the concept had females and males working side by side from the start, but I would bet both of the ship’s nacelles that three hundred years from now not only will humans not be using gadgets that squeak and light up, but there will be no real distinction between the genders.

There is an old assumption regarding man’s evolution- that he will slowly work towards becoming a non-physical mass of energy that will be the final point at which mankind achieves union with the divine. An episode of the original series posited something like this as a race of beings called Organians- represented by a council of feeble old men in hospital smocks that I guess were supposed to read as flowing white robes- turned out to be “pure energy” as Mr. Spock explained, continuing “they are as far advanced from us as we are from the amoeba.”

Whether this forward moving narrative of human evolution is actually the path we’re on or not, the question to ask in watching this show is what will we be like just 300 years from now? The corporeal dissolution thesis would, I think, first require that men and women merge into androgynous indistinction, which would change the way we do reproductive business, to say the least.

Another hypothesis would mirror a hive-like development where specialization within an integrated whole would allow a queen to replicate the species while a good portion of said species would evolve sideways into other, sexless support tasks. How that insect-like devolution scenario gets us closer to pure energy is beyond me.

The major point I want to make, however, is that the idea of the individual has profoundly changed in the last quarter of a century. The notion of individual sovereignty has been giving way to the integration of the single component into a system where personal interest has been replaced by coordinated effort. You know: collectivization. With this integration, the unique traits that go into constructing an individual are falling by the wayside. With that inexorable process underway, gender defining characteristics will also dissolve. Three centuries from now the crew of the Enterprise will look more like Ziggy Stardust (providers) and Marilyn Manson (carriers) (or vice versa) than bald continental effetes, cock-sure matinee idols, earth mothers in Versace and pasty faced logicians.

 A Buddy's Love

I might return to my parent’s brief marriage but my father had no chance as a husband for we now know he was suffering from a crippling dose of hyperactivity. He was a workaholic because of this, an alcoholic, too, but he was born in 1931 when addiction to bitterness and resentment was a cultural imperative so the bottomless thirst came standard. He never said no to a job and this sickness kept him busy all day and night.

He had worked his way up to a hammer and nails guy for the art directors union, building sets and painting backdrops. In time he was the go-to guy for painting convincing wood grain and marble; most of the courtrooms, old west saloons, and ancient palaces on television were paneled by cheap plywood and Pop's deft handling of acrylic and enamel. 

One other responsibility members of his guild had was hanging around back stage at gala functions in a tux ready to fix a disobedient piece of scenery or tangled drape chord should the occasion arise. That kind of gig was usually reserved for the old timers, too feeble to wheel backdrops or hoist ladders, but as they died off Pop was well known as a reliable last second fill in.

In this latter capacity, he’d mingle, invisible certainly, with fifties A list Hollywood while back home my mother fumed at his uneaten dinner and we kids fell asleep in front of the TV. As mentioned, he was missing an ear, and for that he was a magnet for the gimp crazy Jerry Lewis who, bless his heart, always asked Mike after the kids, wife, the family which my father did everything in his power to keep at arm’s length.

“Getting’ enough tail, Mike?”

“Uh, sure- you bet, Mr. Lewis-”

“Good- I got some chippies in the green room looking for company- go get ‘em some beers, and take yer time, Mike-”

“Yessir-”

Pop did time on the Colgate Comedy Hour, that paean to imbecility featuring a rotation of entertainers, Martin and Lewis among them, headliners blissfully incapable of embarrassment; Dean-o drinking his lunch, Jerry ad-libbing Dean’s bumbled lines… the old man rinsing paint buckets, wheeling bandstands back and forth, boxing tools and inventorying power chords and props. But it was that jagged indentation where his left ear had once been that became a throbbing, pulsing Technicolor beacon for the mesmerized Jerry; the monkey man’s concentration would shatter, his gaze autistically fixed on the wound- See  sheaves of paper hydroplaning, band leader Sammy Kahn's score sailing away from Jerry's spastic mitts, the eyes bulging, the rubber face freezing in a half gasp of lust and repulsion, leavened with a pathological dose of anger and survivor’s guilt... Let's watch now as Lewis finds himself staggering towards the young stage hand who is lost in his own pathological soup, unaware that this comedy immortal, a man who by all rights and the well established protocols of show business should not even be able to see the little people let alone grieve for them, about to fall at my father’s feet, tears of remorse at the silent and capricious cruelty of Yahweh puddling around Jerry's scabbed and bloodied knees-

