[Leica] Moon landing - where were you?

Tue Jul 23 00:00:26 PDT 2019

Jayanand,

I have spent a considerable portion of my life studying the history of the Soviet Union. I have no illusions about what life was like there. Compared to the US, life was hard and the people there had little in the way of material possessions. Worse than that, they had no political freedom. That said, damn near every household in Soviet Russia owned a television from the 1960s onward. This is because the Soviet government made a special effort to make sure that TVs were produced in large numbers and sold cheap to ensure that everyone had one. They didn't do it out of the kindness of their hearts; the Communists saw TV as an excellent propaganda tool. Propaganda is only effective if it is accessible, so they put the effort into making TV accessible.

India has never been a dictatorship of the sort that Communist countries are, so the propaganda value of TV didn't matter to India's government. Your story about 25 year waits for a Vespa is similar to the  way automobiles were sold to Russian workers in the USSR. I don't think anyone waited 25 years for one; but waits of 10-15 years were not unheard of, and the cars were small, crappy, unreliable junk that cost a lot of money. Few Russians tried to buy one.

I knew, as a historian who has studied the USSR, why TVs were commonplace in the Soviet Union. I don't know as much about your country and asked a simple question because I was curious. There was no need to insult me, or the American people. The really stupid people don't ask questions at all because they have no intellectual curiosity.

-- 
Chris Crawford
Fine Art Photography
Fort Wayne, Indiana
260-437-8990

http://www.chriscrawfordphoto.com  My portfolio

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On 7/22/19, 11:53 PM, "LUG on behalf of Jayanand Govindaraj via LUG" <lug-bounces+chris=chriscrawfordphoto.com at leica-users.org on behalf of lug at leica-users.org> wrote:

    TV was a luxury that the masses did not deserve, according to the
    Government in those days. The waiting queue for a Vespa scooter in those
    days was 25 years - you paid an advance, then waited 25 years for the
    delivery to come. None of you Americans have the faintest clue on what
    living in a socialist economy is like, with centrally planned economic
    policies, and licenses to manufacture anything, even a pencil, leading to
    shortages of everything starting from food, and rampant corruption
    everywhere to obtain the semi monopolistic licenses.  You have this woolly
    picture of a Socialist Workers Paradise, which is utter nonsense. I know
    the delicious thought of pick pocketing the capitalist rich to obtain
    freebies for oneself is alluring, but it just does not work. Another class
    of exploiters will just take their place. In truth, to quote (I think)
    Orwell of Koestler, "Socialism feels like paradise till you reach there".

    I would think a rereading of Animal Farm and The God That Failed should be
    in order.

    Cheers
    Jayanand

    On Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 8:39 AM Christopher Crawford <
    chris at chriscrawfordphoto.com> wrote:

    > How did socialism keep people from having TV in India? There were a lot of
    > countries far more socialist than India that had television long before
    > 1982 (The Soviet Union, for example).
    >
    >
    > --
    > Chris Crawford
    > Fine Art Photography
    > Fort Wayne, Indiana
    > 260-437-8990
    >
    > http://www.chriscrawfordphoto.com  My portfolio
    >
    > http://www.facebook.com/pages/Christopher-Crawford/48229272798
    > Like My Work on Facebook
    >
    >
    > On 7/22/19, 10:05 PM, "LUG on behalf of Jayanand Govindaraj via LUG"
    > <lug-bounces+chris=chriscrawfordphoto.com at leica-users.org on behalf of
    > lug at leica-users.org> wrote:
    >
    >     I was in college at that time. We were still in the clutches of full
    > fledged Fabian Socialist hell in those days in India, so there was no TV
    > service at all in the country (which made a pan India entrance, gingerly,
    > though only in urban areas in 1982, for the Asian Games). I remember
    > hearing it on radio, followed by the photographs in LIFE magazine which
    > followed soon after.
    >
    >     Cheers
    >     Jayanand
    >
    >     Sent from my iPad
    >
    >     > On 23-Jul-2019, at 07:24, Peter Klein via LUG <lug at leica-users.org>
    > wrote:
    >     >
    >     > In July 1969, I was working at a summer camp in rural
    > Massachusetts.  The night of July 20, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
    > landed on the moon, we counselors were invited up to the camp director's
    > house to watch the moon walk. The adults were all out for the night, so we
    > had a critical mass of unsupervised 15-22 year-olds. With predicable
    > results.  Many of the assembled used the opportunity to tell raunchy jokes,
    > smoke cigarettes, and if they had a willing partner, make out (*). I
    > remember being irritated that it was hard to understand what the astronauts
    > were saying. I was absolutely enthralled by the moon landing, space-nerd
    > that I was (and still am).
    >     >
    >     > At one point, I remember wondering if we could ever look at the moon
    > the same way again.  Would the sight of the moon still be romantic, now
    > that people had walked on it?   Walking back to my cabin later, I got my
    > answer.  The full moon was just as romantic as ever, maybe more so. And I
    > so wished that I had a girlfriend to make out with under it.   :-)  That
    > would have to wait a couple of years.
    >     >
    >     > --Peter
    >     >
    >     > (*) For people for whom English is not your first language, "making
    > out" is mid-century slang for hugging, kissing, petting, etc., as long as
    > the "etc." didn't go beyond a certain point.
    >     >
    >     >
    >     >
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