Norman Mailer's "space-operatic heebie-jeebies" about Apollo 11

Life magazine commissioned Norman Mailer to write Apollo 11. They paid very well and he needed the case. So he did. He wrote three "three mega-installments" and collected them into a book, Of a Fire on the Moon. James Parker writes about that book for the July 2019 issue of The Atlantic, ‘A Work of Art Designed by the Devil’.

This is the glory of Of a Fire on the Moon—the fidelity of Aquarius [that is, Mailer] to his apprehensions; his space-operatic heebie-jeebies; his perverse, obsessive sense that under the achievement, something is dying. Plenty of people regarded the moonshot as a monstrous misallocation of resources. Aquarius alone—or alone in mass-market magazines—was ready to declare it a metaphysical catastrophe. In his stagy rhetoric, his mangled-by-moonbeams prose, he laments the lunar trespass by “strange, plasticized, half-communicating Americans,” and what it portends down here on Earth. Apollo’s success, he declares, “set electronic engineers and computer programs to dreaming of ways to attack the problems of society as well as they had attacked the problems of putting men on the moon.”

Horrific prospect. Midway through his dispatches, Aquarius has a sleepless night in Houston. The abyss gapes. Futuristic vistas assail him; by the witch’s light of insomnia he sees an America “gassed by the smog of computer logic,” where reason has become a higher insanity, and irrationalism a sanctuary.