Bombast is the hip, cool “marketing” crowd’s reason for being… The sky and the stars are never enough. Hipsters and Hypesters must liven them up with excitement, spectacle, surround-sound, fast-edit cuts, and garish color illustrations. They cannot stand anything that is quiet and restrained and might therefore encourage thought, wonder, contemplation. They cannot package and market those things. They are in business to reduce the sky, the stars, the whole universe to on-screen entertainment.
ALAN writes:
A few months ago, a conjunction of planets was visible in the night sky. A woman I know learned about it from an Internet blurb and then looked for it after dark. But she said afterward that she could not see it. Of course she could not see it. I knew she wouldn’t. That is partly because of bright city lights that make even the brighter stars hard to see. But it is also partly because “it” was not the same thing as the garish color depictions that are now common on the Internet. It was not her fault that blurbs like those are gross misrepresentations of what can be seen in the night sky.
Overblown color illustrations, photographs, and “artists’ conceptions” in books, magazines, and Internet sites have taught three generations of Americans to expect to see such things in the night sky. They are victims of a hoax and a fraud perpetrated by the entertainment and marketing rackets.
In ancient times, 1963-’67, I read magazines like The Review of Popular Astronomy and Sky and Telescope. They were serious magazines written by and for a specialized audience: People with an interest in the night sky. That excluded most people. It still excludes most people, partly because of the dumbing down of American culture, but largely because most people at night now pursue higher interests on their big-screen like wrestling, porn, and car crashes.
With rare exceptions, photographs printed in those magazines in the 1960s were black and white. Illustrations in the form of “artists’ conceptions” were black and white, restrained, sober, and not doctored, enhanced, or overblown. All those qualities were part of a frame of mind that was being weakened quite purposely in the 1960s by agitators for Hip and Hype.
In the decades since then, people who publish magazines like those agreed to water them down with cutesy features, “fun facts”, and gaudy, overblown color photographs and “artists’ conceptions”, all of it engineered to appeal to a mass audience, no longer a specialized audience of people knowledgeable in such matters. Then, whether because they were fools or liars, they had the effrontery to deny that they were part of the dumbing down trend. The frame of mind of publishers, editors, writers, and readers was now entirely different from what it had been only a few decades earlier.
When they are primed by overblown color blurbs to expect such things in the night sky but then fail to see them, people like the woman I know may conclude that there isn’t much there to be seen. Of course that is not so. What is there in the night sky is made to seem insignificant by comparison with the garish, overdone, overblown color photographs and illustrations that are now featured on Internet sites and in cutting-edge books, magazines, TV “documentaries”, and books “for” children. It is not the night sky but Hype-about-the-night-sky that Americans now permit to determine their frame of mind and their expectations.
A notable characteristic of the moon, stars, planets, meteors, aurora, galaxies, eclipses, rainbows, sunrise, and sunset is that they do not shout at us. The universe does not practice Hype; only stupid, conniving, avaricious men do that.
Bombast is the hip, cool “marketing” crowd’s reason for being. It is why we cannot shop in supermarkets without being bombarded by the ugly, vile noise mendaciously called “music”. The “marketing” crowd cannot stand the absence of bombast. The sky and the stars are never enough. Hipsters and Hypesters must liven them up with excitement, spectacle, surround-sound, fast-edit cuts, and garish color illustrations. They cannot stand anything that is quiet and restrained and might therefore encourage thought, wonder, contemplation. They cannot package and market those things. They are in business to reduce the sky, the stars, the whole universe to on-screen entertainment.
Imagine how different it was for young Leslie Peltier growing up on a farm in Ohio in the early 1900s, and for other children in those years. It was by chance one night in 1905 that he glanced through a farmhouse kitchen window and caught sight of the Pleiades. It sparked his curiosity about the stars and the sky. His parents encouraged his interest, and he pursued and expanded it to a point in later years when he would become one of the most highly-respected amateur astronomers. (All of it told in his autobiographical Starlight Nights: The Adventures of a Star-Gazer, Harper and Row, 1965).
His inspiration came from what he could see in the night sky, what he learned from his elders, and what he could read in books filled only (!) with words. There were no motion pictures, no radio, no TV, no newspapers or magazines filled with garish, overblown color illustrations, no Internet, no smartphone screens, and no racketeers-in-Hype to influence his frame of mind. Children like him and their elders — living in rural areas and in daily contact with the land and the sky — were far better acquainted with the night sky than people today whose frame of mind is determined by Hipsters and Hypesters.
It is preposterous to imagine that the expropriation of the night sky by Hypesters would elicit anything but disapproval by knowledgeable astronomers like Leslie Peltier, or Donald Menzel and Peter van de Kamp, professional astronomers whom I heard speak at the Planetarium in St. Louis in 1968 and 1970, or the renowned telescope maker Robert E. Cox, who taught a course in astronomy at that Planetarium in which I enrolled in 1965. Neither he nor the young men in his class were infatuated with “special effects”. We had no screens or surround-sound. All we had were the sky and the stars; we thought they were adequate. We were not influenced by Hype or trendy nonsensical ideas like “inclusion”. There were no women or “diversity” in our class or any idea that there ought to be. That is because we possessed a better frame of mind in a better country at a better time.
That the night sky should not be cheapened and commodified would be obvious to people who could think straight. That would appear to exclude most people today.
[Photo of Children at Hansen Planetarium, circa 1969; Source]
