Now I know why college tuition is going through the roof.

Source: Soviet Moon Images – Don P. Mitchell

Mitchell also scared up a version processed fresh from the tapes in 1965, which would haven’t looked nearly so much like blotchy maria:

“RWA” means “right wing authoritarian” (I know, you thought the “A” was something rude), and after a lot of study, it emerges as a possible organizing principle for understanding “those people”. Note how I’m avoiding the term “conservative”, because another thing I understand is that RWA describes a mental architecture, loosely a personality, and that’s quite a different thing than a quasi-coherent ideology cobbled together, despite its artificial patina of antiquity, starting in the late 1940s by Professor Leo Strauss of Chicago University. The Professor didn’t quite believe that Americans had too much freedom, it was more subtle than that: He believed that Americans lacked discipline and restraint, and exercized their freedom too, uh, freely. A key component of his prescription was creation of a civic religion called “conservatism”, made up of what we’d recognize as conservative economic theory (strangely enough, guaranteed to enlist wealthy backers) with a heaping dose of myth and mysticism and fundamentalist religion and raw nationalism to appeal to the American “volk”.

In other words, this civic religion of conservativism was a meme tailor-made to lodge in the RWA mind. RWAs existed before American Conservatism, they existed before Hitler enlisted them, they existed when Ugg rallied the tribe to kill the aliens in the village next door (and build a big, beautiful wall to keep them away).

In one of the ironies that abound when you study a movement renowned for its inability to appreciate irony, at about the same time that Professor Strauss was judging Americans a fallen people, a young Egyptian exchange student named Mohammed Kotb looked around at America and came to the same conclusion about the decadence of America.

His solution was to return home to Egypt and found the Muslim Brotherhood.

But I digress. Easy to do with such a broad and morbidly fascinating subject.

It probably goes way back to colonial times, when Americans, even the rich and highly cultured, educated and refined ones, were commoners, not nobility like in the Old Country. They might own land and slaves, speak Latin and read Greek, but they were plain folks, like us. Aristocrats were back in England, their wealth and their power was inherited, not earned. When war came the Redcoat officers all had upper class accents, they were nobles. Anti-intellectualism in America has deep roots, and has been projected into really surprising, unexpected areas.

My cousin Rudy and I were just talking about this the other day. He was born and raised in Cuba but has spent most of his life here and he has has noticed it too. I’ve known it since I was a kid. My family knew it. We could see it all around us. As Rudy puts it, “Americans aren’t any dumber or smarter than anyone else, where they are different is that they tend to not like smart people. Even the smart ones learn real young to hide it.”

Remember Nixon’s “Checkers” speech? It explains the Liberal “elites” in the colleges, and Hollywood, the arts and the media. How does that mesh with your “authoritarian personality” insights?

In the early days of the space race, the Soviets scooped us by being the first to send a spacecraft to the far side of the moon where it took a grainy picture and radioed it back to earth…The picture was indeed awful by modern NASA standards, but it showed major features like maria, and even a few of the major craters.
…
I remember this so distinctly because it occurred to me at the time that there was no way the Russians could get away with this. It was only a matter of time before one of our own space probes went there and took its own pictures, exposing the fraud, and showing the Soviets as total liars and cheats.

Oops. I think you just exposed the Soviet deception.

What a bunch of morans.

A few days later, the Tampa Tribune ran a full page “expose” of the Soviet mission, conclusively proving it was a fraud, a complete fake. It was written by a local minister. By using the Soviet image, and a few pencil sketches, he showed that the moon picture was actually an out-of-focus photograph of a hard-hat deep sea diver. The Russians had doctored it to make it look like a photograph taken from orbit.

I remember this so distinctly because it occurred to me at the time that there was no way the Russians could get away with this. It was only a matter of time before one of our own space probes went there and took its own pictures, exposing the fraud, and showing the Soviets as total liars and cheats. What was the point? What could they expect to gain? It made no sense.

All of which provides a disturbing window into the way Uncle Gadget’s mind works.

I’d better edit my mark o’the beast out of that URL before Uncle Gadget starts beaming those HAARP waves at me. Or venture timidly out after dark to buy more aluminum foil.

What do these guys do when NASA publishes the hi-res stuff, simply dismiss it as a government cover-up? Black helicopters, jack-booted storm troopers, climatologist cabals, Socialist Kenyan Muslim conspiracies, etcetera, etcetera.

I think there’s more to this than just a little individual anomalistic looniness. We are becoming swamped by a tsunami of conspiracies. From Bengazi committees to truthers, birthers, third termers, gummint invasions of Texas and concentration camps for god-fearin’, gun-owin’ ‘merkin citzens.

Its a form of mass hysteria, with a probable origin in the shared subconscious realization that the good ole postwar prosperity is finally coming to an end, propagated at the speed of thought by the new digital media technology.

Ever read Huxley’s “The Devils of Loudun”?