perfidy

NASA's site commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Apollo landing read, "On July 20, 1969, the human race accomplished its single greatest technological achievement of all time when a human first set foot on another celestial body."

But the NASA text, and other sources, typically ignore one important and obvious detail:

We CONQUERED it!

The British created a world spanning empire through the simple expedient of planting the Union Jack on soil inhabited by wogs who didn't know that flags meant ownership. Benighted natives woke to British officers telling them that they now lived in the British Empire. When they disputed this, the officers merely pointed at the flag and said, "See, there's the flag. England." And when they continued to disagree, there was always the Maxim gun. In keeping with this grand tradition of symbolic declaration strecthing back millenia (but without getting too into the semiotics of possession) our guy put our flag up there- so it's ours! Happily for the granola crunchy set, there were no Lunar aborigines that needed to be convinced more... strenuously.

Today is the 38th anniversary of that glorious event, when not just homo sapiens in general, but specifically God-fearing Amurricans left the cradle of Earth to begin the conquest of heaven. We sent men into space on a tower of fire, backed with nothing more than whiz-wheels, slide-rulers, and less computing power than my car's fuel injector. A relatively modest start, some might say - the Moon being low-hanging fruit, solar system wise - but it was a start nonetheless on the long road to interstellar domination.

And someday, when Old Glory waves on 10,000 worlds and our mighty fleets cruise the galaxy, our fair descendants will look back at the Moon and Apollo as the start of it all. The only question is how they'll fit all those stars on the flag.

Huzzah! Huzzah! For the bonnie striped flag borne by a single moon!