Armstrong's America

Most of the commentary about Neil Armstrong’s death on Saturday celebrated his being the first man on the moon, and rightly so. I’d like to remember him, however, for what he did right here on earth. His life and character embodied key virtues of our culture that made this country great, and can do so again — if we just believe in and embrace them the way Neil Armstrong did.

First, there were the traditional small-town virtues of the Ohio town where he was born in 1930 and raised. That was where his father followed the career that’s the butt of every late night comedian, as an accountant, and Neil became what every liberal activist now despises, an Eagle Scout. But small-town didn’t mean small horizons then any more than it does now. Neil’s greatest dream was to fly, and he earned his pilot’s license before he learned how to drive.

Then there was the United States Navy, where Neil trained as an aviator and flew 78 combat missions in the Korean War. He always said those missions were far more dangerous than anything he did as an astronaut or test pilot; they were certainly more important in terms of shaping his outlook on life. The Navy taught him the importance of friendship, but also the discipline to deal with the pain when those friends crash and die. Combat “builds a lot of character,” he once told an Australian interviewer. “It builds a lot of backbone.”

It certainly did. Later when he learned people were hawking his autographs for money, he stopped signing them. When he learned his barber had sold a snippet of his hair for $3,000, he threatened to sue unless the barber gave the money away to charity (the barber did).

Neil Armstrong knew there were more important things to life than being liked. Today, of course, we live surrounded by a media bubble that teaches the opposite. It’s the same bubble where character gets washed away with the semen stains on the Oval Office rug, that teaches our kids that what they feel is more important than what they know and says image always trumps reality.

But as an engineer, Neil Armstrong knew that reality can’t be Photoshopped or mouse-clicked away. It has to be confronted, and reason is our God-given tool for dealing with it. More than once as a test pilot and astronaut he had to make split-second decisions on which his life and the lives of others depended, as when he had to override the auto-pilot on the Apollo 11 lunar module before it dumped him and Buzz Aldrin in a field of boulders.

In those moments, asking “will this work?” becomes more important than, “How does it make me feel?” It’s a brand of Stoicism that’s out of favor today. Neil Armstrong wouldn’t have made a very good guest on Oprah. But it did make him the perfect person to travel to the moon with.

And Neil Armstrong was confident that someday, despite the end of NASA’s manned space flights, someone would “fly back up there and pick up that camera I left there.” Everyone who met him was always struck by the same thing, his humility. I think it was because he knew that he was no TV image Superhero. Behind all his amazing feats was something greater, an America that believed in character over celebrity, in accomplishment over image and solving problems instead of blaming someone else.

That was the America that made him who he was and put him on the moon. Today, in the age of the Kardashians and Desperate Housewives, many Americans despair of ever getting it back. But the truth is, it never went away. It’s still there, waiting. Like Neil’s camera, we just have to go pick it up where he left it.