Thoughts on Star Trek

 

Watching, again, Star Trek Strange New Worlds, I wondered, one more time, why it seems appropriate to producers to infantilize audiences while wagging the moralistic finger. Just to be clear, Strange New Worlds has a few excellent episodes, as far as entertainment is concerned. But it descends, in others, to unadulterated boneheadedness. I suppose it is an improvement on what came before.

It was Star Trek Discovery that set the absolute lowest bar to rationality and entertainment, preferring to insult its audience with a moronic ideologism in which the rainbow-alphabet-doctrine was presented through stunningly stupid characters, subject to infantile tantrums and cretinous beliefs completely at odds with a militarized interstellar civilization. How could idiots like the almost exclusively heteroclite crew in Discovery possibly manage to survive 60 seconds in an interstellar spacecraft facing even the slightest challenge? Well, the answer is that, in the show, pink pony unicorns really did exist to sprinkle otherwise entirely irrational morons with special pixie dust, turning them into happy-clapping, born again dimwits of whatever that religion is that was being preached.

I am somewhat astonished that real people who might be lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, etc, weren’t vocally outraged to be portrayed as quite so devoid of intellect or rationality. Never mind being corralled into a silly acronym like animals in a petting zoo for the rich and feckless. And that’s really the problem here: only people living in incredibly wealthy privilege could imagine that the most pressing problem for their petting zoo animals are not the very wealth and privilege of the infantilizers, based on the bone-crushing criminality of wealth and social inequality, which creates all of the real problems for a much wider underclass than the pink pony unicorn rainbow fantasy of LA rich people about inequality.

What doesn’t surprise me at all is that the fascists saw just how feckless and weak their supposed betters are, and stole the country–the USA, Britain, Australia, wherever–from idiots pushing these kinds of infantile messages, possibly believing their own bullshit, adopting the political strategy of fighting an election on the basis they would be sprinkled by pixie dust, like the Star Trek characters, to turn their own infantilized cretinism into a viable politics.

With the outcome of fascists now controlling every aspect of government in the USA. Chalk one up for the rainbow fantasy. Or not.

Star Trek Strange New Worlds is slightly less offensively stupid. Slightly more about entertainment, if you can overlook the unrestrained childishness of the Spock-Chappel romance, the absolute bollocks about Illyrians, the pedestrian invocation of a cartoon series to excuse the mediocrity of the scriptwriters, and the truly awful appropriation of really rancid Bollywood musical Schmaltz late in the second series. The best episodes were unapologetic rip-offs of the Alien franchise, in which the crew actually had to oppose an inexplicable and merciless foe with zero regard for ideology.

What was always missing was the enemy that is neoliberal political economy. The enemy that crushes billions of people so that a few thousand can enjoy incredible privilege. An enemy that would be logical in the Star Trek universe, which must be a socialist one, since the entire edifice of Starfleet couldn’t possibly be funded by any capitalist or Libertarian system. In fact, profit itself is absent from the fable altogether. Because the more likely explanation of a capitalist Starfleet would be the genocidal rape and pillage of all alien civilizations encountered that are too weak to resist it. Weapons sales to others slightly more martial, and trade alliances to share the spoils of genocidal exploitation with civilizations militarily on par.

At about this point I can imagine some young spotty demanding to know why I watch Star Trek if it’s such crap. But the young spotty should know better. It’s for the same reason he or she eats the crap that makes them have bad skin to be a young spotty. Because junk food is there. And addictive. Like junk culture.

I was addicted early. Before I was ten. By way of the original Star Trek. Which at least tried to present a picture of American imperialism that wasn’t infantilized, even if it was racist and sexist in the same breath as condemning both. Women running around in miniskirts and dancer’s tights were a step ahead of women running around in less, and openly enslaved as playthings of ridiculously one-dimensional villains. Spock, Chekov, and Sulu were evidence of American equality that included very few black faces, but many grotesque stereotypes of Asian, Middle Eastern, and Soviet scoundrels.

What was appealing about the original series was the very socialism that has been jettisoned since. Star Trek television since the 1990s has been about incredibly privileged children. That is, perpetual children in all stages of life, who seem unable to learn any lessons from their misadventures, and certainly seem entirely bereft of any knowledge of the Enlightenment, Mill, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Hayek, or any number of others who should have dispelled the infantilism of LA scriptwriters, by dispelling the demand for their unsophisticated fictions in their audiences.

The early promise in the original series, which did actually imply we overcame selfishness and greed, disappeared in the Thatcherism and Reaganomics of the 1980s and 1990s. To which the Star Trek franchise was too cowardly and sickly to offer the obvious opposition. Which is part of the reason why we are still Earth-bound. Idealism gave way to cowardice and profiteering—the new religion. A religion entirely in keeping with infantilization.

And that’s where I came in.