John Glenn and Buzz Aldrin: To Infirmity and Beyond
I remember when the term “Space-Age” meant the future, now it means the past.
With the death of John Glenn and the recent hospitalization of Buzz Aldrin, it’s starting to look like the greatest days of pioneering and exploration are behind us. Let’s face it, we peaked as a civilization about half a century ago, and now we’re sliding back down on the great decline. Like the parabolic arc of a rocketship, we reached our zenith when we reached the Moon, and now we’re plummeting back to Earth to burn up on re-entry into the atmosphere. Not from velocity, just from our own global warming. Going to the Moon was the greatest achievement of humankind, and by a wide margin, 238,900 miles to be precise. Let’s put that distance in perspective: If you were to take everybody in line in front of you at your local Starbucks on a Monday morning, they would only reach halfway to the Moon. Wow, right?
The Moon is so far away that astronauts Tom Hanks and Lt. Dan couldn’t even get there in Apollo 13. I think it was because the other astronaut was Kevin Bacon, and his very presence caused all their calculations to be off by six degrees. Man, I hope somebody got that. I’m pretty sure Ed Harris was in that movie too, before he started killing robots and spilling paint on the floor. If it sounds like I never even saw Apollo 13, you’re right. I just know that from the title it sounds like another one of those high-number sequels, like X-Men 9, or Star Wars 7, or Oceans 11, and I think I would have to watch the other 12 Apollo movies first to know what was going on. I mean, I saw the first Apollo movie, where he fights Rocky, right? That was a good one. I know they fight again in the sequel, but after that Rocky goes on to fight Mr. T, and Dolph Lundgren, and Viet Nam a few times. I didn’t know there were a dozen more Apollo Creed movies, and in this one he’s in space? Now I have to see it! I learn so much from documentaries. I guess if a cartoon rock band of strippers like Josie and the Pussycats can make it into Outer Space, anybody can.
Going to the moon was man’s highest ambition from the moment the very first cavemen looked up and touched that monolith. Next thing you know, they were throwing bones in the air to the Blue Danube Waltz, and somehow that started the space program. And our Apollo mission was the big, climactic finish of man’s deep-seated longing for the Moon. It wasn’t just the Moonshot, it was the Money shot. And like any good porn actors, our astronauts hit it two more times before they quit it.
And we haven’t been back since. Which is pathetic. And don’t give me any of the usual millennialist Weltschmerz about how there’s no reason to go back, and it costs a lot, and it’s just a bunch of rocks. If you want to put it that way, then Mount Rushmore is just a bunch of rocks, and the Pyramids are just a bunch of rocks, and the Grand Canyon is just a hole where a bunch of rocks used to be. But they’re all sure as hell worth the gas to get there. And you’re not thinking very hard if you can’t come up with a hundred ways the Moon could be used for fun and profit. How a theme park, Disneymoon. And they wouldn’t even have to build Space Mountain, they’d just have to point in any direction and go, “There! There’s a space mountain! And there! There’s another space mountain!”” Then they could point point back to the Earth in the distance and say, “See? It’s a small world after all.” It would certainly be a honeymoon destination. Or would that be a honeyearth destination, it’s kinda messed up. Plus billionaires could hide their money on the Moon to avoid paying taxes, no taxes on the Moon. Today they have to stash their money in off-shore accounts, you know how much they’d love to stash their money in off-world accounts? Good plan, unless the Ferengi find out about it. And the Moon looks like the best place to be to score some alien drugs. No drug laws on the Moon, either. Forget Maui, imagine Lunar Kush from the Sea of Tranquility. In space, no one can hear you cough.
But we’re not going back to the Moon, not anytime soon anyway, not Americans. Not men, not women, and probably not your kids or grandkids. We’ve lost it. The will as a people, the cohesiveness, the cooperation and the belief in a better future that would be needed for such an undertaking. They can’t even fix the roads. Hell, we don’t even have any spaceships anymore. The Shuttles were scuttled and shuttered and scattered and shuffled off to museums and I’m eating skittles. Try saying that, I dare you.