-No- That didn’t happen- What Pop actually described was that Jerry, whacked out on Percodin or Demerol or just genuine insanity, ran across the stage in reaction to some crack by Kahn, a squat, bald lawn ornament of short man’s resentment, tackled his musical director and bit- strike that- he sunk his fangs into Kahn’s shiny pink scalp, issuing torrents of blood that did puddle around his scabbed and bloodied knees, the assault requiring a dozen plus stitches.

Let’s assume, if that attack took place, Jerry made amends: sent to Kahn’s dressing room a season of top shelf hookers. Just as likely, Kahn said nothing as Lewis in his delirium had no recall of the incident even as his make-up man wiped the blood off his chin- and what with Jerry being a mob darling, likely he was indulged by Kahn with all manner of supplication for causing Jerry's "spell"- sending the star a season of top shelf hookers to supplement the harem already installed in his suite of dressing rooms.

A digression, but the Hollywood notion of insane Roman emperors like Nero and Caligula come from the borsch belt frenzy of vaudeville and Broadway lunatics whose popularity helped launder billions of mob dollars. Really, think it through: The pathologies that define public performers inform the pseudo-history of Hollywood far more profoundly than some fossilized tract of British probity; could Gibbon even remotely lead to Jay Robinson's Caligula? No, but the profitable insanity of Jerry Lewis would inflate the thin armature of historic narrative some back lot hack used to devise well appointed falsehoods like Quo Vadis and The Robe.

Even better: Those same hacks also looked to the mobsters to fertilize their caricatures of power, like Mickey Cohen, the reigning emperor of the Los Angeles underworld. As much as beloved entertainers who behind closed doors beat their wives and children with unimpeded fury, the fedora level capos like Cohen inspired those fables of ruthless insanity in sandals. Granted, a British accented effete like Laughton or Ustinoff seems hardly redolent of those dese and dose illiterates from West 92^nd and Lexington, but even as they essayed the most notoriously discredited of anti-Christian emperors, their foreign façades masked the originals: Bronx honkers whose strategies of persuasion would employ all manner of theatrical artifice, an admixture of low brow comedy captioned by malaprop laden erudition of physical threat fueled by hallucinations of a dead mother wielding the dipsomaniacal old man's shaving strop.

But that's the psychoanalytic pablum that the masses demand to stay sedated. The truth- about Jerry Lewis at any rate- is far more bizarre, to the point where no witnesses ever talked because no one would have believed what I'm about to relate: a whopper a contemporary of my father once told me about the original Jerry, not the cineaste and telethon operator we know and love.

Kenny was the name this crusty old timer went by- the Jerry he described was the scrawny, buzz cut, gene-spliced feral ape that even the perpetually self-medicated Dean Martin could no longer endure; you know, the caricatured profile on the Jerry Lewis MDA thingy you used to see at the grocery store checkout counter that displaced the March of Dimes coin drop.

"Yes, that's right, Sonny," Kenny the cretin says, "The nudnik you laughed at wasn't the genuine article."

"No you don't, you toothless coot," I snap, "Don't try and peddle one of those damn conspiracy theories! I know that racket and the last thing you want to do is cut heads with me!"

But I couldn't say it because I was down to a quarter cup of dirty dishwater and a hole in every pocket, so I let this yannigan have the floor after I soft soaped him for a refill and the blue plate special.

"We're at the Copa, circa '55," he starts. "After hours and the place turns into a "private" club so the swells can keep drinking. Frank is there, so is Carlo Gambino and a select few of the mayor's friends, including former mayor Vinny Impellitteri, the Sicilian Imp, the last defense of the Cosa Nostra against those Irish wankers who call themselves Catholic."

"Yeah," I says, "Get to the point."

