6 days ago
Jim Lovell To Donald Trump: From America's Best To Its Worst
Wednesday, 13 August 2025, 1:36 pm
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations
Taken aboard Apollo 8 by Bill Anders, this iconic picture shows Earth peeking out from beyond the lunar surface as the first crewed spacecraft circumnavigated the Moon, with astronauts Anders, Frank Borman, and Jim Lovell aboard. Image Credit: NASA
The astronaut Jim Lovell died last week. Those of us old enough to recall Apollo 8's circumnavigation of the moon, captained by Lovell over Christmas 1968, will tell you that it was nearly as much of a global event as Neil Armstrong's landing less than two years later.
Like most American boys at the time, I followed the Apollo missions closely. 1968 is the same year that '2001, A Space Odyssey' came out, which is considered one of the best films of all time. By grappling with the big questions about humanity's place in the universe, the movie inspired me as a 16-year-old to be a philosopher, though I didn't realise it until ten years later.
Apollo 8 was the first time humans left Earth orbit, and it was a huge gamble for NASA. The United States was locked in an ideological struggle with the USSR, and in John F. Kennedy's words, 'landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth' was a national priority.
Though Apollo 8 wasn't originally scheduled to orbit the moon, NASA took a chance, and the mission was a tremendous success. Equaling the technical feat, there was a moment of global unity that Lovell, Borman and Anders provided that Christmas Eve. As a billion people from 64 countries – one-quarter of the world's population at the time – watched and listened, the three astronauts took turns reading the first lines from Genesis.
This mission was the first time humans had seen the entire Earth from space, and Bill Anders is credited with taking the most famous photo from space, 'Earthrise,' which started the global environmental movement.
Irrespective of the Christian creation myth of Genesis, anyone with half a heart cannot now listen to the Christmas message from humankind's first spacefarers as they orbited the moon without it bringing a tear to the eye. Not out of any traditionally religious sentiment, but because it crackles with the highest aspirations of the human race.
It's hard to fathom now, but the backdrop of the immensely successful Apollo program was the immense failure the Vietnamese War was becoming, and the generational division it was spawning.
The contradiction between America's technological prowess and political/military failure reverberates to this day. Indeed, the unaddressed darkside of American character came to dominate its culture and politics to the point of the present destruction of our democracy.
Both Lovell and Armstrong were men of exceptional integrity, humility, courage, and competence. Lovell's leadership was instrumental in bringing the badly disabled Apollo 13 crew home, and Armstrong's cool competence landed the Eagle on the moon with only seconds of fuel left.
How did the United States come to be ruled by the worst example of its manhood in Donald Trump and his henchmen like Vance, Hegseth and Homan?
The short answer is that the American virtues that produced the space program reached the zenith of their external expression with Apollo, and since the moon landing have been eroded year after year by Americans refusing to turn and face the darkness that produced the atomic bombings and the horrors of Vietnam.
The first Gulf War supposedly exorcised the ghosts of Vietnam, but it led, after the wasted Clinton years, to the 'forever wars against terror.' Even Barack Obama doubled down in Afghanistan, and in his professorial purblindness, kissed the bankers asses in 2009 after the financial meltdown, and opened the door to Trump.
Today, nothing brands the United States as an authoritarian banana republic more than sending the National Guard into Washington DC to stop a crime wave that's been in decline.
As one commentator said, 'No one is really supposed to believe that the deployment of troops to America's most liberal, most racially diverse, and most culturally thriving cities is an actual response to an actual crisis. Rather, the thinness of the pretext is itself a demonstration of power.'
Trump cannot 'impose suffering' however. He can't even impose his will without a prostrate citizenry, focused solely on its personal escapes. In 1968, the American people would have revolted en masse to being ruled by an ugly-mouth tyrant. After all, we threw out the much less criminal and despotic Richard Nixon in 1974.
Authoritarianism in a nation that has no history of democracy arises from longstanding internal conditions of fear and domination in all its forms. Authoritarianism in a nation that gave birth to modern democracy, and prided itself on the power of the people, arises from relatively recent internal conditions of individualism, apathy, indifference and a collective abrogation of responsibility as citizens.
It's pointless to write about 'the core features of fascist regimes,' and refer abstractly to the 'collapse of rhetoric and reality.' Yes, 'the ability to make your lies have the force of fact is a terrifying power,' but in a culture that has long prized 'my perspective,' and 'my truth,' seeking and speaking truth has eroded to the point that few feel there is any such thing as truth anymore.
The continuous drumbeat of 'competing narratives' in the national media only adds to the underlying corrosion. Even in a woefully imperfect democracy, which is what America has arguably been since a few decades after its inception, tyranny emanates not from the top down, as pundits and academics would have you believe, but from the bottom up.
The evil of nationalism is again sweeping the world. Neil Armstrong didn't even want to plant a ridiculous flag on the moon.
Look up at the moon tonight. Now NASA is making a priority of building a Trump-driven nuclear power plant on the lunar surface, motivated by the lunacy of extending nationalistic dominion to our nearest celestial neighbor.
The man-made evil that flows through Trump and Putin means to destroy the human spirit as surely as the American spirit has been destroyed by the perennial denial of self-made darkness. How far we've come technologically, and how far we've regressed spiritually and philosophically. Martin LeFevre
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