Of Heroes in Mordor:

Neil Armstrong

September 6, 2012

     There is no virtue in being a hero, I have often thought, but there is failure in not doing what one knows needs to be done.

     When Neil Armstrong performed his act of interbraided scientific knowledge and human courage, modest as he was, I was not able to properly recognize or appreciate it, and I deeply regret that now. William Appleman Williams, Paul Goodman and Ray Bradbury understood his accomplishments better than I did that Summer. Feelings in the country, and at Purdue, during Armstrong’s flight were volatile about Viet Nam, Nixon, etc; this was a time when national magazines and newspapers could seriously debate whether we were going to be a nation of “good Germans.” Furthermore, all this was before Jackson State, Kent State, the murder of Fred Hampton, and Mark Clark. Then, “Mordor” was one of the politer terms to refer to the contemporary U.S.

     That fall, after the flight, those of us-many-at Purdue who opposed the war were often told to “go back to Russia.” To this kid from South Bend, familiar as I was with Chicago, Purdue was more alien than Siberia could have ever been. We thought we were already in Kolyma; Purdue certainly knew how to act like a GULag when it wanted, or felt it had to. This was a GULag designed by an absurdist novelist on an acid trip, with a real poison pen that hurt and drew blood. Yet, Armstrong had gone here and prospered; I attended classes in a hall named after the ill-fated Gus Grissom. The time I spent in Boston and Portland ME the next summer felt more comfortable to me than Purdue ever did then, or on my innumerable trips back there since. I have spent virtually all of my adult and late-teen years morally ashamed of my country. For me, in that period, there could be no heroes in Mordor.

     Fast forward 30 years-I’ll make this relevant, I promise. My wife and I were watching “The Postman,” starring Kevin Costner. I had already read the book by David Brin, and somewhere under a high pile in a cluttered closet of my home lies the original magazine version of the title novelette. This novelette is one of the few exceptions-in-full to Ursula K. LeGuin’s maxim that it is morally impermissible to write a post-nuclear holocaust story. I do not remember if Ms. LeGuin presented this as a personal principle or a general ethical prescription, but neither really apply to Brin. Brin writes of the chaos of a state of Hobbesean disorder and warfare, including some nukes, but he firmly attaches the blame for this social collapse to survivalists.

     At the scene in the movie where the flag of the “Restored United States of America” first appears, I started tearing up, surprising myself more than anyone. When my wife asked me why, I knew why, but was confused on how to explain it. Like my fellow Hoosier, and life-long hero, Eugene Debs, I am, and will remain an internationalist. It’s just that it would have been nice to spend most of my life in a country whose leadership was not constantly finding new ways to make me writhe in mortification, if not utter humiliation. I did not, I do not, I never will hate; not everyday hard-working people-I am one-nor especially, the Midwest, whose ways, crimes and glories, I understand SO well, and from which, if removed, I would die. I will ALWAYS be a Midwesterner, forever camped out between Chicago and the Amish.

     And so, returning back to Armstrong, I know little of his private life, virtually nothing of his politics. I DO know though, that whatever he did in the Korean War, he NEVER dropped napalm on little girls running across lunar mares. Of all the rightfully famous people I have been aware of in my life, he was the one who least blew his own horn. There was certainly much more of great value, but for real Midwesterners, this last datum alone will serve enough to sustain lifelong respect.

     Let me bid you goodnight, Commander, as you catch the late local, detouring through that ever-dark district of broken, unfulfilled, maybe unrealizable dreams, on your way to your final frontier. Heinlein, Anderson, Asimov, et.al. kidnapped enough of my teenage dreams, outside of puberty, that I could never have contempt for your visions the way bankers, and realtors can now. I won’t say “Bon Voyage;” neither of us believes in that. I will offer you the closest thing to a blessing that an atheist like me can to a Deist like you. May you, and the closest of your companions in your endeavors, as well as all fighters for progress and human advancement, be known to the coming millennia in the same way my generation knew who Eratosthenes, Archimedes, Pythagoras, Hypatia, Newton, Einstein
 and so many others, were.