From the Moon to This Damn Virus

I started reading One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moonby Charles Fishman (Simon & Schuster, 2019) today. So far I found that the Moon smells, but that is a small part of the fascinating story of how we as a nation and as a species achieved the goal.

From the introduction:

"... when President John Kennedy declared in 1961 that the United States would go to the Moon, he was committing the nation to do something we couldn't do. We didn't have the tools, the equipment - we didn't have the rockets or the launchpads, the spacesuits or the computers or the zero-gravity food - to go to the Moon. And it isn't just that we didn't have what we would need, we didn't even know what we would need. We didn't have a list; no one in the world had a list. Indeed, our unpreparedness for the task goes a level deeper: we didn't even know how to fly to the Moon. We didn't know course to fly to get there from here."

In short, Kennedy challenged the country to do something that no one anywhere  in the world had a clue how to do.

As a kid, still in grade school, the space program fascinated me. As I grew older I discovered that my scientific acumen was nowhere near the level I would have needed to be an astronaut, but back in that classroom of my youth, I wanted the program to succeed.

I would stay home as late as possible, eyes glued to the television screen, on mornings of launches. Sometimes, when a launch was paused for whatever reason, I would head to school with my transistor radio with its single earbud. I would string the wire through my sleeve and lean on one arm with my hand cupped over my ear. I tried to look attentive to whatever Sister Mary Delores was saying, but my mind and thoughts were with the radio broadcast of a launch, hoping that she wouldn't notice me.

Those were the early days of the program. I was in college by the time we finally landed on the Moon, but I remember that night vividly - that first step, the words of Armstrong, the glee in the face of Walter Cronkite.

The thing about starting this book is that I know how it ends. We get there and we don't go back. The stuff of the Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (released a full year before we landed) is still the stuff of fantasy and dreams. I believe we should have and could have done much more, but we didn't. Now we don't even have the rockets or equipment to get there anymore, and we have to buy seats on Russian rockets that are barely modernized versions of the Titan rockets we used.





That brings me back to the words of the book's introduction. We are faced with a rapidly spreading corona virus. As I write this today, 40,000 Americans have died from COVID-19. As I write this, my wife's father is in an ICU with it. As I write this, some people are protesting the stay at home orders in many states, demanding that those orders be lifted.

Meanwhile, the President of the country is blaming everyone else for the slow response of his administration to this virus. He is blaming governors for not doing more testing when the machines for testing don't have the materials for testing. He is blaming the previous administrations for a depleted stockpile of supplies when his team has had three years to replenish that stockpile. He is blaming Democrats for not passing legislation when the GOP controlled Senate is not voting on bills passed by the House. He is blaming the press for asking tough questions and not praising him enough.

Countless scientists and care givers are combating the virus. Hospitals and doctors and nurses are trying new things to what works best for treatments. People are working on vaccines around the globe. People are testing old and new medicines to discover efficacy and dosage levels.  Some have even suggested that perhaps the answer lay in the often used and perfectly safe oral polio vaccine.

The point is that, like the beginnings of the space endeavors, nobody has a clue of what to do or how. This is going to take a coordinated and constant effort similar to the trials and failures that lead to countless discoveries and advances in space. The point is that humans can and will find a way to get past this, to get back to work, to find a new normal in our lives.

Without the space program of the 60s, we would't have the lives we have today. The drive to get to the Moon opened the digital age in which we have grown comfortable. Integrated circuits, telecommunications, weather services, GPS in our cars, all the things we use and take for granted. The space program gave us the normal we have today.

The concerted effort to find a a way to, if not cure the virus, at least live with it is necessary. It was a concerted effort to cure polio that found a vaccine. It was a concerted effort to get to the Moon. Our normal lives understand we have to get vaccinated so that polio doesn't come back. Our normal lives understand the devices with which we live and on which we have come to depend.

It is time for this country to come together, not complain about having to stay home. Let the experts and scientists get us ready to launch again.

Participating with John Prine

Countless tributes of John Prine have been written. It sure doesn’t seem fair that this corona virus thing took him. No words can truly express our sympathies to his wife and family.

When I graduated from college in 1971, I was asked to give the commencement speech as a student. I must have heard John Prine’s “Spanish Pipedream” and it must have stuck in my brain since I remember that I used some lines about going out into the world sans TV and raising peaches.

Prine really wasn’t fully in my life again until Don Breen, a guy I used to work with, gave me a couple of boot-legged albums, oh, I’d say 20 years ago. I had obviously heard of Prine, probably through the MIdnight Special radio show in Chicago. I did hear more Steve Goodman and Fred Holstein, but Prine was leaving town about the same time I moved to finish school in Wisconsin. I suppose that if he, and I, had stuck in Chicago longer, I would have heard of him more, but would have the rest of the world?

That first full, more than fleeting, encounter with him, though, left an indelible mark on me. I will be forever grateful to Don. In that collection the quirky “Dear Abby” made me laugh out loud. “Hello in There” left me crying. To hear most Prine fans talk, he had that effect on almost everyone.

I can’t say I have a favorite John Prine song. There are so many. It is interesting that so many other performers readily pick songs to cover in the tributes abounding since his death. Susan and I cover four of his songs when we do gigs as Wattle & Daub.

Those are:
Angel of Montgomery
Paradise
That’s the Way the World Goes Around
In Spite of Ourselves

We like to say in our gigs that Prine wrote that last one just for us. We’re kind of silly that way. Prine used to tell a story that he wrote the song to run during the closing credits of a Billy Bob Thornton film that was never released. He also told the story of a lady who asked him to sing the “Happy Enchilada” song. “You know,” she told him. “It’s a happy enchilada and you think you’re gonna drown.” I’ve heard Prine tell that story a number of times in shows.

Susan and I were lucky enough to see him as the closer at the Newport Folk Festival in 2017. 
You can hear it here.

The festival has a nice montage of that concert in this video:

I’m not sure why, but Prine’s death has affected me as much as Pete Seeger’s did in 2014. It was the year after my first wife passed away. I had picked up the guitar again, one that had sat idle during her long illness. I started playing the old songs I used to know and some new ones. I liked when people sang along, the way Pete made them do.

Pete always wanted people to sing. He once said, “There is something about participating; it is almost my religion. If the world is still here in 100 years, people will know the importance of participating, not just being spectators.”

Pete had lots of causes and demanded that people at least pay attention. He taught us the words, and taught us that we are stronger when we sing together. And, good teacher that he was, he provided a moral guide post for us all.

Prine’s songs had people singing along, too. Probably because they knew all the words already. He didn’t have to teach us the words. We learned them by ourselves. We laughed, we cried, they became a part of us.

We got to participate when we heard these guys, probably more than we even realized. Pete was our conscience. John Prine was our soul.