Daily News of Los Angeles, Sunday, July 10, 1994

Here we are at the 25th anniversary of the moon landing, and the whole thing is a little bit sad. I remember watching the landing one warm summer night in 1969 with a few friends at my apartment in Norfolk, Va., drinking white wine and eating cheese fondue, and we were young and our whole lives were before us and the United States was the pre-eminent technological and economic power and it would stay that way forever.

Well, it didn't. Not by a long shot. Not only did the moon landings not lead anywhere, our country didn't particularly live up to expectations, either and - as long as I brought the subject up - neither especially did I.

Although the country had already begun its long downward spiral by 1969, it wasn't apparent to everyone just yet - the country was too enmeshed in the turmoil of the Vietnam War.

In 1970, I had left the Navy to enroll in graduate journalism school, and on my third day on the Berkeley campus, anti-war protesters staged a riot against the ROTC building, and Alameda County sheriff's deputies appeared on campus to confront them.

Suddenly, I found myself on Sproul Plaza literally standing between the rioters and the deputies in a freeze-frame tableaux while a smoking tear gas canister flipped end-over-end in a high slow arc through the tops of the Strawberry Creek redwood trees. In five years in the service, no one had ever fired a shot at me in anger; now here I found myself standing in no-man's land while police and rioters resolutely went crazy.

Even so, what was really destructive about those days wasn't the anti-war protesters marching across the Berkeley campus with their Viet Cong flags or the bookstore windows they smashed on Telegraph Avenue or the Berkeley Safe-way they looted one day in protest over allegedly overpriced bread.

The really harmful part was the simple-minded anti-intellectualism, anti-establishment parroting of Chairman Mao's little red book, the thought-police atmosphere in which anyone who studied engineering, math, science, or even accounting was denounced as a tool of the fascist, baby-killing military-industrial-complex state.

It was the only time in my life in which I was surrounded by large numbers of people who lived in a delusion. Once I went to an anti-war rally at Berkeley's Ho Chi Minh Park to listen to a speech by Tom Hayden. Just before he stepped up to the microphone the speakers went dead, whereupon the moderator tapped and blew on the mike until the power returned, whereupon he announced to the cheering throng: "The spirit of the people is greater than man's technology."

Well, that's how people think in a state where it's considered fascistic to study science and engineering. Unfortunately their ignorance had consequences beyond their own generation - those cheering members of Hayden's audience who were so proud of their technological illiteracy eventually took their places as teachers in the public schools and universities, where they gleefully passed on their contempt for science, which is one reason, as Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan recently observed to a convention in Seattle, that 25 percent of the U.S. population believes in ghosts, 50 percent believe in UFOs and a quarter to half of all Americans don't know that the Earth revolves around the sun.

Thirty-five years ago, when John Kennedy announced that we were going to the moon within the decade, we did it ahead of schedule. If the current administration were to decide that we wanted to return to the moon, one NASA official predicted a few years ago, this time around it would take us 20 years.

All civilizations rise and fall but we somehow think we are immune. Technology is going to save us in spite of the fact that upward of 90 percent of us don't know how to program our VCRs. We talk knowingly (though ignorantly) about computers, cold fusion, biotechnology and channel surfing our way to prosperity down the information highway. But our problem isn't lack of knowledge. It's lack of character.

Recently, I've been rereading Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," that wonderfully evocative play about life in Grover's Corners, N.H., in 1901. It's just three acts, 103 pages, but it deals with the greatest issues of all--the shortness of life, the tragedy of existence, our incomprehensible blindness at the predicament we're in. After Emily, one of the three main characters, dies in childbirth, she goes back to Earth for just one day, her 12th birthday, to live life all over again one last time.

But knowing the future as she does, it's too painful. Her parents are so young, her mom both beautiful and oblivious to her daughter's early death, the shortness of life, the fact that every second is precious and yet everyone acts as if they had all the time in the world. Finally Emily turns to the Stage Manager (himself a character in the play) and asks to be taken back to the cemetery. "I can't go on. It goes too fast. We don't have time to look at one another."

That play was set in 1901, and by any measure our inability to stop, see each other and appreciate the moment has only gotten worse. Today, we have microwaves and VCRs, but we've given up a lot to get them and it's not clear we've made the better end of the bargain.

In John Fowles' "The French Lieutenant's Woman," a modern novel about Victorian England, there's a wonderful passage in which the author explains how different was the Victorian attitude toward time compared to ours. Today, we think of time as a scarce commodity forever destined to remain in short supply. But in more leisurely Victorian times, says Fowles, the problem of gentlemen and ladies wasn't so much the difficulty of finding time as finding a way to fill up "the vast colonnades of time" they saw stretching out before them.

When I was a kid growing up in the country in western Pennsylvania, I had vast colonnades of time too. I, who was so punctilious, who was good at math, who had the horsepower, wheelbase and zero-to-sixty acceleration of a 1952 Chevrolet memorized to three decimal places, would forget what day of the week it was, and the days and weeks and months would roll by as if that world would last forever.

In those days, I would get up early on bright August mornings and pull on my jeans and T-shirt and sneakers and sit out on the back porch, with the sun shining through the tall trees in patches on the wet grass, watching chipmunks, listening to the cicadas and feeling the morning heat. ("It's going to be a scorcher," my mom would always say.) Later I would get my bike and ride up and down the dirt road in front of our house, feeling the sun on my shoulder blades, hearing the buzz of insects, holding out my hand to catch between my fingers the tall daisies and black-eyed Susans that grew beside the road. I didn't think about the future in those days - I was too busy catching salamanders in the creek and swinging on vines in the woods, making bows and arrows from the sassafras trees that grew in astonishing profusion in the forest beside our house. But even so I'm sure I operated on the same assumption as I did until the last half-dozen years or so-- that with every passing year life would only get better.

Now my sons tell me they wish they grew up in rural western Pennsylvania too --"You had all the fun."

Well, I got to admit it--it's true, I did. And at the beginning of August, I'm taking my 7-year-old son back to western Pennsylvania to visit his grandparents. And this is what we're going to do. We'll get up early and pull on our jeans and sneakers and T-shirts and sit side-by-side in the shade on the back porch with the sun shining through the tall trees, and I'll tell my son, "It's going to be a scorcher."

Then, if I'm lucky, I, who am so punctilious and good with computers, will feel the sun on my shoulder blades and hear the buzz of cicadas and remember once more what it was like to grow up in the '50s, when the country was young and hopeful and everyone knew life could only get better.