Starfleet Academy
It's a perfect metaphor for the United States today. What better reason for Paramount and the Ellisons to cancel it.
Nine hundred years after James T. Kirk’s five year mission — that is, in the thirty-second century — the United Federation of Planets is in shambles. Starfleet is a military force, its mission of exploration pushed aside. There is no Starfleet Academy: the military academy stands in its place. Important planets and peoples have withdrawn from the Federation to focus on their own defense, their own self-interest, in a time of scarce resources and rampant piracy. Sound familiar?
We don’t need to look 1,100 years into the future to see the very same thing: the United States, once the leader of the free world and a guarantor (more or less) of world peace, is a laughing stock; it has been brought low by a confluence of factors including low voter turnout and a president who embodies all of the very worst traits of mankind throughout its history. His gleeful transgression of social and political norms strikes a visceral chord in those voters who feel betrayed and often belittled by the status quo and who cheer while he sets fire to the very foundations of their personal liberty. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful force; pair it with the very human unwillingness to admit being conned, and it has taken ten long years — and sixteen months of wanton destruction — for people to wake up and say, “This isn’t what I thought I was voting for.” Not all of them, and not all at once; but it is happening. Progress is rarely linear. It is frustrating in its halting, stuttering, shambling pace. (This, naturally, is one of the core problems: voters want results now, and they want to see a clear nexus between government action and their lives. Whose eyes do not glaze over when you try to explain how aiding starving babies abroad serves their interests at home?)
In Trump’s America, it is every man — every foreign nation, every reliable ally — for himself, for itself. There is no shared purpose: the world is just one big Orion syndicate, and you are either a hood or a victim. It’s a betrayal, a rejection, a refutation of the idea of the United States, a nation whose name proclaims its citizens’ shared enterprise.
And the people are pissed off. They know that government is not working for them. The country is not working for them. More to the point: the people in government — who should be working for them — are not working much at all; and to the extent they are, they’re working not for the people who pay their salaries but for the people (and by that I mean corporations: looking at you, Mitt Romney) who fund their campaigns and feather their nests. Government, in the age of Trump, has become the grift so many people have always believed it was.
“They’re all the same!” a friend of mine used to regularly exclaim. “They’re not,” I’d say. “They are!” And I’d ask him: do you have health insurance? “Oh, yes. That Obamacare saved my life.” At which point I’d look at him and say, “You’re welcome. They’re not all the same, are they?” We had the same conversation a dozen times. People often don’t connect the things government does, when it does things well, with the improvements it has made in their own lives; and moreover they don’t connect it with the elected officials and other civil servants who made it happen. Government at its best is almost unseen; but that also means that its achievements go unrecognized. It puts the people doing the actual hard work at risk of being replaced by posers who want to dismantle it (Elon) and the useful idiots who help them (Donald).
The results are predictable, if you’ve been paying attention; and appalling, whether you’re paying attention or not. A Secretary of Health and Human Services who wonders aloud, after the entire public health apparatus has been decimated, why we’re seeing disease on the rise; Secretaries at Commerce and Treasury who regularly tell us not to believe the evidence of our eyes; a Secretary of Defense who insists that six months in to a disastrous war of choice, our munitions are not depleted, our victory is assured, and our troops are manlier than ever; and a Secretary of State who — well, to be honest: I’m not sure, because in more than fifty years we’ve never had a Secretary of State so invisible. All this in service to a president who insists he’s the best ever, that nobody could do what he’s done.
And that, at least, is the most truthful statement to issue from this congenital liar: nobody else could do it, because nobody else would do it. Because they observed the world, listened to their advisors, and took the prudent path. Trump’s need to outdo everyone is pathological. This native New Yorker has been forced to observe him for decades, and where the tabloids (and even the ostensibly more sober press) called him “brash,” I’d have called him obnoxious, attention-seeking, and in way over his head. And so here we are: a nation in shambles, spending tax dollars on golden statues and triumphal arches that nobody wants while too many of us can’t make ends meet. We can only hope that Starfleet will reconstitute itself and lead us out of this.
Spoiler: We have to be the change we seek, and the change we need. No cowboys are going to ride to our rescue. We're going to have to do the hard work ourselves, just like the students in the Academy. It starts with simple things, like voting. It only gets more complicated from there.