What is the greatest thing America has ever done? America has done many great things, whether “great” means powerful, good, or any derivation or combination of the two. America has many great accomplishments, great failures, great acts of selflessness, and great acts of selfishness. This contradictory tapestry is predicated upon America’s one dominant characteristic: Greatness.
But what is our greatest deed? What is the one thing America has done that will leave a mark more permanent, more universal, than any other? I consider the two greatest men to ever live to be Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler, so it cannot be stressed enough that greatness does not mean goodness. With that in mind, it just so happens that America’s greatest deed was good as well.
Project Apollo. That was America’s greatest iteration, its moment in the sun, which was all the brighter in the atmosphere-less moon. Only America could have the balls and the brains to send men to another world, after publicly predicting that they would before the requisite hardware even existed, and then put its spaceships in museums and switch its focus to the more noble scientific pursuits of Rogaine and Viagra.
What else has America done that is great? A short list would be changing the nature of government, changing the nature of economics, changing the nature of individual identity, changing the nature of warfare, changing the nature of technology, changing the nature of food, and changing the nature of transportation. That was a short list.
But all those things had been done previously. America just did them better, bigger, faster, more productively and, ultimately, more destructively. But, Apollo. That was something without precedence. Beneath the Cold War cock fight was no small amount of romantic humanism; America was the first country that dared to leave Earth, and it was not just due to wealth. It was due to Greatness, and the ridiculously absurd, but ultimately vindicated, idea that there was literally nothing that America couldn’t do.
John Kennedy vowed to land on the moon by the end of the 1960’s. This would be akin to someone vowing to land on Pluto by 2015; the theoretical framework is there, but the physical and logistical manifestation of such a mission simply had not been invented. They existed on chalkboards. They existed on sliderules. They existed in computers with less computing power than my 1994 Toyota Tercel, never mind my $30 cell phone.
There was no wealth to be gained by going to the moon. There were no minerals to mine there, no moon-men to toil in sweatshops. There was nothing but expense and danger. And Greatness.
Part of greatness is the absurdity of it. It is absurd, to put it kindly, that America went to the moon while its cities were burning, its army was being mauled in rice paddies, its leaders were being assassinated, and its youth were flirting heavily with nihilism. But we did it.
And at the end of 1968, the most violent American year since the Civil War, three American squares filmed the earth rising over the horizon of the moon for live television, for all of their jaded and frightened and stoned and bloodied countrymen and worldmen. By going to the moon, they discovered the earth.
I personally doubt that the United States of America will exist in one hundred years. I have no doubt, however, that America is great. Every person that is alive now looks every night upon a moon that we have walked on.
But what is our greatest deed? What is the one thing America has done that will leave a mark more permanent, more universal, than any other? I consider the two greatest men to ever live to be Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler, so it cannot be stressed enough that greatness does not mean goodness. With that in mind, it just so happens that America’s greatest deed was good as well.
Project Apollo. That was America’s greatest iteration, its moment in the sun, which was all the brighter in the atmosphere-less moon. Only America could have the balls and the brains to send men to another world, after publicly predicting that they would before the requisite hardware even existed, and then put its spaceships in museums and switch its focus to the more noble scientific pursuits of Rogaine and Viagra.
What else has America done that is great? A short list would be changing the nature of government, changing the nature of economics, changing the nature of individual identity, changing the nature of warfare, changing the nature of technology, changing the nature of food, and changing the nature of transportation. That was a short list.
But all those things had been done previously. America just did them better, bigger, faster, more productively and, ultimately, more destructively. But, Apollo. That was something without precedence. Beneath the Cold War cock fight was no small amount of romantic humanism; America was the first country that dared to leave Earth, and it was not just due to wealth. It was due to Greatness, and the ridiculously absurd, but ultimately vindicated, idea that there was literally nothing that America couldn’t do.
John Kennedy vowed to land on the moon by the end of the 1960’s. This would be akin to someone vowing to land on Pluto by 2015; the theoretical framework is there, but the physical and logistical manifestation of such a mission simply had not been invented. They existed on chalkboards. They existed on sliderules. They existed in computers with less computing power than my 1994 Toyota Tercel, never mind my $30 cell phone.
There was no wealth to be gained by going to the moon. There were no minerals to mine there, no moon-men to toil in sweatshops. There was nothing but expense and danger. And Greatness.
Part of greatness is the absurdity of it. It is absurd, to put it kindly, that America went to the moon while its cities were burning, its army was being mauled in rice paddies, its leaders were being assassinated, and its youth were flirting heavily with nihilism. But we did it.
And at the end of 1968, the most violent American year since the Civil War, three American squares filmed the earth rising over the horizon of the moon for live television, for all of their jaded and frightened and stoned and bloodied countrymen and worldmen. By going to the moon, they discovered the earth.
I personally doubt that the United States of America will exist in one hundred years. I have no doubt, however, that America is great. Every person that is alive now looks every night upon a moon that we have walked on.
Forget 9/11. Apollo changed everything. America sent men to a place where they saw the earth for what it is: a single organism, a single family, fragile beyond all comprehension, suspended on an invisible string and surrounded by invisible scissors. America showed the world what the world is. And that is Greatness.
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