And we don’t have many astronauts left either. And the ones we do have left are getting very, very old. Personally, I’d like to see them go back into space. And luckily, Cape Canaveral is already in Florida. The mission would be called AARP-OLLO 13. They would stop at the International Space Station, but just to ask directions. And then they’d forget where they parked. There is a danger they might freeze to death, simply because they’re all old men, and they would all keep turning down the thermostat. “I’m not paying to heat the whole outdoors, let alone the endless reaches of space!” They’d be the first astronauts to orbit the Earth at no more than 40 miles an hour. They’d be going so slow they’d probably be passed by a Galaxy. A 1967 Ford Galaxy. Upon re-entry, they’d orbit the Earth six extra times looking for a closer parking space. And they’d land in the wrong time zone just so they can still catch the early-bird special.
John Glenn died on December 8th at age 95, and he was an amazing man. He was a fighter pilot in both WWII and Korea, he flew 149 combat missions, his plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire on twelve separate occasions and he survived. Then he went into the space program and became the first American to orbit the Earth. Then he served 20 years in the U.S. Senate. Then at age 77, he returned to space. Has anyone in the world ever achieved more? I seriously doubt it. And yet if you ask people today who the most interesting man in the world is, they’ll say it’s the liver-damaged Latin lothario Don Juan-wannabe in the Dos Equis beer commercials. Well if he’s so goddamn interesting, how come he’s always in some dive bar at closing time, telling his stories to a couple of bored hookers one-third his age, instead of being at home with a family that loves him? How badly did he screw up his life with alcohol and the constant need to be the life of the party? Hell, that’s basically me without the accent, and I’m not the least bit interesting. I wish the voice-over in those Dos Equis commercials that tell us how interesting he is were more honest about his actual exploits:
“He drank so much crappy Mexican beer that even his new liver needs a new liver.”
“Once in a drunken rampage he punched Mother Teresa in the tit because he thought she was a velociraptor.”
“He sold his soul to the Devil for free beer for life, but now the Devil realizes he made a bad deal and wants out of the contract.”
And then there’s his tagline. “I don’t always drink beer, but when I don’t, I still drink beer. So I guess I do always drink beer. Buy me a beer?” And, “Stay thirsty, my friends.” Stay thirsty? That sounds like one of the warning signs of diabetes to me. Put down the beer and get yourself to an endocrinologist. “I don’t always inject insulin, but when I do, I always drink beer. Stay medicated, my friends.” Mega-Dose Equis.
And have you noticed they recently replaced the old “most interesting man in the world” for a new, much less-interesting man in the world? What happened to the old guy, did Trump already deport him? Now that would be interesting. What actually happened is, Dos Equis wanted to change their image to appeal to the growing hispanic population, so they dropped Jonathan Goldsmith, who is actually Jewish, and replaced him with Augustin Legrande, who is actually French. That makes sense. Nothing more popular in Latino culture than Post-Impressionism and delicate Croquembouche puff pastries.
Days before John Glenn died, Buzz Aldrin, the second person to walk on the moon, was evacuated from the South Pole because he was showing signs of altitude sickness. That’s how every news media began their report. Every one of them. Buzz Aldrin, “the second person to walk on the moon”.
Actually, what they’ve called him all these years was “the second MAN to walk on the moon”, which is substantially more accurate, and shorter to say. I’m not sure when they stopped using the word ‘man’ to describe him, but it happened when I wasn’t looking. Which basically just means it didn’t happen on Pornhub. So now the Moon landings are gender-neutral now, and I’m cool with whatever, but I think that tinkering with the descriptive language of historical events is kind of ‘1984’. It’s doubleplusungood. I’d say it was ‘Big Brother’, but today it would have to be ‘Big Sibling’. Which is fine, I guess. Orwell that ends well, I always say. I just don’t see the point in being purposefully vague about the gender of the people who walked on the Moon, there were only twelve of them, and all of them were men. I think people are okay with that fact, and I’m pretty sure that if we had continued to refer to them as men it would not have led to widespread protests at Cape Canaveral. I doubt there’d be hordes of angry progressives marching on the launchpad holding up signs that read “NASA: Not Another Sexist Agency!” and “Rockets=Flying Erections!”
