Song: Whitey on the Moon

Artist: Gil Scott-Heron

Album: Small Talk (1970) 

Genre: Spoken Word 

Content Warning: Profanity. 

It was an inspired if anachronistic move to include a segment from Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” in the excellent, if overly melancholic First Man (2018). Scott-Heron was not the only, or even the first, person to criticize the United States’s massive expenditures on the Apollo program in the face of its equally massive social problems [1], but he does so with exceptional verve and style. 

“I can’t pay no doctor bill (but Whitey’s on the moon).” Scott-Heron delivers this line beautifully — it isn’t rage in his voice, nor even exactly righteous indignation. It’s not even the same thing as people getting mad at Jeff Bezos for going to space while his warehouse workers fall asleep on their feet from exhaustion. It’s an ancient exasperation, tinged with a finely-tuned sense of irony, of being asked to celebrate the triumphs of a culture that would not find a place for him, that had, for centuries, made “great leaps” at the expense of his people. 

Now, Apollo was a triumph, a staggering feat of ingenuity and courage. It was, and is, a source of national pride and even identity. To have it written off as rich white people playing games is unpleasant — but it’s a good, Old Testament kind of unpleasantness. The kind that can get a person to sit up and pay attention. The kind that teaches us that national pride does not exclude national repentance, and that national repentance does not obliterate national pride. 

A couple of years ago I took my oldest daughter to a local coffee shop, which had some books for children. I picked one out and started reading it to her. The book was called Ron’s Big Mission, about a nine-year-old Black boy in 1950’s South Carolina who loved to read science books at his local library. He was prohibited from checking these books out — until one day he decided that he would not leave the premises without them. The police (for the love of mercy) were eventually called. Finally, the absurdity of the situation impressed itself on the adults, and Ron finally got his own library card. 

The epilogue stated that Ron was Ronald E. McNair, who earned his PhD in physics and eventually became America’s second Black astronaut. On January 28, 1986, he and six others slipped the surly bonds of earth and touched the face of God. At this point I was choking back sobs and my daughter had moved on to Elmo, which was totally fair. 

America, the horror and the glory. 

[1] See also, “Reader’s Digest,” by Larry Norman.