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Star Trek

Okay, so I guess now that I have this page on my site I am officially a geek.

Still, there are few stories that have created such a following. Even in our own military and space programs, it has become a tradition to name the first of each new type of vessel "The Enterprise." Aircraft carriers...the first space shuttle, even. I understand the appeal. All stories are a form of alternate reality that give voice to our wishful thinking. For many folks - like the show's writers - that wishful thinking includes a utopian vision of the future...a future that includes space ships that ply their way with warp drive engines that fold space the way Einstein and Hawking and Sagan (and most of their drinking buddies) have said is theoretically possible.

For me, the appeal of Star Trek is in the fact that I do see wider-spread space travel happening soon. Designer Burt Rutan and His Corporate Sponsor Virgin Atlantic (picture is of their Space Ship One) are already building and flying successful civilian space craft that they promise to make available commercially within the very near future. I believe that space tourism will follow their path - that of private, um...enterprise - rather than NASA's. NASA has too much government baggage to carry with it to make great strides of progress. Private enterprise, as ever, needs only the will of people with the means to finance it...and who among those people (or any of us) does not have the dream of traveling into space? Personally, I expect it to be possible within my lifetime to spend the same money as the cost of summiting Everest to buy a few days on a moon-based resort sipping martinis at an Earth-rise. 

And from there space commerce can only follow, perhaps in the form of Mars-mining or the like. Perhaps we will discover an indestructible "Reardon" metal there too. Who knows? Yes, from there we are likely to have star wars too, as nations and pirates battle for supremacy over this new frontier and all its associated resources. Lamentable as some of that is, it is the dichotomous nature of man that with progress comes a degree of stupidity. C'est la vie.

But I digress, the crux of this page is that space travel will happen, and Star Trek is as well-developed a vision for that future as we currently have...and I like exploring those possibilities as much as they do. The degree of specifics in their mythology (told with an evident reverence for future history) and the development of their characters is very detail-oriented. Yes, every now and again they include some pretty silly costumes and the acting occasionally leans cheezy. But if you can look past all that and Shatner's gut girdle, it's a fun ride.

While they are usually very insightful, they have missed the mark on the singularly fundamental push-pull of human society building: that of Capitalism vs. socialism. Unfortunately, they blow it on that score when they proclaim repeatedly that they have "outgrown the need for money" and that people now work "for the sole purpose of improving themselves as people - betterment for its own sake." Lenin and Stalin; Ho Chi Min, and scores of other socialists thought the same thing too. While that might start as a nice idea, all of them have failed to realize (as all pie-in-the-sky liberals do) at least two things:

  1. 1). Money is not a bad thing. Quite the opposite, in fact. It is the way that society rewards you for your contributions to it - in measure to the degree of your contribution. And that is what keeps society from degenerating into a system whereby the only way to get you to contribute is through force...which is precisely what happens when societies try to paint money as an evil thing, as the socialists and communists do. That is why such philosophies always give rise to oppressive regimes...they always become brutal. They have to because, without money, they must force people to work and then take what they produce. That's why freedom cannot exist without capitalism...and that's why they call it a "free market."
  2.  
  3. 2). Star Trek writers have underestimated the laziness of people who do not have to work, just as Lenin did and as modern socialist-democrats do when they perpetuate the Welfare State. When people don't have to work, most will not see that as "the freedom to better themselves." Never mind the fact that we do better ourselves through the struggle of the wage earning process. Some would see a "wage-free" world as an opportunity to pursue learning, etc for its own sake, and would continue to contribute to their world just because they feel the need to self-actualize, as Maslow called it. The wise would do all this - but they by definition are always in the vast minority. The vast majority would see this as an opportunity to eat bon-bons while watching Oprah all day and living off their neighbors' tax payments. That's money that those neighbors worked for and earned to provide for their own families. Hardly a picture of utopian freedom. We have enough "welfare" families who exhibit proof of this tendency already. No, a wage-less world would fall into disrepair and actually regress backwards to stone age living standards pretty quickly because of the laziness of the average man, the way it did in Atlas Shrugged.

Having said that, I usually do like the way the show tackles real life in their story lines, and they usually get it very right when they metaphorically comment on social issues. Like when they showed how asinine racism is when they had those two people on board from a planet where people are white on one side and black on the other. They go through the whole episode trying to kill each other and only at the end do we the viewers realize that one is black on the left side and the other is black on the right. We hadn't even noticed, and when they tell us the source of their hatred we all said "so what?" Then we got it.

And I like the way the Federation / Klingon relationship resembles the cycles of our U.S. / Soviet Cold War; and the way the Romulans are likened to Nazi Germany and how they and their cousins the Vulcans reunified, a la East and West Germany when the wall came down. There are countless other examples...most of which came before their time in an exhibition of pretty cool vision.

I also always liked the military structure of the show. They have always had a pretty well-developed idea of leadership in tough situations; and their less-than-perfect solutions and equivocal moral dilemmas that leaders are forced by circumstance to act upon made them more than caricatures. Even the rank structure lent a disciplined organization to their story lines, that I confess was part of the appeal of the military service for me...but I'm still waiting for the right time to say to a subordinate "make it so" without sounding like a geek. I guess only Captain Picard can pull that off (**sigh**)

I like the way they have been able to avoid becoming one-dimensional in their treatment of social philosophies. By that I mean, for example, that while they treat money socialistically (as I mentioned above) they are not willing to jump into bed with every additional liberal idea just because most liberals take their philosophies as a packaged set that always go together. As an example, un-like liberals, they seem to esteem military discipline and to understand that resorting to arms when faced with a persistently aggressive foe is often a necessary part of responsible leadership and the protection of others.  

Also unusual in the Hollywood, Left Coast culture, their characters didn't take the typical "if it feels good do it" approach...rather they valued striving and hard work towards a difficult goal even if doing so proved unpleasant; and even more they showed moral judgment as the positive thing that it is (good judgment, after all, is a part of the definition of maturity and a big part of what separates us from animals) rather than treat it as most Hollywood leftists and liberals do.

But beyond all that...I just LOVE The Enterprise as a ship! I mean, it's ridiculously cool, and it's awesome to see it swoop through the galaxy!

 

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