July, 1969.
A press release from the University of California announces the foundation of what would become the Internet.
Queen Elizabeth crowns her young son Charles as the Prince of Wales in a televised ceremony seen by an estimated half billion people.
In New York state, the Harlem Cultural Festival plays to enormous crowds of African Americans, in an event lost to history until the film footage of the “Black Woodstock” was discovered in a basement a half century later.
Also that July, Rolling Stones musician Brian Jones is found dead in his swimming pool. David Bowie’s song Space Oddity is released in tandem with the planned launch of Apollo 11.
I was at a summer arts camp on Lake Ontario on the night of July 20, anticipating news from another world. And the news was good - word filtered from broadcast networks to camp counselors to happy campers that the Eagle had landed. NASA had shepherded three astronauts through thousands of miles of outer space, with team leader Neil Armstrong making his epochal “…one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
I recall lying in my bunk bed and looking through a window at a gibbous moon, marveling that men were actually walking around on it. For a nine year-old kid it was a Stan Lee/Jack Kirby fantasy come to life. As I drifted off to sleep, it seemed there were no limits to what clever adults could do.
Truly. As we all now know, the “moon walk” was actually filmed in 1968 under tight security at a Universal Studios back lot by 2001 film director Stanley Kubrick.
Okay, I’m kidding. My point is that in July of 1969 lot of adults were gripped with an understandable spirit of cosmic inflation. Writer and anthropologist Loren Eiseley, noted that within a week of NASA’s triumph a US senator crowed, “We are masters of the universe. We can go anywhere we choose.”
Eisely offered a sober response in his 1970 essay, The Cosmic Prison:
“To speak of man as mastering the cosmos is about the equivelant installing a grasshopper as Secretary General of the United Nations.”
Yet in the jubilee year of American technological triumph, the senator’s remark about being “masters of the universe” seemed more like a statement of fact than hominid hubris.
Like everyone else, I was caught up in techno-elation of the Apollo missions. My faith in American know-how, can-do and tally-ho got mixed up in my Swedish meatball of a brain with other pop culture mythopoetics, including Kubrick’s cinematic head-scratcher, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Marvel’s Manhattan-based superheroes: Spiderman, The Fantastic Four and The Mighty Thor.
It was a time of tremendous optimism. A mere seven years before that giant leap for mankind, the chief architect of the American moon program, President John F. Kennedy, helped launch the sixties’ spirit of human possibility.
The former senator from Massachusetts reigned in US Steel, supported African liberation movements, and after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba he is said to have intended to “break the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind.” He also challenged Pentagon brass by stepping back from the brink during the Cuban missile crisis, and aimed for rapprochement with Nikita Kruschev by skewing American-Soviet competition from an arms race to a space race.
Dangerous stuff.
The Apollo missions were, like the civil rights legislation initiated by Kennedy and inherited by his successor Johnson, carried along by the posthumous momentum of a leader who flew into the Oval Office as a hawk and departed from Dealy Plaza as a dove.
Six decades later, the world is still dealing with the fallout from that loss.
With threats from peacenik leaders removed - including JFK’s brother Bobby and the Reverend Martin Luther King - the monsters could continue to run amok with their public-pirate partnerships. The sixties-era celebration of mind expansion, antiwar protest and technocratic possibility shaded into the seventies-era hangover of Watergate, the war on drugs, and oil shocks.
And the space program?
Well, even astronauts in dune buggies stopping to whack golf balls on the lunar surface failed to hold a jaded public’s imagination. By the time Apollo 11 segued into Apollo 17, I was getting a little bored myself with moon missions. NASA went into budgetary retreat, occasionally piquing public interest with the more cost-effective and scientifically meaningful Viking, Pioneer, and Voyager missions. To say nothing of the International Space Station, the Hubble Telescope and the accursed Space Shuttle flights.
Meanwhile, under the canopy of a heating troposphere, the war in Vietnam and other manned missions to nowheresville finished off my adolescent faith in adult wisdom. This was approximately the same time my interest in comics shifted to books. In my reading I started to feel whiplashed by the bipolar estimates of the human species’ worth and prospects. The Club of Rome had come out in 1972 with its dire prospects for human population growth, The Limits to Growth. A year later the bible of the degrowth crowd appeared, E. F. Shumaker’s Small is Beautiful.
We were both masters of the universe…AND a cancer on the planet.
The cosmos awakened in embodied form to witness itself…AND an ape that had yet to shed aggressive tribalism inherited from its primate past.
Carl Sagan’s “star stuff”…AND Shakespeare’s “quintessence of dust.”
At the Crossroads
Nearly two decades after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left their footprints in the dusty Sea of Tranquility, the Saturday morning cartoon series Masters of the Universe debuted, based on a line of plastic action figures bearing the same name.
Writer Tom Wolfe subsequently reworked the expression to describe Wall Street’s best and brightest in his Dickensian 1988 novel Bonfire of the Vanities. Both the novel and the Hollywood film adaptation are now considered curios from the eighties, but “masters of the universe” live on, not just as a rebranded Netflix animation series but as jokey shorthand for briefcase-carrying barbarians in the financial market, who wreak havoc on everything from pension funds to national economies at the touch of a keypad.
So where are we at now, decades later? At a strange crossroads of history, where the elites, however you define them (masters of the universe, the hedge funds, the oligolopoly, the .001 percent, the deep state, rich dynasties, etc.) have settled on where we stand as a species. Or rather, where we stand and they stand.
The contradictory estimates of Homo sap’s prospects have a new inflection: we’re the virus and they’re the gods in the making. More on this in part 2.
If you watch that terrible new science fiction film "Moonfall" there's a moment when they are about to go into the artificial moon, cause that's the conspiracy theory rabbit hole down which this films plot decends, and one of the main characters takes some needed medication.......which is in the form of a "red pill". A "red pill" Geoff. Is this some kind of disclosure? Maybe the Moon really is artificial, and that's why no one has gone back.
The cat wins ! The bug is a nice touch too...
Looking forward to Part 2...the New Apocalypse?