I watched “Apollo 13” last night. Not all of it – I stumbled into it at about the halfway mark. I’ve seen it a few hundred times before, but always have a hard time passing it up when it’s on. For one thing, Bill Paxton’s in it, and it’s always fun to try and decide which is more dire: being stranded in a freezing, crippled, and dying space capsule a quarter million miles from earth, or living in Utah with three wives. Tough call, but if forced to choose, I think I’d opt for the space capsule (unless you let me pick chasing tornadoes with Helen Hunt). Seems a bit safer – especially if you’ve got a pissed-off Sissy Spacek after you.

Of course, I also enjoy watching that movie ‘cuz it’s set “back in my day”. I was about 10 years old at the time, and – like most boys my age back then, I guess – I was big into all that space shit (still am, truth be told; we’d be a lot better off spending more money on space and less on trying to kill everybody who lives on top of our oil). It’s fun to watch all those people in the old 60s-ish clothes and haircuts (and cars), all smoking cigarettes constantly (stomping out the butts in those plaid sandbag ashtrays – remember them?), sitting in front of those Mission Control “monitors”.

I guess the thing I like best about those days is that it seemed like the good old US of A could do just about anything. And if we couldn’t do it yet, by golly, it wouldn’t be long before we’d figure out how (well, except for that whole Vietnam thing, but even that wasn’t all bad – a lot of good music came out of it, not to mention free love and pot). You know, “American ingenuity” (for you younger folks, that’s a phrase they used to say about us back in the olden days) and all that.

We were actually known for being smart and and having a “can do” attitude back then (and by “we”, I of course refer to the generation one or two before mine).

If there’d been an oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 1969, we’d have locked a couple dozen white shirt and tie-wearing, crew cut-sporting egghead engineers in a room, tossed in a couple cartons of Luckies, and in a few hours they’d have come up with a way to make a plug out of cardboard, plastic bags, vacuum cleaner hoses, and duct tape. Then John Wayne woulda dove down through the burning oil with a knife between his teeth, plugged the hole, and then come up and give Maureen O’Hara a nice big wet one smack on the lips. All on one breath

Now, well, we don’t seem capable of doing much of anything any more.

I blame Reagan.