If You Believed ...

I’ll give you one guess what song is going through my mind as I write this post …

Sorry it’s been awhile since I’ve posted. I have a number of thoughts for things I want to post about, but haven’t found the time to sit down and write out what I want to say yet. Perhaps in the next couple of weeks …

Today, though, I’d like to acknowledge the fortieth anniversary of the day that people walked on the moon. Most notably, Neil Armstrong is remembered for being the first person to set foot on the moon. This weekend, I noticed that CNN.com ran a short editorial piece by Bob Greene about Neil Armstrong’s hometown: Wapakoneta, Ohio. There, you can find the Armstrong Air & Space Museum, which looks like a big golf ball as you drive past on I-75. I know this because I’ve driven by it scores of times and I’ve been to it several times. I grew up what is almost exactly a half-hour’s trip from it. So, for Cub Scouts, for school field trips, and I think a couple times with my father (who was curator of another museum in the area) or my grandfather (who was a bit of an air and space enthusiast), I went to the museum periodically. Though I’ve been meaning to go back since I relocated back to Ohio a few years ago, I haven’t yet, meaning it’s probably been around 25 years since the last time I was there.

I have glimpses of memories from the place—barely enough to even mention, for fear I’d completely misrepresent what was there then or is there now. All I remember are some pictures on walls and a kind of spacewalk room. My most vivid memories of Wapakoneta, though, involve something different, yet strangely similar. You see, while I go to the movies frequently in my adult life, as a kid my family didn’t go very often. We did, though, see a number of the big blockbusters in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, like the Star Wars films, E.T., and (actually when my brothers and I cajoled my mom’s brother into taking us) Back to the Future. Usually, my dad and his brother would also take us to see a Star Trek film whenever one hit the theaters, making me into the Trekkie that I am today. Many of these films we saw in Lima, Ohio, but I distinctly remember seeing two films at the old theater in Wapakoneta. One, in 1983, was Return of the Jedi. (I can even still remember the pillar I had to look around to see some of it.) The other was in early 1987. (For some reason, I remember that it was the same week that they announced that Billy Williams was elected to the Hall of Fame, which led me to buy my first Billy Williams baseball card that day at a baseball card shop in Wapakoneta and start my collection of Billy Williams cards, which I still have today, with only the most expensive among the set—his 1966 Topps card—missing.) In this instance, the film was Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (“the one with the whales,” which tends to be regarded as one of the better Star Trek films and, on my own personal list, would rank second among Star Trek films, behind the second film with the Next Generation cast (“the one with the Borg”) … see, told you I was a Trekkie; I’ve even got a list of how I would rank the Star Trek films …).

The funny thing about all of this is that it didn’t dawn on me until I was reading the aforementioned CNN piece that my two most vivid memories of Wapakoneta are about seeing films that are about space—indeed, films from what are probably the two biggest space-oriented media text franchises ever. I don’t really believe in some kind of “fate,” so I take it as coincidence that I happened to see these two films in Wapakoneta and that those are my most lasting memories of the town. However, two things might make this a little more than coincidence. First, there is always the possibility that these films ran longer there or were a bigger deal in Wapakoneta than in many other places, since space is such a part of the town’s identity. That might contribute to it being a little more than coincidence that I saw these films there … though, I saw the other Star Wars and Star Trek films that came out when I was kid elsewhere. Second, perhaps subconsciously I so heavily associated with Wapakoneta with the air and space museum, that my mind latched onto these connections to space-oriented films in some way as well … though, that doesn’t explain the Billy Williams connection.

In the end, though, regardless of how coincidental my connections are, all of this shows just how significant space exploration has been in the last half century. That interest has become stitched into United States culture and society in many ways, in large part because the government (particularly with John Kennedy’s famous pronouncement that the United States would have a man on the moon before the 1960s were over) explicitly advanced this movement and the Hollywood industry, toy industries, and so on followed suit. And through all of this, so many space-oriented narratives have been built off a mythology that is evident in Bob Greene’s piece on CNN.com: what might be called the mythology of small town wholesomeness. Greene assigns it to Wapakoneta as he writes wistfully of the town. Many narratives of American history and identity build off this same theme, perhaps most prominently reflected in the prominent, though very limiting, idea that rural towns and cities in the Midwest (like Wapakoneta) constitute the moral center of American values. Many space narratives have followed suit, placing the origins of their protagonists into those rural environments. Star Trek and Star Wars are no different. Captain Kirk, after all, came from Iowa. And Luke Skywalker was a moisture farmer on the desert wastes of Tatooine before the Rebellion came calling. So, even as American stories have reached “to explore strange new worlds” and “to seek out new life and new civilizations,” that search has very much been rooted, physically and ideologically, in the familiar world of the rural United States. That is, of course, why space narratives have been associated with the Old West, with Star Wars being called a Western and Star Trek calling its scene “the final frontier.” (And, here, my friends, I’m sure is my Billy Williams link, since the popularity of baseball is built on a similar mythology, complete with the Field of Dreams in, of course, Iowa.) This is also, though, of course, how the mythology of the Midwest as the moral center of the United States carries on, bearing with it the politics of that morality. After all, it is in these kinds of rural spaces that a lot of the most persuasive forms of exclusion in American history—from sexism to racism to homophobia to xenophobia—have maintained firm ideological holds.

When I look back, then, at my memories of Wapakoneta, I hold nothing against the town. Indeed, I have happy memories of the town. Yet, I know little about Wapakoneta, other than my few memories and whatever information I might look up about it. Still, I have to wonder if Bob Greene, even though he is originally from a town in Ohio that’s not too much farther from Wapakoneta than the one I’m from, knows that much more than I do. The problem is that his column seems to imply that he does. It’s as if he knows the town’s soul, because it must have a good soul simply because it’s a Midwest town. That is, after all, what the mythology of small town wholesomeness tells us. And perhaps Wapakoneta is, on the whole, a good place. Yet, it’s not the automatic assumption that because it’s a Midwest farm town it must be a good place that should make that determination about Wapakoneta. In fact, quite the opposite is the case, since it’s that kind of assumption that, even when put forth rather innocuously in places like Greene’s piece, helps reinforce the deeper obstacles to democracy and inclusion that so often take place in Midwest farm towns.

So, let’s celebrate Neil Armstrong, NASA, “a man on the moon,” and Wapakoneta, if we wish, but let’s not forget the politics of how we go about doing so.