No matter how far off the rails present-day America goes, there are still moments in our national story that will never lose their brightness. July 20th, 1969, is one of these.
This blog has
been criticized for its pessimism, an attitude which shouldn’t surprise anybody
when I call myself “Twilight Patriot” and identify myself as someone “with eyes
open wide enough to see the coming nightfall.” Nonetheless, due attention
should be given, from time to time, to the sort of moments that came to define
American greatness – the things on which I am so dismayed to see the curtain
being pulled down.
Every nation is born in a valiant
struggle for freedom, and every empire meets its end in an orgy of debauchery
and mass injustice. But the Americans will always be remembered as the nation
that, in between those times, sent a few of its bravest men to walk around on
the moon.

Although
I despise the civilization that presently surrounds me, the one thing about America
that I will never cease to love is its history, and today, 20 July 2019, marks
the 50th anniversary of one of the great moments in that history.
People
have a lot of opinions about the Apollo Program and the moon landings. Were
they a hoax, a waste of time and money, a brash offshoot of the cold-war
rivalry with the Russians? I will not waste time debating whether they were a
hoax, and as for whether Apollo was a waste of money or a minor spinoff of the
cold war, those notions can be laid to rest simply by thinking about how 1969
will be viewed in the coming centuries: my belief is that the fact that men
walked on the moon will be remembered, and the surrounding politics and
economics will be forgotten.
And that
is the beauty of it. Exploration and discovery need no validation outside of
themselves. From the dawn of time, men have been venturing to go beyond the
next hill, to climb the unclimbed summit, and to see that which no one had seen
before. People will remember the moon landings as a time when mankind did such
a thing. The bootprints on the moon, and the knowledge that the number of men
who have walked there is no longer zero, but twelve, will endure beyond the
fall of our civilization.
I am not
a techno-utopian, and I will not wax eloquent about how space travel is the
solution for anybody’s problems here on earth. But that isn’t what exploration
has ever been about. The awareness that someone is out there, pushing the
boundary into the unknown and sharing that experience with the rest of us here
at home, is enough to satisfy me, as, I am sure, it is enough to satisfy
millions of other Americans, especially the young and the young at heart.
I don’t
think that the government ought to be spending large sums of money on a new
space race, nor do I think that there is any chance of a return to the moon in
the near future along the lines that the Trump administration is promising. The
culture and politics of the 1960s are those of a bygone era. If there is to be
another round of adventuring, let private adventurers lead it and fund it
themselves – there are plenty who are willing to do so.
Right
now, American civilization is on its downslope. As I have explained elsewhere
on this blog, I expect the next half century to be a time of brutal and
well-deserved decline. And the people that are left to pick up the pieces will
remember the fallen regime as one of the biggest human rights abusers that the
world has ever seen – as well they should, because to do otherwise would be to
insult the memory of its victims.
But I hope
that, in times to come, as the American collapse takes the place of the fall of
Rome as the historical archetype of debauchery and excess, America’s earlier
eras will retain their brightness, and revolutionary America will be a model to
be looked up to, as was the Roman Republic. In our day, when something is
compared to Rome, we know from the context whether the speaker has in mind the
sprawling empire of Nero and Domitian, or the city-state of Poplicola and
Cincinattus; in the future, when men and women speak of America, I hope that
the listeners will likewise know when the nation of Washington and Jefferson
is being referred to.
And there
will also, I hope, be a place for the America of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin,
and Michael Collins.

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