The Week

The question before the House of Representatives is: should Apollo 11 plant anything on the Sea of Tranquility which would have ah, symbolic significance? The forces are mobilized which oppose putting a conventional American flag there, on various grounds, e.g. it smacks of old-fashioned colonialism, and anyway, the teevee coverage from the module will be in black and white, so the color of the flag wouldn’t come through. Still, something should be left there, to make less lonely the next person who happens by. Perhaps one should look ahead. Why not a flag with 51 stars?

The upset in New York City might just have some of the consequences so vociferously feared by those who begged the Republican voters to return John Lindsay. The upset is a major upheaval. Because to turn down Lindsay was to turn down what he stands for, which is dogmatic liberalism. The job ahead is to make his burial as a national Republican figure neat—by explaining to bewildered GOP observers out over the country why it was wrong in the first place to wax enthusiastic over Lindsay as a Republican comer: why the national GOP, in order to succeed, needs to jettison the old stereotypes. For those who are interested in symbols: the New York Conservative Party, which set out in 1962 from scratch to salvage the New York Republican Party, surpassed the showing state-wide of the twenty-year-old Liberal Party in 1966. John Lindsay is reduced to the backing of the exiguous, ideological Liberal Party. The Conservative Party and the Republican Party fuse to back an obscure competitor of John Lindsay.

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The question before the House of Representatives is: should Apollo 11 plant anything on the Sea of Tranquility which would have ah, symbolic significance? The forces are mobilized which oppose putting a conventional American flag there, on various grounds, e.g. it smacks of old-fashioned colonialism, and anyway, the teevee coverage from the module will be in black and white, so the color of the flag wouldn’t come through. Still, something should be left there, to make less lonely the next person who happens by. Perhaps one should look ahead. Why not a flag with 51 stars?

The upset in New York City might just have some of the consequences so vociferously feared by those who begged the Republican voters to return John Lindsay. The upset is a major upheaval. Because to turn down Lindsay was to turn down what he stands for, which is dogmatic liberalism. The job ahead is to make his burial as a national Republican figure neat—by explaining to bewildered GOP observers out over the country why it was wrong in the first place to wax enthusiastic over Lindsay as a Republican comer: why the national GOP, in order to succeed, needs to jettison the old stereotypes. For those who are interested in symbols: the New York Conservative Party, which set out in 1962 from scratch to salvage the New York Republican Party, surpassed the showing state-wide of the twenty-year-old Liberal Party in 1966. John Lindsay is reduced to the backing of the exiguous, ideological Liberal Party. The Conservative Party and the Republican Party fuse to back an obscure competitor of John Lindsay.