Douglas Brinkley Masterfully Connects the Moon Landing to the Birther Issue. Bravo, Mr. Historian!

Proving he can talk about pretty much anything, Douglas Brinkley, historian, writer, music lover, professor, responded dutifully to Imus’s query about Bob Dylan’s trip to China, where, at the Chinese government’s insistence, he omitted certain songs from his performance.
 
“I saw the playlist,” Brinkley said. “He did ‘Ballad of a Thin Man,’ ‘Highway 61,’ a couple of songs off the ‘Slow Train’ album that actually have a very anti-authoritarian cast to them. So I think, lyric by lyric, Dylan got the best of them.”
 
As it happens, Brinkley nearly accompanied Dylan on that trip, during which he also visited Vietnam and played in Ho Chi Minh City. “In Bob’s bio, this trip…I think will be talked about when anybody writes about him from now on,” Brinkley concluded.
 
In Imus’s estimation, the current situation in Libya is beginning to resemble that war with which Dylan is often associated—Vietnam.  “”It seems like it’s the land of no return if we start sending troops into Libya,” Brinkley said. “If the Colin Powell rule is true—if you break it you own it—I don’t want to own Libya.”
 
The United States, along with other NATIO countries, has so far been conducting only air strikes, and Brinkley noted that lack of rationale for stepping foot inside Libya.
 
“It’s got such a small percentage of oil, we don’t need it as a strategic base, it’s not any kind of trading partner for us,” he said. “It’s just a country we shouldn’t be too involved with.”
 
Should the United States deepen its involvement, Brinkley worried, “It could be Obama’s quagmire.”
 
Brinkley teaches three courses in the fall at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and spends the rest of the year writing. He is presently working on a biography of Walter Cronkite, and spent some time with the former head of NASA talking about the quest to get to the moon in the 1960s. In a way only Brinkley can, he connected this event to the current fuss over whether President Obama was born in this country.
 
“I’m astounded by the number of ‘birthers’ that there are,” Brinkley confessed. “But I teach history, and I go around the country, and conspiracy theories are very big.”
 
For instance, he told Imus, “You have no idea how many young people think we faked Apollo 11, with Neil Armstrong going to the moon.”
 
In fact, that rumor has crossed international borders. During a trip to Venezuela, Brinkley interviewed President Hugo Chavez, whom he found garrulous and charming, until…
 
“He started getting into, ‘Well, you Americans faked your moon launch, it was all done on a backlot studio in Hollywood, and everybody knows it,’” Brinkley recalled. After that incident, he declared Chavez to be both crazy and dangerous, a lovely combination.
 
Then Imus tried to put the question of Obama’s birth to rest once and for all—and in a very timely manner, mind you. “I know the President doesn’t think of himself as the Messiah, but a lot of people do,” Imus said. “This could very well have been a virgin birth.”
 
Somebody get Donald Trump on the horn.
 
-Julie Kanfer