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The first time I heard Whitey On The Moon, I had a strong feeling that we don't all live in the same world, even while we share the same planet.

As a counterpoint, there's Home on Lagrange: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRns6u5bHuw

     Oh, give me a locus where the gravitons focus
        Where the three-body problem is solved,
        Where the microwaves play down at three degrees K,
        And the cold virus never evolved.                       
    (chorus)
     We eat algea pie, our vacuum is high,
        Our ball bearings are perfectly round.
        Our horizon is curved, our warheads are MIRVed,
        And a kilogram weighs half a pound.                     
    (chorus)
     If we run out of space for our burgeoning race
        No more Lebensraum left for the Mensch
        When we're ready to start, we can take Mars apart,
        If we just find a big enough wrench.                    
    (chorus)
      I'm sick of this place, it's just McDonald's in space,
        And living up here is a bore.
        Tell the shiggies, "Don't cry," they can kiss me goodbye
        'Cause I'm moving next week to L4!                      
    (chorus)

    CHORUS: Home, home on LaGrange,
        Where the space debris always collects,
        We possess, so it seems, two of Man's greatest dreams:
        Solar power and zero-gee sex.

                --Home on Lagrange (The L5 Song) 
                       © 1978 by William S. Higgins and Barry D. Gehm
http://www.jamesoberg.com/humor.html


> The first time I heard Whitey On The Moon, I had a strong feeling that we don't all live in the same world, even while we share the same planet.

I think that was the point. White Americans and Black Americans weren't living in the same world in the 1960s.

And you're not providing a counterpoint, you're answering a community's outrage at the literal interplanetary scale gulf of racial inequality (the US was still dealing with desegregation at the time) with twee nerd humor.


It's nerd humor and nerd aspiration. It's a novelty song, but it shows what people want.


It shows what some people want, and what at the time only white people could aspire to.

The criticism that the space program came at a social and economic cost that primarily burdened black Americans while only reinforcing the narrative of white supremacy and racial inequality seems legitimate. The Wikipedia article links to a paper that quotes MLK on the matter:

    Today our exploration of space is engaging not only our enthusiasm
    but our patriotism. ... No such fervor or exhilaration attends the war on
    poverty. ... Without denying the value of scientific endeavor, there is a striking
    absurdity in committing billions to reach the moon where no people live, while
    only a fraction of that amount is appropriated to service the densely populated
    slums. If these strange views persist, in a few years we can be assured that when
    we set a man on the moon, with an adequate telescope he will be able to see
    the slums on earth with their intensified congestion, decay and turbulence.
I mean yeah, why should black people have given a damn about the moon landing when American society was still permeated by the remnant effects of slavery in many places?




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