In two days it will be exactly 40 years ago that three very brave men took to space to make the final journey to the moon, and land on it. They accomplished this extraordinary feat on July 20, 1969. I still remember the live footage I saw on television, that evening just after nine.
That in itself was an extraordinary feat too, because I was 5 years old at the time and my long term memory was probably still under construction. Never mind that. I remember it all very clearly, possible or not.
The 40 years anniversary triggers – besides the genuine tributes – a host of loony crap about the alleged lunar landing hoax. Clearly every event that is more complicated than a regular sports match somehow brings such nonsense about. Naturally, a sports match is something that an uneducated simpleton can easily understand. In times of big tournaments, like the soccer world championship for instance, there are suddenly 3 billion soccer specialists around, who can tell you all about the games, the quality of the players, their fielding, the referees and the accommodations available to the athletes. Yet, these same people would be writing “cunt” with a “d” under normal circumstances. My point being: soccer is obviously something for the simple of mind, because everybody “understands” it.
To an elitist like me, who values intellect, reads a book regularly and tries to expand the mind beyond mediocrity, the game is lost, so to speak.
One only has to take something slightly more complicated than a match and one can see how the crowd has real difficulties wrapping its mind around it. Mister Simpleton will try to imagine how he would put a man on the moon. His sparse braincells, usually engaged to drink his beer and breathe at the same time, are now asked to cooperate and comprehend something, that could with good rights be called the most difficult mission ever undertaken by mankind. How can he? It is no wonder at all, that the poor bugger will fail at understanding the enormity of this accomplishment, and thus he will come to the conclusion that it must have been bogus. “A man on the moon? Hell, I can barely stack two bricks on one another, so how can THEY go to the moon….?”
Well, I do not doubt the lunar landings for one second. I have great respect for what was done there and I will sit in front of the television during the next few days to celebrate this amazing result of human ingenuity. And I will secretly laugh at the idiot who got punched in the face by mister Buzz Aldrin, who was a member of the first team on the moon. Aldrin felt very insulted by this idiot, who could not resist to point out that the moon landing had been staged somewhere in an earthly desert and was never really executed on our precious satellite.
Good for you Buzz, I would have done the same thing. The lunar missions are a very special and outstanding piece of our history, and we should cherish them and appreciate them for what they are. But most of all, we should respect all those people who were involved in making the missions a success, and who in a concerted effort eventually put the moon within our physical reach. And the fools who don’t believe that it ever happened, can go and play soccer somewhere.
