BrinkLindsey.com – The Age of Abundance

Today is the 38th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The space program was the great enthusiasm of my boyhood, and it was watching the events of July 20, 1969 that awakened that enthusiasm. Back then the meaning of the first moon landing seemed obvious: it was an early victory in humanity’s conquest of space. Perhaps that conquest will eventually resume, and Apollo’s promise will be redeemed.

Now, however, the meaning of Apollo looks different: from our current vantage point, it looks like the high water mark of technocracy. Over the course of the twentieth century, the dream of space travel waxed together with the dream of central planning and social engineering. An early visionary of the final frontier was the Fabian socialist H. G. Wells; another was the Russian rocket pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who ended his life as a committed communist. Rocketry advanced first under the Nazis, then under the Soviets. Krushchev pushed forward after Sputnik with an ambitious space program in the belief that the Space Age would herald the transition to true communism. Which, in turn, provoked a response from the New Frontier/Great Society technocracy of the “best and brightest,” culminating in the landing at Tranquility Base.

By the time of Apollo’s triumph, however, the tide had already turned. Krushchev had been ousted five years earlier, his fantasies of the communist millennium replaced by Brezhnev’s disillusioned corruption. The New Frontier had ended in horror; the Great Society, in tragic failure. A few weeks after Apollo 11, the counterculture’s rebellion against technocracy peaked at Woodstock.

As Cold War rivalry cooled and the technocratic vision lost its hold on the imagination, the Space Age fizzled. The gleaming future gave way to rust and ruin, as evidenced in the photo at the top of this post. The picture is of Launch Pad 34 at the Kennedy Space Center, site of the Apollo 1 fire and the launch of the first successful Apollo mission, Apollo 7. The picture was taken 10 years ago, on the 30th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire.

But the dream of space has survived the demise of its technocratic host. A new era of private spaceflight may now be starting, funded primarily by fortunes created by the Internet revolution. And what a wonderful twist that is. Spaceflight’s founding era rose and fell with the vision of technology as an instrument of top-down control. How wonderful if its rebirth can be midwifed by the vision of technology as an instrument of personal liberation.

Here is a video clip of the moon landing:

In a recent issue of Rolling Stone, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz assesses “The Legacy of 1967″ — with striking parallels to my own look back at the Summer of Love (excerpted from my book) in the current issue of Reason. Both of us stress the dualistic nature of developments that year, as tumultuous changes in American society gave birth to new formulations of both left and right.

For my part, I start off in April of that year, with the announcement in San Francisco of the Summer of Love and, that same week, the formal dedication ceremonies for Oral Roberts University in Tulsa. Wilentz, in similar style, starts at the beginning of 1967, as Country Joe and the Fish ushered in the new year at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco while 24 hours later, up in Sacramento, Ronald Reagan was sworn in as governor of California at the stroke of midnight.

The tone of the two articles, though, is quite different. I try to describe that watershed year and the decades that followed from a perspective that transcends the left-right dualities of the era. Wilentz, however, remains stuck solidly within them. He writes as a committed partisan of the left, still fighting the good fight. Check out this paragraph near the conclusion of Wilentz’s piece:

A few years ago, Bill Clinton offered an astute assessment of the decade that shaped the politics of his generation. “If you look back on the Sixties and on balance you think there was more good than harm in it, you’re probably a Democrat,” Clinton observed. “If you think that there was more harm than good, then you’re probably a Republican.” That polarization is the real legacy of the Summer of Love. On a cultural level, our daily lives – the music we listen to, the air we breathe, the rights we are afforded – remain shaped, in large measure, by the progressive movements of that era and the victories they achieved. But on a political level, the social and religious forces who are determined to roll back those victories are still in charge.

For Wilentz, the story of 1967 and its aftermath is basically a simple morality play of good vs. evil. The left is the party of progress; the right, the party of reaction. And while the left’s remaking of the culture is a liberation to be celebrated, the right’s capture of political power is a terrible wrong still to be righted.

I don’t see it that way. Rather than white hats vs. black hats, I see a more complicated picture. On the left I see liberation mixed with destructive nihilism; on the right, hidebound reaction with a saving conservatism:

The events in San Francisco and Tulsa that spring revealed an America in the throes of cultural and spiritual upheaval. The postwar liberal consensus had shattered. Vying to take its place were two sides of an enormous false dichotomy, both animated by outbursts of spiritual energy. Those two eruptions of millenarian enthusiasm, the hippies and the evangelical revival, would inspire a left/right division that persists to this day.

That split pits one set of half-truths against another. On the left gathered those who were most alive to the new possibilities created by the unprecedented mass affluence of the postwar years but at the same time were hostile to the social institutions—namely, the market and the middle-class work ethic—that created those possibilities. On the right rallied those who staunchly supported the institutions that created prosperity but who shrank from the social dynamism they were unleashing. One side denounced capitalism but gobbled its fruits; the other cursed the fruits while defending the system that bore them. Both causes were quixotic, and consequently neither fully realized its ambitions. But out of their messy dialectic, the logic of abundance would eventually fashion, if not a reworked consensus, then at least a new modus vivendi.

Which version rings truer to you? Who was more successful in stepping outside the viewpoints of the drama’s participants and attaining a truly historical perspective?

Top honors go to the feel-good classic of Aquarian consumerism, “I’d like to teach the world to sing,” the centerpiece of Coke’s immensely successful “It’s the Real Thing” campaign:

The TV spot debuted in 1971, and it was so popular that it spawned two hit pop versions (sans Coke references), one recorded by the Hillside Singers and another by the New Seekers. The latter reached #10 on the U.S. pop charts; the former, #13. For more about the song, the ad, and the commercial spinoffs, read here.

And as a special bonus, here’s the Christmas version of the ad:

In terms of sheer effectiveness in zapping fairly complex information into consumers’ noggins, I don’t see how you can beat the McDonald’s Big Mac jingle:

OK, as we reach the final three, the tension is starting to mount (actually, since you’re probably reading from the top down, there’s not likely any tension at all). Second runner-up honors go to Life cereal: “Hey Mikey! He likes it!”

At number 4, here’s an ad for the “Pepsi Generation” — an early victory in the “conquest of cool.”

Leading off the top 5, here’s Madge for Palmolive: “You’re soaking in it.”

Coming in at number 6, Starkist’s kiss-off to the tasteful but not tasty tuna fish: “Sorry, Charlie!”

At number 7, Mrs. Olson comes to the rescue with “Mountain Grown” Folger’s coffee:

The redoubtable Mrs. Olson was played by character actress Virginia Christine, whose long list of credits included appearances in “High Noon,” “Judgment at Nuremberg,” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” No, she wasn’t really Swedish.

At number 8, Speedy treats us to a round of “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is!”

For a time Alka-Seltzer was king of the catch phrase, with two classics from the early ’70s: “Try it, you’ll like it” and “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.” Alas, neither is available on YouTube.