"So, your Jerry Lewis, the potzel, he's there, too, like a hungry seal he's being tossed fried calamari by Rosie Clooney who's probably banging Frank and an army of uncut Sicilian salami; and the mutant Lewis is slapping his fins and arf arfing with every stringy tentacle he catches in his gaping maw- and suddenly, the former mayor, Impy, he reaches for a lemon wedge to juice up the squid to help himself and this meschugener Lewis, I swear he's some mad doctor's laboratory mistake of half chimp, half lobotomy- this Itdgit Galoot, he grabs his honor by the ears and plants on him an open mouth kiss, of course to the amusement of the lubricated assembled- until Jerry starts putting pressure on the mayor's temples causing the mayor's tongue to protrude at which point a frothy suds of blood and vomit spills out and the berzerk Jerry bites down and yanks the mayor's tongue out by the roots, so help me St. Shadrach. Then the mad man proceeds to chase a terrified Clooney about the room, waiving the slimy appendage around like a bola, flicking blood and vomit every which way."

"Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's muscle, stands up and looks at Frank in the front who looks at Carlo Gambino at a back table who nods and Frank turns and nods to Jilly and Jilly fires his 9x19 Glock at Lewis, shattering the whacko's jaw, takes aim again as the psychopath continues galloping after the hysterical Clooney, fires and misses Lewis altogether but hits the matre d's eight year old daughter who had snuck out from the kitchen to see her idol, who by now has some inkling of what is happening and makes like a steeple jumper, leaping over tables and patrons who dive for cover as the bullets keep coming, Lewis spitting blood and teeth, cackling like a headless rider whipsawing through the Tahitian decor, knocking over the cigarette girl with a forearm just for shits and grins, her tray flinging the smokes, notions and sundries in the air as another stray bullet goes through her right eye, her brains slapping in the sawdust and causing Jerry to lose his footing, slipping and sliding towards the john where, responding to the insults at his poor marksmanship, Jilly barrels through the crowd, crushing the windpipe of a mink wrapped dowager out for a few final thrills who has been felled by a bullet to the spine, Lewis scuttling towards the toilet stalls, within one of which he has hidden his own hold out piece, as he has in joints all over town; the Beretta stashed behind the water box above the chain-pull toilet is yanked loose, the squawking mad man turns and puts four slugs into Jilly's fat as Jilly empties his three remaining rounds into what was left of Jerry's face."

"The last thing Jilly saw before he came out of his coma three weeks later was the flayed arms and legs of the dead original Jerry Lewis twitching in rhythm with the spurts of blood pissing out his bat sized ears."

"That's a bit rich," I say, mopping up pepper sprayed oatmeal doing a weak impression of turkey gravy with a slice of white refined floured foam insulation the FDA used to call bread, already.

"Yeah," says Kenny, "a night to remember. But, this being then, and the collateral dead being female, the men concerned had money change hands and the whole thing was covered up. There may have been a few witnesses iced for the temerity of asking for hush money but the real problem was dead Jerry Lewis."

I have space between my first and second upper right side bicuspids so I take this bent fabric's calling card and saw out the gristle from that turkey patty and spit the twig at the wide bodied rump of our waitress as she bends over to wipe something edible off the scuffed toes of her bowling shoes. I surmise she's presenting, and though I don't drink before noon, her credit at Irv's Liquor Mart will get me through the weekend holed up in her Air Stream Stella beached at  Red and Yuell's yonder before the purloined SS checks of dear departed but not reported Pop comes through Monday morning, the first day of the rest of my remaining life.

"Yep," Kenny belches, "the brain can only handle so much at one time. The world still needed the idea of a Jerry Lewis. It took about six months to train a down and out Lewis impersonator named Sammy Petrillo to take over for the real one but it came up aces-"
"Petrillo took off as the new, more measured Jerry and from this came the beloved films and immeasurable good will and money for the MDA mission." Kenny raised his brown paper bag to toast- "Good shot, Jilly!" he said.       

Begotten-(Shard No. 2)

Origin of the Species

By the time I was born my father was missing an ear. There were several versions of how he lost it, some from the source himself, others from official documents culled from Marine Corps files; the responding MP’s report has yet to turn up but one could assume that scenario would most closely approximate the truth. Every version did include alcohol and a jeep destroyed on impact. The location, even the country, is in dispute but Pop was definitely in uniform somewhere in the far-east. That’s enough for me. Given his genetic imprint, I'm comfortable with any variation save an act of God. He had no truck with the dispensation offered to the religious and you can’t be an atheist and believe in fate. It was his fault, whether someone ran a stop or he had blacked out behind the wheel. He’d insist that somewhere leading up to it, he could have made any number of alternate decisions had he just been alert.

