“Nevertheless, there was something extraordinary about it when a man so young, with so little experience in flight test, was selected to go to Muroc Field in California for the XS–1 project. (And this grave gent lives on in excellent health.)” Sentiments that one scarcely gives a second thought to in one's private life are nevertheless insisted upon in all public utterances. In either case, the animal's fundamental concern remained the same: the public, the populace, the citizenry, must be provided with the correct feelings! One might regard this animal as the consummate hypocritical Victorian gent. In a later period this impulse of the animal would take the form of blazing indignation about corruption, abuses of power, and even minor ethical lapses, among public officials here, in April of 1959, it took the form of a blazing patriotic passion for the seven test pilots who had volunteered to go into space. In the late 1950's (as in the late 1970's) the animal seemed determined that in all matters of national importance the proper emotion, the seemly sentiment, the fitting moral tone, should be established and should prevail and all information that muddied the tone and weakened the feeling should simply be thrown down the memory hole. “It was as if the press in America, for all its vaunted independence, were a great colonial animal, an animal made up of countless clustered organisms responding to a central nervous system.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |