WRIGHT MORRIS
The facts of nuclear war, like those of a "lasting peace," the private
preserve of the politician, have one instructive element in common–
the prospects of such a heaven, and such a hell, both exceed the realistic
range of our imagination. But war, for this reason, lies within our
grasp-just as peace does not. The familiar horrors of peace weigh more
heavily on some men than the unfamiliar horrors of war, since one they
know, personally, and the other
is
beyond the telling of it. Propaganda
against war has always failed because man cannot imagine his own
annihilation: he knows about dying, but nothing to speak of about
death. Not his own.
Somewhere Rebecca West speaks of
lunacy
as a madness peculiar
to women, originating in the female's poetic, as well as periodic, affinity
with the moon. The madness of men, idiocy, originates in this lack of
planetary commitments, but thanks to science it is undergoing a change.
Moon-madness now lies within the male's expanding orbit. Any male.
For the time being the female is out. A word for such men is happily
not lacking, but the word Astronaut doesn't cover the orbit. With the
future in mind, I would like to suggest the word Luna-Tik. Strictly
speaking, the Luna-Tik
is
one who is persuaded that a man on the moon
would solve the earth's problems. One of
our
men, of course. Not
one of theirs.
If
this suggestion holds any data we are already a nation of Luna–
Tiks, since it is the only project we have that might be called a
National
project. The money has been voted. The lights burn long in the labora–
tories. Scarce a week goes by a rocket doesn't go up, and data doesn't
come back. You can't eat it, or drink it, or take it in your arms, but
if
you're an
echt
Luna-Tik you don't want to. You want to get away
from all that, and if you're Luna enough you probably will.
Owing to certain frailties of the human mind an idea is good or
bad, right or wrong, sane or insane, lunatic or idiotic, according to how
many people believe in it. Operation Moon, a bit of neurotic behavior
for which clinical terms are not lacking, is now the endorsed program
of ,a nation of one hundred and seventy million people. Moonlight is
now the daylight of our time. We see the facts, if at all, in this spectral
light. We share a madness as common as that recently proclaimed at
Berchtesgaden, the klieg-lit looney bin of Herr Hitler's Gotterdamme–
rung. Nations as well as individuals fall under the spell of some un–
earthly prospect, sometimes slanted in the direction of heaven, some–
times toward hell. Today it is the scientist, rather than the poet, who
burns with a romantic agony.
