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A beautiful post, Gary. I love that song by Roberta Flack, and will always associate her with it. And now we live in FL, and watch the launches from our kitchen window. So much has changed since the ’70’s. Thanks
General Bernard Schriever, who ran the USAF missile-development program, was profiled by Time Magazine in a 1957 cover story. The article referred to Schriever and his crew as “tomorrow’s men.” In my post about Schriever, I noted that:
In retrospect, this was true only if one defined “tomorrow” as the interval between the appearance of the article and, say, July 1969. Actually it could be argued that Schriever was a man of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, the era of the Panama Canal and the Hoover Dam and the Empire State Building. In our current era, the execution of such projects has become difficult almost to the point of impossibility.
The post is here: A Fiery Peace in a Cold War.
Thanks for your kind words, Susan! Here’s a fan-created montage from The French Connection, backed by Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon.
There are poignant moments in the past that are premonitions of the future; at about 2:00 to 2:05, the building under construction in the background is the World Trade Center.
It’s funny how we’re always mining the past to try to predict the present, much less the future. The signs are all there, if we can read them, but so are the signs of many things that never do come to pass – and I wonder what hit movies and music of 1971 today are forgotten because they point to nothing, but seemed important at the time. Like the images in Galadriel’s mirror, which is which is something not even the wise can always discern.
Jonathan Pageau is an Orthodox Christian writer and wood carver (and friend of Jordan Peterson) who likewise studies the signs of the times to see what might yet be coming, looking for archetypes and patterns rather like a Jungian, but with a Christian lens. His youtube / podcast series The Symbolic World would I think be of great interest to you.
I am familiar with Sargon of Akkad. Whenever he goes into his “I am an atheist” spiel, I fast-forward through the next five minutes. The rest of his stuff is pretty good.
I’ll have to look up Mr. Pageau.
In this discussion Jonathan ribs gently on this, as both Sargon and Pageau are vehemently agreeing that the “New Atheism” is an intellectual and moral failure, and an arrogant and smug one at that.
My father saw the launch live and said it was tremendous. Three years later he briefed six Navy astronauts about GPS including two of the Apollo 17 crew. He said that they were extremely smart engineers.
L-R Cernan (Apollo 17), Mattingly, dad, Evans (Apollo 17), Crippen and Kerwin in dad’s office at the Naval Research Lab.
A great picture, Richard!
Here I am in 2012 with Jack Schmitt the other member of Apollo 17’s crew.
When John F. Kennedy declared, “We choose to go to the Moon”, he was reaffirming a program he inherited from the Eisenhower administration. Even the name—Project Apollo—had already been picked out. But Kennedy, who could easily have dumped the program, as his science advisors recommended, instead chose to give the ‘60s one of its final defining moments, and a too-rare positive one.
So many other of the country’s big projects of the early Sixties hadn’t worked out as hoped: optimism over civil rights, urban renewal, construction of new college campuses, overseas wars.
Sargon is not what I would call a evangelist (anti-evangelist?) but still, to me it is like someone announcing that they are color-blind. The more time you spend on it, the more tedious it becomes. The big problem with the “new” atheists is that Augustine blew their best arguments to splinters and rags over a millennium and a half ago.
And this is something Sargon concedes easily here: the New Atheists were empty suits.
Man, I love Popeye Doyle and, for his entire filmography, Gene Hackman. I’ve seen him out and about on his bike or walking on Islamorada’s millionaire mile. I was either running a long run or doing a ruck march (back when I could do such things).
Unlike some other celebs I’ve bumped into down here, Hackman was and is immediately recognizable. Hey, that’s Popeye Doyle! I am, of course, as an international man of mystery (back when I could do such things) way too cool to drop in genuflection and and ululate a Wayne’s World “Not Worthy” iteration. Just a head chuck and a thumbs up. Got the same back. Very cool.
When Hackman got clipped by a pickup on his daily bike ride in Islamorada, they life-flighted him out from the football field of Coral Shores High School, from whence 3 of 4 graduated. He’s kinda sorta part of the community down here.
