Space... the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before.
As evidenced by the crew of the Enterprise, the mission has presumably already been accomplished on earth. On the bridge is a veritable rainbow coalition of skin colors, continents, funny accents, and even a guy from another planet, Vulcan, where all actions are guided by (gasp) reason. Created at the height of the Civil Rights era, the original Star Trek projects the 1964 Voting Rights Act into the future: all races, classes, and gender (although women still wear mini-skirts, thankfully) push the buttons and pull the levers of power as a team. It’s the inclusive dream of liberal capitalism (note, again, ship’s name) come true: democracy, cross cultural understanding, and the entrepreneurial spirit of economic development all mutually reinforcing the fundamental human drive for adventure and creative contact with what’s new. And I love it for this reason alone: it rubs wrong the stodgy, narrow conservatism that hates anything new or different (read: people of color, non-Christians, and gays).
Star Trek XI (the first in over a decade) is, in the best sense, a popcorn movie, a summer blockbuster. It’s awesome big, goofy cliché fun, and jumps up and down like an 11 year-old on a can of Monster. I’m no Trekkie but like many who were kids at that time I watched every episode of the original series multiple times as it was broadcasted daily as reruns in the early ‘70s. With that background, I found the prequel vision of the principle characters fun and, particularly, in the case of Spock even touching. Although, I must say, the cameo appearance of the original Spock, Leonard Nimoy, felt gratuitous (if obligatory) and seemed only to ground a film that otherwise warps through space.
(I am left wondering, though, what the uninitiated make of the cheesy character acting? If they like it they ought to check out more of the original because even as fine as Chris Pine is as the brash young James T. Kirk he cannot prepare you for the Shakespearean hambone antics of William Shatner. And if that’s not enough for you check out Rhino Records compilation series Golden Throats for some Shatner and Nimoy musical performances. Show stoppers!)
At any rate, I’m happy to report that in the Star Trek future discrimination, disproportionality and, apparently, group oppression of any kind disappear. Although, unfortunately, bad guys are still around. Turns out some cultures are just genetically predisposed to being meanies; or, rather, not getting enough love as children, for them, has become a cultural tradition, it is not clear which is the case. In the original Star Trek one group of perennial evil doers, the Klingons, look vaguely like Genghis Kahn’s Mongol horde on a spaceship, evoking a murderous cold war Sino-Soviet hybrid. In the latest installment the bad guys, Romulans, look like white supremacists with a tattoo fetish. Nero, their leader, is bent on revenge against Spock and the Starfleet Federation for failing to save his home planet from an exploding star. In either case these baddies are presented as if they’d be welcomed into the Federation if it wasn’t for the simple fact that they’re all haters and can’t get along with others.
This is just about when, if you think about it, the multicult dream starts to sound like a good old fashion whitewash. Or a Benneton ad, might be more like it! Nero and his Romulan gang want to destroy the Federation because of a natural disaster. Right, and Lil Wayne and his posse are bound and determeined to bring down the United States government because of Katrina. Anybody that doesn’t join hands with the Federation (or celebrate the joys of shopping)must be a cracked sociopath; an “enemy of freedom,” a violent actor filled with blind, misplaced hate. This is the appropriation of civil rights goals to rationalize liberal capitalist imperialism: making the structure of power transparent and inclusive to all races and genders (or other marginalized groups) (or at least commitment to the same) renders opposition to the system as negligible— the actions of incorrigible cranks like Klingons and Romulans. In short: it’s a belief that full civil rights can be achieved without any rethinking and reforming of the system that generates economic inequality. Ideologues of the left and right may snicker at this feel good liberalism but its importance as dream making myth rallying support for the status quo should not be underestimated.
This is no mere red state-blue state divide. Even if the republicans drag their feet on policies that promote inclusiveness, and thinly veiled demagogic bigotry remains their chief campaign strategy, any open opposition to the equal opportunity for all creed would spell their decline, if not total destruction, as a major political party in America. From this viewpoint, democrat or republican, civil rights have become the American Dream in that in America everyone, regardless of their background, ought to be able to strike it rich and live like a King in their castle. But this creed ignores the economic origins of equal rights claims. And the consequences of this outlook on U.S. foreign policy is, in short, an inability to recognize (and so confront and reform) the divisive injustice of American imperialism. Team America is seen as at worst a bumbling superpower with good intentions. By contrast, Kim Jong II is a megalomaniacal dictator threatening world destruction as a way to shore up insecurities about his own power. And Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his Iranian Mullahs view all individual human rights as a conspiracy against the Koran and Islam. Like Klingons and Romulans, these guys were just born evil.
