MURICA

'Murica is America said with a grin, the word swallowed and stretched on purpose, the way people say it when they are teasing themselves and still meaning every syllable.

This picture takes the joke seriously and then keeps going. The flag has real history behind it. Six American flags were planted on the Moon, one by each Apollo crew that landed, between July 1969 and December 1972. The first was a 3-by-5-foot nylon flag from the government supply catalog, at a cost of $5.50, with a rod sewn into its top hem so it would hang unfurled with no air to lift it. Buzz Aldrin later reported that the exhaust from the lander's liftoff blew it over. Photographs from lunar orbit in 2012 showed the flags from Apollo 12, 16 and 17 still standing.

In the picture an astronaut in a white suit and gold visor holds a flag as big as a sail, its pole planted in gray lunar dust, with the whole blue Earth hanging in the dark sky behind. A lunar lander stands at the left. At the right the picture goes somewhere no mission did: riders in cowboy hats cross the dust on horseback beside a wooden building with flames and smoke rising at its edge.