“Keep your electric eye on me, babe,” Bowie begged-or commanded. The late-twentieth-century revolutions, political, cultural, sexual, were televised, unthinkable without electric guitars, electric kool-aid acid tests, and the use of the electrified image to fracture, distort, whip up, and break apart. Yet America’s subsequent decline was electric, too. Now, the whole world could see not only men on the moon but the whole of humanity, the entire Earth, from the standpoint of the void. It was not just our greatest triumph, but the greatest triumph of electricity. The landing brought together the Moon and the Earth, giving Americans a new perception of each as a whole captured at a glance.
Americans watched the drama play out on their home sets ten thousand New Yorkers gathered in Central Park to watch it on enormous silver screens. These unities were thoroughly televisual. Not until the end of the Cold War did America reach a similar peak, a moment when the whole country was symbolically unified, and conceptually united with the whole of humanity. Most Americans likely remember Apollo 11 for the straightforward reasons: the triumph over gravity, the apogee of Cold War success before the decline initiated by Vietnam, the heroism and the heroes. “Freak out,” sang David Bowie, “in a moon-age daydream.” So echoes the motto of the last phase of electric life on Earth, touched off in earnest by the lunar landing, in a style that’s a little bit Apollo and a lot more Dionysus.