I know there are just as many women as men who want to go to the Moon and are qualified to do so. Although with the women I’ve known, their favorite rocket? It fit in their pocket. And none of the women I know would want to go to Moon, for the same reason they hated every restaurant I’ve ever taken them to: the food sucks and there’s no atmosphere. <moonshot rimshot>
But hey, things change fast; language, everything, whether you notice it or not. That’s how the world changes; not before your eyes, but behind your back. Never while you’re looking. One day, you just turn around and there are no more pay phones. “Where did they go? They were right here like five minutes ago! Thousands of them!” There were rows and rows of pay phones, on every corner of every street in every city in America. And then, there weren’t. Just like that. And I’ll tell you what, I never saw any pay phones get hauled up out of the ground by the roots and loaded onto the back of a flatbed truck. Not once. They were just gone, man. Not even a hole in the sidewalk where they were, just smooth cement. Were workmen ordered to remove them only in the middle of the night, so as not to frighten people with the pace of societal change? Nobody ever sees change coming, you just eventually notice that it happened. They always tell you to “face the future”, but to do that, you better keep looking over your shoulder.
I actually feel sorry for anyone who never knew the cheap thrill of walking by a pay phone and sticking your fingers into the coin return slot, on the very small chance that somebody walked away and left money in there. It didn’t ever actually happen, to my knowledge, but people always stopped to check anyway. Today, these are the same people who buy scratch-off lottery tickets and think they’ll win, and when they don’t win, they buy more scratch-off lottery tickets and think they’ll win. I found a dime in the coin return slot once. Not the coin, but a bag of weed some guy stuffed in there when he was making a call and a cop car parked next to him. Apparently it was the kind of weed that makes you paranoid, because when I smoked it up, I had a weird feeling the pay phone was going to ring and it would be the guy asking for his weed back. Anyway. The coin return slot on pay phones curved upward, so you had to crook and curve your finger as you inserted it, wiggling your fingers looking for coins. Incidentally, this hand motion, repeated over time, eventually led to the discovery of the G-spot. Combine that motion with the motion of dialing an old telephone by inserting your index finger into a hole and making lazy circles, and you weren’t sure if you were giving someone a call or giving them an orgasm.
When I was a kid we had a rotary phone, or as it was called back then, a phone. And they were a pain in the ass to dial. It was relatively easy to dial the lower numbers, they were the closest to whatever the hell you called that curved metal hook that stopped your finger like a miniature Soviet-era sickle, but you had to go almost all the way around the circle for the 8, 9, and 0. And then you had to wait for the wheel to roll all the way back before you could dial the next number. I swear to god, we dropped friends and cut ties with family because their phone numbers had a lot of high numbers that were too much work to dial. “I’m sorry, Grandma, but your number is 797-8990, we love you, but we’ve met another old lady whose number is 232-1311. She’s not you, but she’s a lot easier to talk to. Nothing personal, nanna, we just dialed the low numbers until somebody answered.” And to call somebody in another area code, ten-digits with high numbers? You’d be better off writing them a letter and dropping it in a mailbox. Wait a minute - where the hell did all the mailboxes go? They were right here like five minutes ago! Thousands of them! Right next to the pay phones!
Yeah, I’m old, so what. So I was born before smart phones with unlimited data. So how come It was the generation with the smart phones and the unlimited data that were too stupid to vote? If their phones get any smarter, we’ll be living in a feudal kingdom.
But I am old. I’m so old, until recently, I thought “Galaxy 7 with Unlimited Data” was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In all fairness, he was an Android. And the Enterprise’s mission was to seek out new Verizons. Whoa! Wait a minute! I just remembered something! In the original (best) Star Trek, Kirk’s narration was “...to boldly go where no man has gone before”. But in The Next Generation (not the best), Picard’s monologue was “...to boldly go where no one has gone before.” Holy shit, this gender-neutral-in-space thing goes back further than I thought! I didn’t notice it when it happened, and it was even before Pornhub.
But I digress. Buzz Aldrin, “The second man/person to walk on the Moon.” How tired he must be of hearing that word for the last fifty years. Second. They’ve been calling him that since 1969. Second. Hell, John Glenn just circled the globe three times and he still gets to be called First, Buzz went all the way to the Moon and he gets called Second. Forever to be known throughout all of human history as the guy who had to settle for the Silver Medal in the only race that ever really counted. Poor guy, people think. He was this close to being the famous hero in all the books. Because on July 20, 1969, he stepped on the moon about 20 minutes after Neil Armstrong took the historic first step.