I am my father's son, consequently I don’t believe anything: I either know something or I list the most plausible to the least- I don’t get that from my mollycoddled youth. That’s his gift, along with the blue eyes.

He was honorably discharged, likely because he did see action at Inchon and was clipped by a bullet. Whose bullet we’ll never know, but if he was impulsive he was certainly no coward and the Corps, weighing the balance of service, let the DUI slide and cashiered him with honor.

He was mustered out in San Diego, the town where he began his military career as an attention scrambled fourteen year old knot of unregulated hormones, ecstatic for the discipline and uniformity of military school once emancipated from the backwoods idyll of his moonshine soaked Oregon upbringing. Concepts like family dysfunction were foreign to country folk. Whether you were the sire of inbred simpletons or erudite inebriates you simply made the best of the hand dealt. In those days and in that world there was nothing like consensus reality to be imposed by the state, so the certainty of Pop’s military fantasy was embraced with an enthusiasm that today medical authorities would classify as sociopathic. If he had any recall of his mindset, its certain he’d report even his dreams followed guidelines implied by the academy handbook.

Sad then, I suppose, that he had his glorious career cut short by rolling a jeep while on leave; I might have made it out of somebody’s womb regardless, but I got here through his decisions, reasoned or not, and play the hand I have with about as much foresight, probity and measured response as my father…

Alias

When rich people get radical the poor get dead. Whatever salons the popinjay Irish industrialist Henry Joy McCracken attended where the praises of the French and American revolutions were sung in the late 1790’s, the result was that only the smallest remnant of my clan were able to escape the feverishly ill-conceived plot known as The Wolfe Tone Rebellion; McCraken helped design this farrago with the insane ambition to engage the greatest military force since Imperial Rome. Two of my kind survived; two cousins styled O’Kane, and maybe twelve at the most, whose families had migrated down from Derry and the stalk of Bloskey O’Caine, slayer of Murtaugh O’ Laughlin- the one child almost certainly named John and the other as certain to be named William- slipped out of Antrim as it burned, hidden under corpses of Presbyterians and other disloyal subjects who had been put to the pitchfork by the militias and tossed on carts like codfish to be buried in ditches outside the walls. The Monaghan guard, desperate to show Whitehall they were on the right side of history, had flipped sides and allowed the old divisions to fuel their savagery. Hangings, gutting, pitchcapping and rape attended the collapse and desertion of the rebellion.

 How this slender thread found its way to Cork in the south is all conjecture. What is not in dispute is they claimed an alias, Closkey, after the legend, and their sons and daughters followed as MacCloskey and theirs, McCloskey.

Begotten- (Shard No.1)

The Mick

Pop had no real money his first years in the biz; he needed side jobs paid in cash to beat the tax man. Mickey Cohen, mobster to the stars, moved a lot of untaxed revenue around for the Lansky organization; “copacetic” would be the kind of five dollar word the Mick would use when explaining to my old man their mutual interests.

As it happened, some cafone splattered a rival’s brains all over the ferns at some mob pasta trough and money laundromat in Sherman Oaks in response to some astronomical insult involving all of two C notes and the runt ran off to claim sanctuary in the vestibule of Our Lady of Bounced Checks in Echo Park. Cohen, who was present at the murder, had to negotiate the palooka shooter’s surrender:

"I tell this Dago oil spill: Sam, come out of there, turn yourself in. We take care of our own."

This howler was the shill Cohen gave his death bed biographer as cancer ate his guts. "I tell this soldier he takes the rap, they make a show in court of throwing you life in the joint and then we turn the tables and you're out in two, max, with plenty of play money- twenty five large. Oik! Twelve grand a year! This shtarker couldn't pull that kind of cush on the government's dime in... Eh, gimme that chord. Nurse says to punch this button for a thrill. Morphine. The only good thing about this gut rot, goddammit!"
"So, Mr. Cohen, what about the government?"

"Kiss off, skank! Get me a candy stripper in here to reload my juice. No more today!"

Of course The Outfit lied to the jamook who dutifully turned himself in to a life sentence, never to hear from the Lansky people again.

