become the vehicle of status of that Praetorian Guard now forming of generals, state troopers, admirals, Republican congressmen with wives-on-junket, governors from he-man states, he-man senators, law-and-order mayors, traffic-crisis monitors, and VIPs on state visits to troublesome cities. The helicopter was there to signify: a man engaged in
flag
activity was dropping in on the
spot
. So the helicopter was a status symbol as special as a Junior League Ball. Not everybody who was moderately rich and powerful in American life would necessarily want to go to the ball or ride in the bubble, but for that matter not everybody who was thus rich and powerful was welcome at either.
Under whose auspices then had Von Braun descended? We can pretend to investigate. A large publishing corporation long associated with the Space Program had invited corporation presidents of important firms to voyage out for a few days on a trip to Houston to meet astronauts, then on to Kennedy to see the launching. A private speech by Von Braun was one of the features of the junket, and they waited for him now in a hexagonal banquet room finished in varieties of walnut-colored wood, a fit meeting place for American gods and cousins of the gods, since the shape of the chamber gave an echo of clans meeting in a wooded glen. Talismans in the form of intricate hex signs were inlaid in the wood of the walls around the room below the ceiling. Yet the walls, as though aware the gods were American, their powers corporate, were finished pale in stain, and therefore not excitative to the bottled emotions of business leaders. In any case, the golf course abutted the premises, and some of the guests left the bar and waited for the helicopter outside, standing in the steamy air of evening on that stiff rubbery thick-bladed Florida grass so much an overnight product of hyperfertilizer, turf-planting, and the tropics that it felt like plastic underfoot.
It was a not untypical American gathering. Doubtless, equivalent Soviet meetings were similar. It did not matter how high or prominent these people had become, how far some of them hadtraveled from their beginnings. There was still the same awkward, embarrassed, well-scrubbed air of a church social. Americans might yet run the world, they were certainly first on the way to the stars, and yet they had never filled the spaces between. Americans were still as raw as an unboiled potato. It hardly mattered if Americans were rich or poor. When they got together, they did not know what to say to each other. It is part of the double life of Americans, the unequal development of the lobes in the national schizophrenia. Men whose minds worked with an admirable depth of reference and experience in their business or occupation were less interesting in a social gathering, at least in this social gathering where they were plucked up from a more familiar core of small talk and deposited on the rubber-mat turf of the Royal Oak. It was almost a reflection of the national belief that a man who worked thoroughly at his job was given dispensation from the obligation to have a good time. So conversation took overloaded steps over successive hills, and that was all right, the point of the evening was that they would hear Von Braun and be able to refer to it afterward. The American family travels to strange states and places in order to take their photographs and bring them back, as if the photographs will serve in future years as data-points, crystals of memory to give emotional resonance to experience which was originally without any. The data-point will give warmth in old age. So Von Braun would be a data-point tonight. It would not matter if a good time was not otherwise had. Aquarius’ mind, brooding through these familiar thoughts, was brought up short with the radically new idea that perhaps some instinct in American life had been working all these decades to keep the country innocent, keep it raw, keep it crude as a lout, have it
flag
activity was dropping in on the
spot
. So the helicopter was a status symbol as special as a Junior League Ball. Not everybody who was moderately rich and powerful in American life would necessarily want to go to the ball or ride in the bubble, but for that matter not everybody who was thus rich and powerful was welcome at either.
Under whose auspices then had Von Braun descended? We can pretend to investigate. A large publishing corporation long associated with the Space Program had invited corporation presidents of important firms to voyage out for a few days on a trip to Houston to meet astronauts, then on to Kennedy to see the launching. A private speech by Von Braun was one of the features of the junket, and they waited for him now in a hexagonal banquet room finished in varieties of walnut-colored wood, a fit meeting place for American gods and cousins of the gods, since the shape of the chamber gave an echo of clans meeting in a wooded glen. Talismans in the form of intricate hex signs were inlaid in the wood of the walls around the room below the ceiling. Yet the walls, as though aware the gods were American, their powers corporate, were finished pale in stain, and therefore not excitative to the bottled emotions of business leaders. In any case, the golf course abutted the premises, and some of the guests left the bar and waited for the helicopter outside, standing in the steamy air of evening on that stiff rubbery thick-bladed Florida grass so much an overnight product of hyperfertilizer, turf-planting, and the tropics that it felt like plastic underfoot.
It was a not untypical American gathering. Doubtless, equivalent Soviet meetings were similar. It did not matter how high or prominent these people had become, how far some of them hadtraveled from their beginnings. There was still the same awkward, embarrassed, well-scrubbed air of a church social. Americans might yet run the world, they were certainly first on the way to the stars, and yet they had never filled the spaces between. Americans were still as raw as an unboiled potato. It hardly mattered if Americans were rich or poor. When they got together, they did not know what to say to each other. It is part of the double life of Americans, the unequal development of the lobes in the national schizophrenia. Men whose minds worked with an admirable depth of reference and experience in their business or occupation were less interesting in a social gathering, at least in this social gathering where they were plucked up from a more familiar core of small talk and deposited on the rubber-mat turf of the Royal Oak. It was almost a reflection of the national belief that a man who worked thoroughly at his job was given dispensation from the obligation to have a good time. So conversation took overloaded steps over successive hills, and that was all right, the point of the evening was that they would hear Von Braun and be able to refer to it afterward. The American family travels to strange states and places in order to take their photographs and bring them back, as if the photographs will serve in future years as data-points, crystals of memory to give emotional resonance to experience which was originally without any. The data-point will give warmth in old age. So Von Braun would be a data-point tonight. It would not matter if a good time was not otherwise had. Aquarius’ mind, brooding through these familiar thoughts, was brought up short with the radically new idea that perhaps some instinct in American life had been working all these decades to keep the country innocent, keep it raw, keep it crude as a lout, have it
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