But it’s not what this man deserves to be called. Second place? Bullshit. Buzz Aldrin was the first man on the Moon. Why the hell haven’t they given him his due credit for the last fifty years? Sure, he had Neil Armstrong sitting right next to him, but they touched down on the Moon at the exact same second. They were both the first men on the Moon! You want to know who the real big loser in this adventure is, it’s Michael Collins. That poor son of a bitch went all the way to the Moon with Buzz and Neil, but he had to stay in orbit so they could link up to get back home. If you don’t recognise his name, that’s a testament to how badly he got screwed by history. And no, Liam Neeson did not make a movie about him. Michael Collins is alive and well at age 86, and living in Rome. Hey, here’s a crazy thought, maybe we should start appreciating him a little bit while we still have him, and pay him the kind of attention and importance we normally reserve only for Kardashians.
How insane, that the press, popular culture, and now history books have labeled Buzz Aldrin as anything less than First, and forgotten Collins altogether. When two drivers win a cross-country road race, they crossed the finish line together and they are both first place! Do they say the winner is the one who gets out of the car first? Hell no! When a rowing team wins the gold at the Olympics, do they only give the medal to the guy at the front of the boat? You’re damn right they don’t. Why is Buzz Aldrin a hero? Because he’s managed to accept this injustice with class and dignity, and smile and wave as if it isn’t killing him on the inside. But that’s probably why he’s still chasing adventure by going to the South Pole at age 86. I bet when they got to South Pole, Buzz said to the people with him, “ We made it! Hey, anybody see Neil Armstrong here? No? Nobody sees him? He didn’t get here twenty minutes before us? Oh, right, he died in 2012! Didn’t get here first, did ya, Neil!” Until someone says, “Mr. Aldrin? Wouldn’t that mean that Neil Armstrong got to heaven first?” Then Buzz collapsed and was airlifted to a hospital in New Zealand. If I was Buzz Aldrin, I think I would have killed the first guy to call me Second. Then at least I would be the First astronaut to be charged with First degree murder. Total Buzzkill. Pun intended.
I’m afraid that soon enough, after everybody who went to the Moon has died, and then after everybody who witnessed the Moon landing live on TV has died, that people will come to think that it never really happened. It’ll only take another generation or two of societal lassitude and torpidity until the Moon landing will be listed on IMDB as a Stanley Kubrick film. Which, it just may well be, of course, but that’s a discussion for another day. Someday, the Moonwalk will only be remembered as a 20th Century pedophile’s dance move. And someday the astronauts will only be known for the tired old cliche: “How come they can put a man on the moon, but they can’t…” Fill in the annoyance of your choice. No matter how trivial or insignificant, your personal pet peeve deserves to be compared to the decades of monumental effort, investment, innovation, and sacrifice it took to get us to the Moon. Here’s a few examples:
“How come they can put a man on the moon, but they can’t…make a cell phone battery that lasts more than eight hours?”
Hmm, maybe because Jules Verne, the Wright brothers, and Werner Von Braun didn’t give a shit whether or not you could spend your entire work shift playing with your face on the snapchat filter?
“How come they can put a man on the moon, but they can’t...build a robot that looks just like me that I can send to work to earn a paycheck so I can stay home and chill all day?”
They did. It quit your job on the first day, moved to Los Angeles, became an independent film producer, and he’s engaged to the actress you had a crush on in high school. And he said to tell you she is amazing in bed. He’s living the life you could have, but unlike you, the robot has a drive.
“How come they can put a man on the moon, but they can’t...put a man on the sun?”
A fair question. This should be easy enough. The Sun is a much bigger target, so it should be hard to miss, and it’s very well-lit. And it’s solar powered.
“How come they can put a man on the moon, but they can’t…make a toilet that doesn't amplify my farts 500%?”
Now this one I agree with. Everybody tries to be quiet in the bathroom. So why are toilets shaped exactly like a satellite dish designed to pick up the faintest sounds and signals from space? You're trying to crap as quietly as possible into something shaped to acoustically focus sound and amplify it like a SETI signal receiver. I’m in the bathroom, and people in the living room are like, "Either Aracebo has made contact with Alpha Centauri, or he ate Indian food again." Sure, your ass is pressed to the seat, trying to form a sound-proof seal, but that just changes the pitch. Like when Louis Armstrong used to mute his trumpet with a plunger. He probably thought of doing that while on the toilet, why else would he use a plunger?
Mine might be: “How come they can put a man on the moon, but...we still call the sky the limit?"
But if I could only pick one, I think it would have to be: “If they can put a man on the moon...why can’t that man be Donald Trump?”
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