Osama bin Klingon
by NIH television editor Farrell Childe
Everyone has seen Star Trek at some time or other. If your tastes are like mine, you haven’t seen it for some time, though.
You won’t have watched it lately if you lack any great interest in one-dimensional characterization, unimaginative scripts, wooden acting, and a general atmosphere of suffocating lameness. Not that these are bad things – if they were, the makers of Star Trek wouldn’t work so hard to make sure they were present in every episode – but some of us don’t like them.
Many people seem to like them, though. The show just keeps going. Its fans often justify the show as a vehicle for high ideals, which might compensate for the production flaws. To paraphrase a former president of the United State, though, the highness of Star Trek’s ideals depends on what the meaning of high is.
The chief ideal of Star Trek seems to be the desirability of submitting one’s will to the direction of a wise and compassionate leader. The typical ending of a Star Trek episode features the crew realizing the soundness of the captain’s judgment. That is, at least, a well-intentioned ideal. Wise leadership is, in theory, better than silly leadership.
On the other hand, the leadership on Star Trek is paternalistic. Not only does the captain issue military orders, he or she also solves moral dilemmas for a crew which is incapable of solving them for themselves.
Another high Star Trek ideal is the famous Prime Directive. Over the years this directive has been elaborated, but its core is the statement that “no Starfleet personnel may interfere with the normal and healthy development of alien life and culture.” The only problem, of course, is that they interfere with the development of alien life and culture almost non-stop. For example, they beam down to planets they’ve just discovered and wow the locals with their superior technology – phasers, transporter beams, androids, attractive uniform pyjamas (introducing superior technology is something the Prime Directive, incidentally, expressly forbids). That would have the same non-effect on alien culture that the arrival of Europeans in North America and Africa and elsewhere had on the local cultures.
But that sort of stuff sure goes down well in a country which since before Star Trek began has been interfering in foreign cultures around the world, the doubts of the populace being assuaged by assurances from a purportedly wise leader. Of course, as we in Canada know, Americans have a highly restricted view of culture. It doesn’t include publishing, for example, or any other component whose inclusion might impede the right of the United States to market its goods abroad.
It is not surprising, then, that Star Trek initially failed when it was introduced in the 1960s. In those days the age group at which Star Trek is directed didn’t want leaders of any sort, let alone supposedly wise ones. Many young people then were anti-imperialist, or at least thought they were. They weren’t in the mood to watch a show which transferred the traditional portrayal of cowboys and Indians to the farther reaches of the cosmos.
When Star Trek: The Next Degeneration appeared, though, the populace had become complacent. It had become so accustomed to farming out its intellectual responsibilities to software or experts or mutual fund managers that the idea of a wise leader was more inviting to them. It had become accustomed, too, to not having to be drafted to fight for the American empire. The idea of the American empire had anyway started to vanish, replaced by the much more neutral-sounding idea of globalization.
These days, of course, Star Trek serves as the model for the United States presidency. The president’s public relations consist largely of portraying him as the wise captain at the helm of the USS Free World. President Bush’s contribution to the discussion of the American police action in Afghanistan is to make frequent appearances looking solemn and saying things about as intellectually complex as “Evil is a very bad thing.” The entire moral content of Afghanistan is presented as the need for the wise captain to capture or destroy Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, who clearly play the role of Klingons in this pageant – they are even presented as a threat to Afghan culture. The utility of disrupting the balance of power in the middle east, for example, is never discussed, even as India and Pakistan arm their nukes.
President Bush did not invent this approach. His father used a similar approach in his campaign against the Klingon Saddam Hussein. Where President Bush the Elder went wrong though, was in making a strategic decision not to require unconditional surrender by Iraq.
President Clinton perfected the approach. From the day after his election in 1992 he cultivated the reputation of a wise leader. Much press was devoted to his wide range of knowledge and his long working hours. Before taking office he even staged an embarrassing economic conference at which he commented on the presentations by distinguished economists in a fashion reminiscent of the kindly high school principal encouraging the Civics Club – okay, I found it embarrassing, but many people lapped it up.
He went after the Klingons, too, the most notable being Slobodan Milosevic. I have no illusions about Mr. Milosevic’s character (in fact in the days when everyone thought the Croatians were evil rebels I used to annoy people by informing them of what Milosevic was up to), but to portray the conflicts in Yugoslavia as solely the work of the evil Klingon Milosevic is simply preposterous, especially these days when Franjo Tudjman is reputed to have authorized a campaign of genocide against Serbs. But bombs were dropped, Milosevic was taken off for his show trial, and Albanians were allowed to destabilize Kosovo and Macedonia.
What American presidents have learned since the 1970s is that they can get away with military intervention as long as they keep as many Americans as possible out of it. Military intervention takes place far away, carried out by volunteer troops who operate largely out of the reach of the enemy and consequently suffer few casualties. The intervention is publicized by impressive videos of really big explosions, and people are distracted from issues such as how in the new vigilant secure United States a 15-year-old could fly a plane into the airspace of the base from which the Afghanistan action is being conducted without being intercepted before he flew his plane into an office building.
Well, you can’t say the Americans didn’t warn us. Their young people have been infatuated with Star Trek for some time now. Is it surprising that they look on the reckless military adventures of their leaders as virtuous attempts to thwart the Klingons? The only risk president Bush runs at the moment is that the populace might eventually start to wonder why he hasn’t used his transporter beam to beam bin Laden into Fort Dix.
Osama bin Klingon © Coolth, 2001
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