Lakritz: Armstrong's death recalls age of innocence - Calgary Herald

If there's one song that captures the mood of Neil Armstrong's 1969 walk on the moon, it's Bookends, by Simon and Garfunkel: "A time it was, and what a time it was, it was. A time of innocence..."

Of course, it was a time of turbulence, too. It was the 1960s, after all — the era of student protests, the Kennedy and King assassinations, the Vietnam War and all the rest of the upheaval that marked that decade.

But in everyday life, the innocence was there. We had not yet become jaded by technology. We didn't take it for granted. We could still marvel. And we marvelled in the moment of Armstrong's moonwalk, with millions of other people simultaneously — because we didn't have the means of taping shows and saving the moment for later. It was happening now, and either you were part of it, or you missed it.

Neil Armstrong was walking on the moon and you were with him or you weren't. Just like you watched the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show because they were on at that moment on that day. You couldn't tape it to watch at your leisure a couple days later. That sense of immediacy is alien to 2012.

Then, there was Armstrong himself — that hero with the boyish face, a celebrity who remained, however, blissfully free of the modern cult of celebrity and all its Kardashian-style trappings. No one attempted to dig up dirt or concoct a scandal; nobody recorded Armstrong's comings and goings, nobody claimed to have had his love-child; there was no interest in, nor speculation about, his private life. It's probably safe to say that most people didn't even know he had divorced his first wife in the 1990s until they read it in his obituary this past weekend. He was a very modest and humble man, low-key and soft-spoken.

Nobody gave him his own reality TV show — such things, thankfully, did not exist. But looking at those old photos of him now, you get the distinct impression that had he been offered a reality TV show, Armstrong would have politely turned it down.

People remember where they were when they watched the moon walk on TV, just the way they remember where they were when they heard that John F. Kennedy had died. Nowadays, we'd be hard put to name the astronauts staying at the International Space Station at any given time, or even the name of the spacecraft that is now orbiting Mars while the rover is down below on the planet's surface.

The technological excess, with its constant advancement and thus, constant obsolescence, in our daily lives makes us take all technology as a matter of course. I doubt that 600 million people will ever again be glued to their TV sets simultaneously for anything, as they were that July day 43 years ago.

In those days, too, people had no choice but to interact with, and be constantly present in, the real world. Nobody walked around absorbed in an iPad app, texting friends or yakking on cellphones. The virtual world had not usurped the tactile one, and this advantage permitted us to genuinely marvel at the spectacle of a man walking on the moon. With all of the virtual worlds to escape into today, I doubt that the majority of escapees would do more than shrug at the rather dull television picture of a man making those bounding steps on something so blase as the moon, especially if that picture were in black and white and kept fading out because the rabbit ears needed adjusting.

Even if Armstrong had been able to tweet from the moon, it could never have stirred people as did the sound of his voice making that historic remark about "one giant leap for mankind."

It was an age of innocence and wonder that we will never see again. A time it was, and what a time it was.

Naomi Lakritz is a Herald columnist. nlakritz@calgaryherald.com