Just after the whack of Jack ‘The Enforcer’ Whalen, the irrigated stiff Cohen's punk took the rap for, the Mick had another stooge sent to Television City to harvest a crew for some show he was hiding gaming receipts behind. Veterans of the Mick’s previous extravaganzas were suddenly all “on break”, hiding in the john, the sound stage rafters, the floors of their cars. Cohen was toxic after the double-cross of his button man Sam Lo Cigno and his relationship to the working stiffs, backdrop painters today/thumb breakers tomorrow, was strained. Oblivious, Pop caught the stooge’s eye while running with a wood pole across his shoulders; two bouncing buckets tied to the ends- a coolie hauling sand to shore up rail staves. 

“McCloskey!” his boss yelled.

Cohen was a master of the malaprop but no one would edit his ramblings, natch, and like self-anointed savants everywhere, he wanted to look fancy with his largesse, and make a few cleaned up dollars in the process. So it was to one of these scams- likely an opera: let’s say “Rigolletto” ‘cuz I know there’s an opera with that name, and so do you… No, wait, Cohen had no ear for Italian- more likely it was some popular Broadway obscenity like “A Most Happy Fella”- for which my old man got roped into.

His shop steward: Introducing “Gene Gabrielson” -sounds like a name people had back then- he barks again: “McCloskey!” And Pop drops his head to lift the pole over, leaves the buckets standing in the LA sun and runs towards the echo of his name. He ran everywhere- he had ADHD, long before its discovery but already wreaking havoc on addictive personalities nationwide- in fact Pop once got a $500 bonus from a producer for his apparent hustle.

“Yeah, GG?”

Pop eager and ready, panting and scratching his remaining ear. And GG dispatches him to the same Rondelli’s where the stench of The Enforcer’s blood and shit was still clinging to the red velvet wall paper; Pop’s attendance, but not his opinion, was now mandatory-

“And, Mike,” sez GG with a finger erect as a gun barrel, “don’t accept ANYTHING from these people- they will NEVER let you forget-”

“Right, GG!” sez Pop and drives off the lot in his Pollack splattered overalls, pulls on to Los Feliz, past Bronson Canyon, down Ventura Blvd. and is waived around to the back lot of the restaurant by a lumpy bag of shells: Guido, then as now, in pin stripes and a Brylcream cow lick, sun spot cuff links, his button earned best suit, the blackened palm of burning St. Peter directing Pop to park, that black hand a sign this is the real deal and Pop’s balls choke in his throat and I’m not even a blush yet in my Mother’s cheek.

At the kitchen door stood another button man, Tommy Whatsit:

“Mikey- glad you could make it- we stood for Tony Seda in Jilly’s last year when that toothless hag Monkey Shines and his punk Skeezix tried to short our bets at Hollywood Park. Recall…?”

“Uh, sure,” Pop gulps, “Uh, Tommy?” A lucky guess; must have been another lost weekend playing thumb breaker with a fist bulging in his coat as if packing heat to back up this Tommy’s shakedown of some numbers runner drinking too much of the skim…
“Yeah, Mikey- Go on in- change in the can- and stay away from the cannoli!”

The butterflies really swarmed when Pop dropped out of his overalls and slipped into a Brooks Brothers funeral special- it fit to a T. That’s when the wisdom of GG’s edict kicked in. Accept nothing but a pat on the ass from these gorillas. There’s wisdom in their grunts if they can back it up with dismemberment. Every arm and leg they measured for this suit stayed attached at their discretion.
Around the banquet table elevated in the back of the main floor, behind half drawn curtains, the Mick held court, spinning yarns, eating with his hands, tearing off a drumstick, popping grapes in his flapping jaws like a Roman patrician- getting price quotes from various departments, spittle hurled as far as his insults for the temerity of asking market value for plywood; guffaws from the Mick’s familiars a cue to continue, Pop quick with time frames for set construction, cost in materials- no one was listing man hours and he was not going to break ranks- if he was paid it would be a fat stack of unmarked greenbacks, though if nothing but sweat and splinters came of it he’d be labeled reliable and that opened doors and jumped his name over others on call sheets. And the bottom line was it was always more expensive to dump bodies than peel off a couple of fifties and call it even. He’d get something for his troubles and for all we know, this was his seed money for the full dress press he put on my mother when he came-a-courtin’- Mickey Cohen and his dirty Hollywood gangster money greased the skids to get mom in the sack with my whack job Pop and spawn your humble narrator...