From another viewpoint, however, it is international forces of economic development, beginning with Columbus, colonialism, imperialism, and subsequent mass human migrations, that generated the social ills from which the civil rights movement emerged to correct. It is represented by a democracy for the rich that depends, as viewed globally, on the disenfranchisement and impoverishment of a majority of the planet. It is operationally this amazingly creative machine that makes shiny stuff out of natural resources and human labor but does not take responsibility for its impact on the planet or costs in human life. “Free trade,” the liberal capitalist idea of cross cultural understanding, is a euphemism for: see, you give us raw materials and cheap labor and we will give you Coca-cola and some cell phones. Understand?! Right, Iran’s Mullahs’ are intolerant religious extremists— who rose to power in reaction to the 26 year long U.S. puppet dictatorship of the Shah, who jailed and/or executed any Iranian who opposed him. And, right, Kim Jong is a oppressive, violent, crackpot— who sees nuclear power as the last guarantor of national independence. If the U.S. wants to end nuclear proliferation then, as the country with the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet, it needs to lead in eliminating nuclear weapons, of course. And yet, apparently, this is obvious to everyone except Americans.
Truth is most the action in Star Trek revolves around the apparent conflict between Kirk's guts and glory and Spock's emotionally wrought rationalism. But it's precisely this preoccupation with the unification of an Us against a cartoon, evil Them that grates politically. In all likelihood Nero and his angry Romulans, all miners, had probably been aware of the danger of the exploding star that ultimately destroyed their planet for some time and had been asking the powers that be, The Federation, for help and protection, which they did not receive. And as working class people, working for low pay, they did not have the means to move out of harms way but, instead, to provide for their families, they continued to work in these dangerous conditions. That would certainly present a more credible explanation for the maniacal revenge of Nero but it would also put the whole Star Trek mission in a different light.
Star Trek XI must have started production before Obama’s rise but still what timing. Our first black President. Civil rights, led by African Americans, peaked as a movement at a time when class and economic discussion in this country was polarized by Cold War propaganda. Almost 50 years later we live at a time of another civil rights milestone, almost 20 years after the end of the Cold War, and yet the old either-or discourse on economic issues still seems to prevail. Even Obama’s tepid efforts so far to reform a system of wrecklessly inefficient privatizing profit gouging, demonstrating degrees of wealth inequality not seen since the Gilded Age, are pilloried as socialism. Unions are more than ever regarded as shady unpatriotic special interests that hurt competition and are unwilling to make sacrifices for the good of the country. Meanwhile, corporate (let’s compare the criminal records of union’s and corporation’s some time, shall we?) and banking bad actors are lavished with hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts. Even when the evidence that we need economic reform screams out the reaction continues.
In an important way this is a struggle for the soul of America that goes back to the beginning of the republic and the Alien and Sedition Acts. Concerns over national security push back at efforts to mature, to walk the talk of American ideals, to reconcile civil rights with economic justice, in domestic and foreign affairs. Obama’s recent face off with Dick Cheney is the most recent case in point. To Cheney failing to fight fire with fire, failing to take the fight to our enemies, increases the chances of another 9/11, makes us less safe. In other words, torture and secret prisons and suspension of habeas corpus rights and crony capitalism and executive privilege (i.e., to decide who are our “enemies”) are just what it takes to stay free (meaning: rich). On Obama’s side, torture is a recruitment tool for our enemies, provides unreliable intelligence, and is a profound disrespect to our troops in harm’s way. Etc. And around we go… spinning off topic, democrats brainlessly puffing out their chests for fear of appearing weak on national security.
Civil rights progress is measured as slow, hard-won milestones against a, frustratingly, always receding horizon of full equality, and will do so as long as the causes of gross economic inequality go unexamined and unchecked. In contrast with the liberal capitalist dream, as Martin Luther King put it at the height of the Civil Rights era, it’s still racism, materialism, and militarism that we see tragically reinforcing each other in the modern era. It should be a national embarrassment that the U.S. refuses to participate in the International Criminal Court. In the American imperium, as in the Starfleet Federation, multicultural representation or not, there will always be Klingons and Romulans, terrorists and rogue states.
Currently playing: "Life In Marvelous Times," Mos Def
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