Category Archives: Popular Culture

Planting The American Flag On The Moon

Bob Zimmerman isn’t impressed with the Armstrong movie.

[Update late evening, before I drive up to West Palm Beach to pick up Patricia]

Some (sadly) hilarious thoughts and links from Jim Treacher.

[Sunday update]

OK, I see that Bob Zimmerman has had second thoughts.

I’m going to reserve judgment until I see the film. I think that the proximate cause of the uproar wasn’t the decision to leave out the flag planting, but the Canadian actor’s idiotic explanation of it. As I note in comments, the movie is a biopick of Neil Armstrong, not a history of Apollo, and his great achievement was not in planting a flag on the moon, but in simply being present on its surface.

A Former NPR CEO

visits the half of the country that the media hates:

For an entire year, I embedded myself with the other side, standing in pit row at a NASCAR race, hanging out at Tea Party meetings and sitting in on Steve Bannon’s radio show. I found an America far different from the one depicted in the press and imagined by presidents (“cling to guns or religion”) and presidential candidates (“basket of deplorables”) alike.

I spent many Sundays in evangelical churches and hung out with 15,000 evangelical youth at the Urbana conference. I wasn’t sure what to expect among thousands of college-age evangelicals, but I certainly didn’t expect the intense discussion of racial equity and refugee issues — how to help them, not how to keep them out — but that is what I got.

Two issues with the piece: My usual complaint that there is nothing “liberal” about these fascists, and he’s not hard enough on his former colleagues. But it’s a nice start.