Shoot The Moon

Last week we celebrated the forty-sixth anniversary of Apollo 11's landing on the moon. If you missed your community's parade or the annual Moondance Festival held in most cities across this great land of ours, it turns out that you're not alone, since those events don't exist. Not since 1969, anyway. It has been a while since Tranquility Base was foremost in our minds. Maybe it has fallen into a bin of discoveries and accomplishments that we learn in school without any particular context. July 20, 1969 is a date that sits in infamy right next to December 7, 1941. Or maybe it's like September 6, 1522, when Ferdinand Magellan's expedition completed its circumnavigation of the globe. Ferdinand himself didn't make it, which is a tragedy on par with Neil Armstrong getting lost somewhere between the earth and the moon. Proving the earth was round was the same kind of discovery as the moon landing. The earth didn't suddenly become round. It always was. The moon didn't change because we set foot on it. We landed there to make sure that it really was there, and to make emphatic that human need to prove something by putting our hands on it.
We brought back rocks and soil samples. We took pictures and movies. This is the way we could prove that the earth's moon was part of our territory. You can visit the facility and examine these samples for yourself. You can watch the footage and listen to the communications between the astronauts and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. But since NASA is a government agency, there have been loads of people who would like to suggest that these events never occurred. They were faked. I would expect that there could have been a similar group of naysayers following the surviving crew of Magellan's voyage around with parchment and quills in hand, insisting to them that they were frauds. There were probably religious types who wanted the crew of the Victoria to swear on a bible that they had never been around the globe. That kind of enterprise probably took place in the sixty years between Magellan's trip and the next circumnavigation of the earth. Those records have been lost to the ages, but 1522 still marks the end of the voyage that proved that the earth was round. A fact that could be borne out by the pictures of the earth taken from the surface of the moon. Or maybe that was just photoshopped. But how could that be when Photoshop wasn't invented until 1987? Or maybe that's just what the folks at Adobe want us to believe. Conspiracy? I blame computer software. The stuff that was made possible, in part, by guys like Neil and Buzz walking on the moon. Or maybe they were the architects of a made up world fabricated by doctored and human-generated images.
Yeah. That makes sense.