02 U.S. Politics

For decades, Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott has served up cartoonish anti-American hot takes, so it wasn’t a surprise when he admitted in Friday’s print edition he and others supposedly weren’t able to enjoy the Artemis II mission because of Donald Trump being in office and his “language of genocide and apocalypse” towards Iran.

This, Kennicott argued, has “eclipsed” any “allure” of space, “the striking images” sent back, and the “bravery and telegenic decency of the astronauts.”

The print headline denoted a serious case of Trump Derangement Syndrome: “Artemis II’s view of a dark horizon; President Trump’s menacing rhetoric toward Iran eclipses the new wonders of the Space Age.” Over online, the headlines warned of “dark rhetoric eclipsing” NASA’s “new wonders.”

Kennicott started with the 1969 moon landing and even that wasn’t something he was keen on acknowledging as a monumentally positive and thrilling human achievement. The reason? He didn’t use the words jingoism or nationalism, but he called it “propaganda” as part of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

Additionally, he claimed “[t]he euphoria of the first moon landing was directly connected to our ambivalence about the science that made it possible” because such early days of rocket technology also brought about the power to destroy humanity via “hurl[ing] hydrogen bombs across the planet.”