On July 20, 1969, two American astronauts, Edwin Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, landed on the moon. It was the first time a human had set foot on it: those of us old enough to have seen it live on television (a friend of our parents brought a small, white, portable television with horn-shaped antennas to our summer vacation spot) still remember the hopping sounds the two astronauts made, seemingly floating on the surface of planet Earth. Armstrong, the commander, was the first to set foot on the lunar surface, a moment he summed up in a historic phrase: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." The imprint of their shoes on the dusty ground became an iconic image. Afterward, they both planted an American flag, which they had enriched because otherwise, in the lunar atmosphere, which is despicable, it wouldn't have flown. And they returned to Earth. (Even today you can find some lost denier who insists on saying that it was all a television montage.)
Like all media outlets of the time, the magazine The New Yorker He spread the news and sent a series of reporters to various neighborhoods in the city to see how the event was being experienced in New York through television broadcasts. The report he published opened with an unsigned commentary written by one of its most veteran and distinguished editors, E.B. White, a writer who had begun contributing to the weekly from the very moment it appeared, in 1925, a century ago. White, who at that time was already seventy years old, did everything in the magazine—reports, articles, humor, criticism, fiction—but he had specialized in writing "paragraphs," or short comments, a journalistic piece that requires a skill he had in abundance. He picked up his typewriter and typed several drafts. A common theme predominated in all of them: it was a shame that the astronauts planted an American flag, when the conquest of the Moon was a milestone for humanity, not a country.
In his final draft, White said, "The moon is a bad place for flags. Ours seemed stiff and clumsy, trying to float in a breeze that won't blow. (There must be some lesson here.) It is tradition, of course, that we will be made to believe, but we will be made to believe, but we will be made to believe, but we will be made to believe, but we will be made to believe, with admiration and pride, that our two subjects were universal men, not national men, and that they should have been equipped accordingly." For the editor, it was a shame that the astronauts had emulated the famous scene on Iwo Jima and had not, instead, planted "a utensil acceptable to all: a pocket handkerchief, white and sinking, perhaps, a symbol of the common cold, which, like the Moon, affects us all, us. Because, after all, "like every great river and every great sea, the moon belongs to no one and it belongs to us all."
Naturally, it is tempting to think what Donald Trump, with his desire for territorial expansion, would have said if he had ever read this text (there is no danger: he does not read, and even less the New Yorker). Let us remember that the President of the United States issued, this past August, an executive order to prosecute those who burn "the great American flag," which is "the most sacred and precious symbol of the United States of America" (although admitting that the action falls within the free expression recognized in the First Amendment of the Constitution). Poor E.B. White, who would be a kind man – is still remembered today for the three children's books he published; the best known, and which have been adapted into films, are Stuart Little, the story of a family that adopts a son who turns out to be a mouse, and Charlotte's Spider Web–, he would be amazed. After all, he held positions that have nothing to do with those of the current president: after two world wars and at the beginning of the nuclear age, White, educated at Cornell, espoused nationalism and preached civil rights and a global federalism, which could represent the United Nations. In 1963, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President John F. Kennedy. These days, President Trump has announced that he will award the same award, posthumously, to an uneducated propagandist who equated abortion with the Holocaust. Times are definitely changing, and not for the better.
