Sight Unseen

Apollo 8: The first lunar orbital mission came nearly 60 years ago, in 1968, and briefly calmed a planet in chaos. I was 15 at the time, and there was no Internet, no mobile phones, and global news was broadcast only once daily. It was an election year. In a broken South, George Wallace emerged as an unrepentant segregationist candidate. In the space of three months, the leading Civil Rights activist, Martin Luther King Jr., and the most outspoken critic of the Vietnam War, Robert F. Kennedy, were shot dead. As north Vietnamese troops pressed on with a devastating offensive, President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek reelection. With hundreds of weekly deaths and despite the presence of half-a-million American troops, the United States was losing the war, or so said the respected CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite. In Paris, students joined workers in massive anti-government demonstrations that seemed on the verge of overturning the existing social and political order. Cold War tensions were also high. In August, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia to quash a pro-democracy movement and warned the west against any interference.

The Democratic party’s political convention saw pitched battles between hardline police and radical protesters. Hundreds were arrested, and Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley as well as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover spoke of sedition. In November, Richard Nixon was elected president, saying he spoke for the “silent majority” just as this president speaks for a malignant minority of one.

I mention these events to bring into sharper relief what the three NASA astronauts accomplished during their mission. In scratchy voices heard around the world —there were no video links at the time — they read passages from the Book of Genesis. It was near Christmas and, for the first time in that chilling year, the world felt a sense of peace, harmony, and hopeful humanity. It was as if these three men speaking from so far away had reached the suburbs of the universe, making the interstellar city beyond inevitable. Would that this new group of lunar astronauts could transmit something of the same sentiment, but that seems unlikely in a world fractured beyond even Genesis’ ability to heal.

Madame Moon: It’s official. The moon is a girl. Or so says the NASA of 2026. She’s calling us, and we’re ready, said a NASA spokeswoman ahead of the coming circumnavigation, a ten-day voyage now set to launch later today. This gender revelation puts the moon in league with sea vessels, forever female for luck and the women left behind. Throughout the moon missions of the sixties and seventies, the Earth’s running mate was a barren “it,” the most impersonal of pronouns. Why the change? Maybe the moon has recently taken to popping estrogen. It will now be up to a new set of astronauts to take her majesty’s wedding gown details and post them to Instagram.

Barometers: When it comes to barometric pressure, by which I mean public morale, it cannot be measured only in terms of cities bombed and enemy leaders assassinated. The Nazi war machine disintegrated when both the German military and the German public sensed beyond doubt that all was lost. The morale behind the Iraq mission came apart the instant it was discovered that Saddam Hussein, the great arch enemy, possessed no weapons of mass destruction. Though the Iran conflict remains young, morale is already aquiver in the United States, which started the war by pointing a finger at Tehran as the latest Evil Empire. Minor seeds of public dissatisfaction are evident, driven mostly by a rise in gas prices and a suspicion that winning the war outright may demand the involvement of U.S. combat troops. Israel, however, remains resolutely pro-war, but even there, the mood is jittery. It has been fighting nonstop since the Gaza attacks of 2023, and some are beginning to tire, another barometric dip. Many have already fled the economically vibrant Emirates, at least for the time being. But most affected, at least subliminally, is Europe, a continent made helpless by the new and belligerent world order, a continent in therapy and on heavy doses of antidepressants. Its young people, by now two generations removed from world war, can no longer imagine what the future holds. The virtuous America portrayed by Hollywood for decades has vanished, as if the Earth below had disappeared from view on a routine flight. Only Iran’s tyrannically rigorous Revolutionary Guard appears to be insulated from drops in morale. War is a mind game. War is a mood. War can make even those remote from the action grow anxious and fear for their sanity. If only boastful leaders cared to pay attention to the world’s plunging pressure, but, alas, they do not.

Boiled frog: The Iran war has backed Italy into a schizophrenic corner. The country it has long revered no longer looks or behaves like its old self, leaving both admirers and critics stunned before what they consider an epochal shift. The far-right ruling coalition naturally sides with Washington, but opposition parties are far more skeptical. No one here or anywhere else has much fondness for Iran’s Islamic regime, yet some do question America’s heavy-handed tactics. Others abhor Israel’s role as America’s attack dog (a remnant of longstanding antisemitism). In general, Italians ardently dislike wars. They had little patience for America’s protracted conflict in Iraq, an era that saw tens of thousands of rainbow-colored peace flags ubiquitously hung from apartment windows throughout the country. Many were the anti-war street demonstrations, and Iran has brought a new wave of them. Fallout from America’s lengthy Iraq presence as well as the global financial debacle of 2007 helped push Italy from the center-right to the center-left, albeit briefly. Something of this sort may occur in 2027 when the country will hold general elections — a leftward turn now seemingly more possible following the heavy defeat of a government-sponsored referendum that would’ve given political parties greater control over the judiciary. For now, all remains muddled. In effect, Italians are taking stock not only of their country but also of a transformed America whose values it long saw as immutable. In 1977, I interviewed poet and Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale. At the time, Leftist terrorism haunted Italy. What, I asked him, might the future hold. He answered as only a poet could. Maybe a stew of fine meats, he replied, then paused, or maybe a giant frog no one knows whether to eat or to run from. So it is that nervous Italy awaits what the cook has to offer.