The Sixties

“Fly me to the Moon, let me sing among those stars,” Frank Sinatra has sung since 1964. Four years later, with the help of NASA, Stanley Kubrick left Earth with 2001: A Space Odyssey. This was eighteen months before Neil Armstrong made “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” a recurring refrain of the twentieth century. Just add Tintin, though unknown in the United States, and the dreams and mythologies that were well ahead of Apollo. Forty years later, Neil Armstrong, Aldrin and the others are redolent of yesteryear and the has-been sixties, including the carefully coiffed astronaut hair cuts and Pierre Cardin design of the space vessels.

Woodstock also took place in 1969, which was was the same enchanted summer as the “moon conquest.” It was also the year of Easy Rider, Hair, and of violent battles, from Chicago to the Red Brigade, and from Nixon to Arafat.

Well, what does the moon say, forty years later, in the middle of this century’s chaos? The images still make you dream, even in black and white. The Soviet Union, the great rival of the time, has disappeared, the moon has been forgotten and the astronauts of the 1960s have become old gentlemen walking with small steps. The original moonwalk, however, remains. July 20 reminds one of an unending cultural matrix that all the great American writers, from Mailer to Updike and even Tom Wolfe, have tried to capture. Music and Hollywood have never forgotten the Dark Side of the Moon. Space is truly the final frontier, but today it remains an imaginary, doubtful utopia, far from the certitudes of NASA and Kennedy. Return to Earth.