Why do I cry, every time I write or think about our moon astronauts?
By: Fred Ermlich
Tags: NASA, Strategic Policy, Internationalspacestation, Valedictory, Male Violence

Nuclear Drop. If this capsule had had a nuclear bomb inside it, rather than three weary, smelly moon astronauts, then whoever owned the capsule had the drop on whatever earthly population was about to be vaporized. See, getting the drop on your enemy is literally just that: a drop from above. And don’t forget: these astronauts are all warriors. They carried the WW2 heritage, and practiced war in Korea — they obviously all survived — they had the drop.

Why do I cry, every time I write or think about our moon astronauts? I gotta get this important point down right now. It’s partly a thing, like “you had to have been there.” Plus, I was a child, chronologically, but not mentally.

I gotta add a link here, or an address. History.com does a great job of explicating the almost-disastrous moon landing. It’s truly worth a read. These astronauts were true and surviving warriors! https://www.history.com/news/apollo-11-moon-landing-terrifying-moments

Anyway, I’m trying to explain an “us versus them” mentality; them being the soviet Russians. President Kennedy was about to sell us out to these red devils, but got assassinated on the way to betraying us. I cried for him, yes. I was in fifth grade. It was more recently, retrospectively, that I understood his betrayal.

As far as “polities” go, I don’t really understand the word, but it seems too polite considering that we’re discussing military, killing tactics. And the current discussions re space trash, and crap (literally) left on the moon — that’s all absurd. The moon, like the Earth, is a nearby sun,The moon is crusted over: its nuclear fires are trapped below. And it’s too distant to really mean much to us, not when the Earth is right here, and a trip to Hawaii allows us to see — to overhang our toes in the fruits of fission/fusion (who knows?) right here, right now. Sometimes the “flat Earth” model works really well. Go down 4,000 miles (a bunch of kilometers), and you’re at the “center.” Go down another 4,000 miles, and you’re in Australia. But good luck passing through the “center.” We genius humans have no clue about the core of the Earth. None.

Anyway, back to our being warriors. This is a tacit understanding — or really, explicit as far as we warriors are concerned.

Remember the “Great War?” That was the “war to end all wars.” How many people died? Are you ready for a lot of zeroes? And the names of the dead or severely wounded? Actually, they are mostly un-named. But fortunately, there could never be a disastrous war to follow. Right?

Here’s a little datum, courtesy of novelist Lee Child (Jack Reacher stories): If you’re reading this article right now, it means that all of your ancestors, going back at least 10,000 years, survived. And of your enemies, for me the religious “dark forces,” they also survived all these years, uninterrupted. Amazing, and invariably true.

I wonder, David Lee Andrew: were you expecting such a complicated (and lengthy) response to your comments? Even I wasn’t quite aware, until I started writing. Writing can be strange indeed.

Aside from the Great War, which obviously wasn’t the end of all wars, came . . . more wars. And in the name of warring, we in the US picked some very unsavory bedfellows. Einstein was OK, but some other characters at the Manhattan Project, and Los Alamos, Stanford, UCLA, UCSB (my own alma mater!) — we had huge crews made up from “previous” enemies.

And the word “hawkish” doesn’t even come close to describing the US. We even invaded Panama in 1990. Not that we have a monopoly on warring. The British burned down the very Whitehouse not too many centuries ago. Hey, again . . . it’s all there for your reading pleasure on history.com. Not that brain-dead Americans read anything beyond “notifications” on their stupidphones. But my european and other audiences do read, and are generally supportive of my viewpoints.

Sez Mother Jones: Sandwiched between the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, and the commencement of the first Gulf War on January 17, 1991, Operation Just Cause might seem a curio from a nearly forgotten era, its anniversary hardly worth a mention. So many earth-shattering events have happened since. But the invasion of Panama should be remembered in a big way. After all, it helps explain many of those events. In fact, you can’t begin to fully grasp the slippery slope of American militarism in the post-9/11 era — how unilateral, preemptory “regime change” became an acceptable foreign policy option, how “democracy promotion” became a staple of defense strategy, and how war became a branded public spectacle — without understanding Panama (where we buried thousands of Panamanians, “like dogs” in the words of some Panamanians. And the Panamanian seismographs don’t lie — they can’t lie.

dear Medium readers (ignoring brain-dead Americans): every time I edit this article, it gets impossibly longer.

So I’m publishing this part; & in two days I’m leaving the US. Hopefully forever. So, once I’m medicated in a proper socialist country, I’ll finish the second half of this article. I’m saving a copy, or some kind of copy (archive?), so I don’t blow your minds with PDF-length comments. Wish me luck, & igualmente.