I've finally achieved consistency in my life. Any person of average or above intelligence can predict what I will say next with unerring accuracy. And what I say will always be wrong.

Saturday, June 06, 2009

Utopian dreams and nightmares

My wife finally persuaded me to start blogging about my experiences in
Olympia. I wrote an entire piece about the Food Co-op (sic) in
longhand while in Ottawa, but I haven't been able to bring myself to
type it out yet, so I'll start here, with a recollection of an
incident during my volunteer time at Works In Progress (sic).

I don't name any names in the following account (an unanswered email
to Sophia Mihic, the author of "Star Trek and the Continuing Mission
of American Imperialism," (http://www.counterpunch.org/mihic05292009.html). The biggest trekkie
at Works In Progress, and the most intolerant inquisitor, was a guy by
the name of Tom Freeman (if you're ego-surfing your name, Tom, here it
is, I haven't forgotten you). He figures into many of my Works in
Progress horror stories. Maybe I'll post all of those eventually.
Campus security can't be invoked as a defense against true and
uninhibited free speech any more.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: matt love
Date: Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 11:54 PM
Subject: Your piece on Counterpunch on the star trek movie was great
To: s-mihic@neiu.edu

A number of years ago, I wrote a piece in the Olympia, Washington rag
"Works In Progress" (formerly a house organ for the local branch of
the Rainbow Coalition, but gradually devolving into a sort of
neo-Stalinist propaganda sheet). I advanced a theory I'd developed
over the years. It didn't seem like I was saying anything particularly
creative or thoughtful, but I hadn't seen it elsewhere... how
perfectly Star Trek mirrored the American world view in the 60s. The
federation was the US. Vulcan was Japan, our compliant, inscrutable
lieutenants. The Romulans were Communist China. The Klingons were
Russia. And all these hapless little backwater planets were stand ins
for Vietnam, and other third world countries.

In the interest of protecting them from Klingon domination, the
Federation would go in and kick the shit out of them, week after week,
all the while piously bragging about their dedication to the prime
directive. It was too
perfect. Of course, Gene Roddenberry was a self-proclaimed Kennedy
liberal - that is, he enjoyed the occasional orgy, but he was rabid on
a tough foreign policy. He had a background in the military, and he
worked as an LA cop while peddling screen plays. The trekkies (oh
they don't like to be called trekkies, they want to be called trekkers
- do they realize how infinitely more stupid, not less, that makes
them look) have evolved elaborate spin around Roddenberry's pitch - he
only said he wanted to do 'wagon train to the stars,' to trick the dull
minds of the Hollywood powers-that-be so he could hide subversive
progressive politics inside the shoot-em-up. Roddenberry, who
previously had worked on westerns, really did just want to trade horse
opera for space opera - his progressive vision of the future involved
the white captain kissing the always frightened black switchboard
operator with an inflated job title under the painful influence of
alien mind control - something he fought valiantly against, but
failed. A future where the people in the sky cities deserved to live
there, and the people who slaved underground deserved to live there.
And on and on.

These things were so obvious, I could not see how they could be
missed, but I never heard anybody articulate them, so I wrote it up...
I kept it light (much lighter than this) because I was trying to
persuade, and I'd already had run-ins with the reflexive trekkies in
the "collective" (this was long before the Borg, of course). But one
evening, at a lefty party (I still got invited to them at that point)
I was talking to some very charming people from Venezuela, a visiting
math professor and his adult daughter. I described my upcoming article
to them with some degree of pride. They both laughed gaily and said
of course, everybody knows that... it was obvious, everybody knew it,
why bother to write it, it's like saying water is wet or the room goes
dark when you turn off the lights.

I suddenly felt that my supposedly provocative piece was so limp
people would jeer at me for arriving so late to these obvious
conclusions. Not to worry, the neo-stalinists went apeshit over it.
It's not surprising to me that they worshipped state power, that is
their nature. What surprised me was how easily they could be fooled
into worshipping American state power, just by calling it something
else, even though the trappings were so terribly transparent. It was only
Venezuelans (and probably the rest of the planet) that could see through
the thin allegory that failed to cloak Star Trek's imperialism from inquiring minds, but succeeded so well when it came to American lefty drones.

My only regret was that I announced I had no problem with the next
series. It was merely a lack of exposure, it was much more insidious
because it was better done, just like army ads, industrial films,
commercials, everything became more subtle and sophisticated and hip.
I mean, they could have gone a lot further... the idea of the shrewd
anti-imperialist Samuel Clemens, who earlier had correctly identified
the Enterprise, bristling with weapons, as a battle ship, and not the
Beagle or the Project Hope ship as they liked to claim, was reduced to
dewy-eyed submission by the assurances (and cleavage) of Troi that our
contemporary problems like poverty, racism, etc were over, is pretty
ludicrous. That was exactly the message we were getting from Reagan,
exactly the message the propagandists of Clemens' time were giving
him, no doubt. I don't think he would have been fooled, but clearly it
wasn't in the interest of the propaganda to let even a fictionalized
Clemens' win that debate.

Another example that springs quickly to mind was the time Jordy was
explaining free will to the captured borg. Yeah, sure, we all wear
identical uniforms, live in identical quarters, abandon our
independent wills and obey the captain no matter what, unto death...
but we do it because we want to! So different from you borgs. So
different. I presume that the borgs (Bjorgs?) represent the
collectivist Scandinavian model, where they are offered the false
promise of plenty, but end up in a dreary, grey cube. The enterprise
represents the ultimate triumph of capitalism, where all you need to
do is speak your desire, and it's delivered to your fingertips, and
the ship is powered with energy that's safe, clean, and too cheap to
meter... but people still go to Whoopie's bar to buy drinks, just
because it's so damn much fun to spend money!

Later, I was going to write about the Next Generation, but first I was
purged, then I got onto other things... but I guess I've written about
it just now. And lucky you, you get to see it.

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