How did it happen, then, that I came to Earth in this fashion? I don’t know how telling this is but my mother asked my father at dinner one night, while they were still feeling each other out as spouse material, what this word the other girls in the front office threw around in a fit of pique:
“Fuck?” she asked, what was its meaning?
Flush-faced my father tried to employ the most neutral term at hand:

“It, uh, it means: In-ter-course”, not knowing what she knew of the reproductive process though her scarlet faced embarrassment ended the conversation. However, the subject had been broached…

Moonies-

I don't argue face to face about matters which might routinely be categorized as conspiracies. Nobody, especially men, wants me to explain with cold, geometric logic that they have missed the big picture. Men have precious few emotional resources and they must spend wisely. Consequently, when a man makes a passionate investment in a proposition and then another man tries to expose his folly with intellectual acumen that emotionally shortchanged fool will resist even prima facie evidence before he releases his grip on his pricey purchase. He will be smart on his own time, thank you.

Of my favorite topics to avoid debating in person, the Apollo moon landings (real or staged) lead a strong field. There does not seem to be a middle ground on this. Personally, I don't care if we went up there or not; the seeming pointlessness of the enterprise- sending men rather than machines to the moon (Prepping for human migration to other worlds? Only in a Hollywood pitch session) leaves me indifferent to the purpose, especially since no institution but the military would have any influence on whatever the consequences might be. What is fascinating is how many people defend the landings with real passion, so much so that they feel personally insulted if anyone questions the official story. I can understand this up to a point as I know I can annoy very easily with outrageous statements in the face of heartfelt conviction and at the risk of my all-original teeth; but why such a robust defense for this particular event? I'd understand such a response from a NASA veteran. It would be a gross insult to say such a thing to that person's face- in fact some smart ass confronted Buzz Aldrin with this attitude and got a fat lip for his troubles. But I have friends, family, and co- workers who have no investment emotionally or financially or psychologically in any of it and yet, whereas they will let me entertain them with endless facts concerning Dealey Plaza or The Dakota Apts. or Vermeer the forger, if I clear my throat concerning the moon landings, faces redden, knuckles whiten, teeth grind.

In the face of such irrationality I can only conclude that there is a mass psychological maneuver being employed. Though a poor man has nothing to gain by aligning his sympathies and his vote with the interests of the rich, he often votes conservative anyway; the same basic cognitive disruption process must be going on with the moon landings in an attempt to draw in that portion of the intellectual spectrum that is resistant to the chain pulling that is plied on the undereducated/spiritually simplistic. I'm talking about the empirical side of the collective consciousness and those individuals who are being conned with the same basic emotional template but with the religious facade replaced by a technocratic one.

Given the reliance the mind benders have on war as an economic stimulus, threat demonstrations like the moon missions- and their dexterous components that allow the nominal thrill of conveying humans to and fro- reinforce the helplessness/dependency paradigm vital to the survival of a centralized war making authority even as the old binding myths of angels and demons and the protective embrace of the institutional religions that rescued the faithful from the eternal battle between good and evil fall by the wayside. In addition, consider the preposterous claims of alien abductions, which are really no more than those evergreen archetypes involving the union of the human with the divine- the various virgin birth narratives, for example; these hypnotic recalls are just a side bar of the space age scientific "miracles" NASA has been peddling since our haul of Nazi scientists were chartered to unleash their mayhem at the end of the war; this alien porn is just a hold over for those who still need a trace element of body and blood in their conversion rituals but have cashiered the clouds of heaven and the wings of angels for as yet undiscovered galaxies and glowing metal disks that defy the laws of physics.

Like the JFK situation, though, one can get bogged down in the minutiae of contradictory details and miss the effect the events have had on our perceptions. This is the real problem in my view: the moon landings were not so much a triumph of human spirit, yadda yadda, but a panacea in order to accept the piggy backing advances in military hardware and their attendant destruction. The moon shots were a sales pitch as persuasive as the claims of the old churches that they were the only gateway to salvation. Whether real or imagined, though, the Apollo missions were a bill of goods.

TM

1/9/12