Opinion: Spirits having blown back
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Our relatively newish Blowback feature -- or, as Jeff Jarvis describes it, a ‘lame’ and ‘very controlling effort to add just a little bit of interactivity’ to L.A. Times content -- has its latest installment up now: Rocket Boys author Homer Hickam giving our beleaguered Paul Thornton a what-for about the wisdom of NASA re-conquering the moon. This Hickam passage is well worth the price of admission:
When I was a West Virginia lad of 17, I met a Massachusetts lad of 42 by the name of John F. Kennedy. At the time, I was in a bright orange suit that I had just purchased to wear to the 1960 National Science Fair, where I hoped my home-built rockets would win a medal. Kennedy was in West Virginia trying to win the state’s presidential primary. We met just as he finished a speech designed to convince a crowd of less-than-enthusiastic coal miners to give him their vote. When he asked for questions, I raised my hand and, for some reason, he noticed me right off. Because I was a rocket boy, I asked him what he thought we should do in space. He turned it around and asked me what I thought we should do, and I said we should go to the moon. When he asked me why, I looked around at all those coal miners and said, well, we ought to go up there and just mine the blamed thing! The miners all laughed, and so did Kennedy, and when he agreed with me, he secured all their votes that day. For the longest time, I took credit for the Apollo moon program and, though I’d been shipped off to Vietnam when we got there, I followed the moon flights with a certain personal pride.
Other recent highlights from the Blowback archive -- Diane von Furstenberg disagrees with our editorial against fashion copyrights, Riverside professor R. Stephen White rebuts our ‘No to nukes’ editorial, and dog-lover Robert Hotckiss challenges Joel Stein to pistols at dawn.