BTW, the film of his that left the biggest impression for me was The Domino Principle, in which he played Roy Tucker, a guy I had a lot of empathy for even as a kid. Trust no one.
Man, how did I miss that one?
Well worth your time.
I have to give Eastwood props for steely confidence in going with the slow version we know today. After all, he wasn’t fully “Clint Eastwood” yet; to the music industry people around Flack, he was just a young white actor, who hadn’t proved himself as a jazz and music expert in his own right.
Eastwood’s films are an interesting case. He’s certainly got a conservative standpoint, but he doesn’t go out of his way to make his films a cliched idea of conservative subjects. He’s not family friendly each and every time. He doesn’t shy away from the subject of sex if the plot demands it.
I had never heard the story about “First Time … ‘ in Play Misty for Me. But it makes perfect sense. As you state, Eastwood is a musician (he even composes movie scores now), and I’ve always felt his musicality manifests itself in his signature pacing of his films. Which includes the sex scenes. Bridges of Madison County comes to mind; the film seems almost to follow a musical score. (Always such a pleasure to read your posts, GMcV. You’re missed.)
That’s quite interesting to have you connect all those things about the year 1972 for us. I haven’t seen any of those movies, but of course have heard the Roberta Flack song many times. The most exciting thing I remember about that year is that our oldest was born that autumn. I hadn’t been particularly excited about the prospect of having kids, just figuring it was a part of life. Then she made her appearance in the delivery room, and everything changed. So to me, that’s the background (or foreground) against which all these other things happened. Without your writeup, I couldn’t have told you that that was when they happened.
Great post, Gary. It occurs to me that although I have heard about “The French Connection” since I was a kid, I’ve never seen it. I’ll have to try to keep an eye out for it.
You’ve never picked your feet in Poughkeepsie?
You definitely want to see that movie, Randy.
I hope it was the last departure in the 20th Century, but not the final ride home from the Moon.
Nice trailer, and great tag line. But the line was much better when delivered by Herod to his friend( the Emperor of Rome) in “ I , Claudius”.
1972 is also when protesters put stickers on subway ads that read, “This ad insults WOMEN”, and picketers signs said “Do women have to be naked to enter the Metropolitan Museum of Art?” (this referred to a perceived lack of female artists, not to a novel interpretation of “Free Admission Day”).
In 1970-72, there was far more left wing and racial violence than today, far more police killed, far more bombs going off. It wasn’t a happy time. That’s why I refer to those days as “Woke War I”. To paraphrase a line in Ford v Ferrari, “We’ve fought a war here before”.
In ten years, America came back; in twenty, even New York City came back from the brink. But in life as in politics, there are no final victories.
Never watched that. Loved the book, which I’ve read four or five times now.
BritBox might have it. I saw it when it came out.
Mike Duncan gave it a mini-review in his “The History of Rome” podcast. He noted that Robert Graves was a bona fide member of the “Livia killed everybody school” when it came to the period before Claudius became emperor.
Made me laugh, anyway.
Sian Phillips was fantastic as Livia. Meaner than a snake.
That line about “The Hun is either at your feet or at your throat” was very timely when it was written.
Another prominent image of 1972. Notice that “despite” its conservative political message, it’s as smartly designed as any ad of the period. Volkswagen pioneered the ’60s style of having only a couple of main points, punctuated by periods, and surrounded by white space. If the name of the Committee to Re-Elect the President hadn’t been turned so easily into “c.r.e.e.p.”, it would get more recognition today as the operation behind an FDR/Landon scaled victory.
Maybe you recognize something familiar in this story. A great nation that feels humiliated, that’s been through tough times and a bitter comedown is unlikely to turn to an ascetic saint for leadership. Sometimes it takes an intelligent, ruthless SOB who doesn’t need much approval from his supposed “betters”.
Sentimentalized? Sure. But that’s the Nixon that we knew at the time, the one America voted for twice.
And we’re not the only country that’s ever been in this situation, needless to say:
I have to laugh…even the hands are posed similarly to Norman Rockwell’s original.