GameStop, and the False God of Wall Street

In Shirley Jackson’s 1948 short story “The Lottery,” residents of a nameless American village gather for an annual summer ritual. The characters’ meandering banter reveals this ritual serves to ensure a bountiful harvest and social stability. However, events start turning dark quickly. If you haven’t read it, skip to the next paragraph: by drawing lots, the titular Lottery determines which villager becomes a blood sacrifice to the earth.

One important theme in Jackson’s story is why, exactly, the villagers persevere in this gruesome tradition. Many nearby villages have evidently abandoned their lottery. Though old-timers prophesy doom for those villages, this catastrophe apparently hasn’t happened yet. Like Americans asserting that voting for the other party will have disastrous consequences, the doom never quite arrives. But for true believers, that only means doom hasn’t arrived yet.

News broke this week that angry Redditors, working in collaboration, had collapsed a billion-dollar hedge fund, Melvin Capital, by driving up prices on selected stock. Though that stock included multiple holdings, the emblem of this action became videogame retailer GameStop. Melvin gambled that GameStop stock, always a precarious holding, would plunge in value, and sold short. Redditors banded together to hoist prices, leaving Melvin holding the bag.

Initially, I saw this story as another declaration of how effective people become when banding together. Defenders of the status quo love asserting that banded groups of consumers—especially labor unions—constitute an unjust intrusion on market forces. Capitalism requires concentrated money, but atomized human beings. When individuals band together, their actions steer markets, which the status quo finds intolerable. Capitalists always get their fee-fees hurt.

However, this feels different. Netizen peons didn’t do what organized labor usually does, demanding better pay or executive accountability. They actively challenged capitalists in their sacred temple. Hedge funds have historically enjoyed near-total impunity for their reckless behavior, even after the stock market collapses of 2007 and 2020, simply because few outsiders understand their domain. These netizens walked in, cornered the market, and broke the system.

Shirley Jackson

Notably, just like Shirley Jackson’s habit-driven villagers, this action elicits prophets of doom. This will end in tears, some say, or your revolution is doomed from the start. Just as Jackson’s aged, angry villagers demand the young keep respecting traditions, because they’re traditions, these market mavens assert that any interruption in the way we’ve always done stocks, will bring ruin down around our ears. Frankly, we’ve heard this all before.

Wall Street brokerages frequently operate just like an arcane priesthood. Stock market votaries claim exclusive access to capitalism’s gods, and enter a poorly understood temple, emerging with the oracle’s prophecies. Until 2005, access to the New York Stock Exchange was capped at 1,366 seats, which traded at nearly $4 million each, making the priesthood literally exclusive: you couldn’t get rich on stocks without already being rich.

Just like you must already be a wizard to get into Hogwart’s.

Capitalism, like religion, dominates only because enough people believe it does. That belief derives from an enigmatic priesthood claiming to have better skill reading signs than ordinary believers. Eventually, young people raised on opaque rituals and wordy liturgy, will studiously question the beliefs they’ve been spoon-fed. They’ll ask: Do these beliefs make sense? And more important, do other believers live by the beliefs they claim to espouse?

This isn’t the place to debate whether religions are necessarily “true.” Anybody who’s studied religion or philosophy already knows that truth is a slippery criterion. But religions hold their power by the willingness of believers to accept their essential veracity. Whether that means Christianity’s “priesthood of all believers,” or the closely held secrets of Greek mystery cults and Haitian vodoun practitioners, religion gains its power from others’ trust.

Like villagers rejecting the Lottery, peons surging into Wall Street’s Holy of Holies upsets the order. Though about half of Americans own some stock, mostly through mutual funds and 401(k) programs, more than four-fifths of the stock market belongs to just America’s richest ten percent. Yet market mavens insist they have unique oracular powers, and whatever happens to Wall Street now, happens to America overall later.

In the end, Tessie Hutchinson dies to preserve the villagers’ faith in the Lottery. One year ago, I might’ve thought people willing to die for capitalism was merely symbolic. But with the pandemic, defenders of the status quo have advocated exactly that. Capitalism is truth, and truth is something we willingly die for. But Redditors said no. This isn’t labor unionism, I now see; this is religious iconoclasty.

Big Data and the Prequel to Technocracy

Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

Madison Avenue publicity maven Ed Greenfield had a vision: what if we could predict the future? Using the newest IBM mainframe computers and the rising principles of Cold War social science, Greenfield believed paying customers could anticipate upcoming human behaviors. He didn’t consider himself a technical genius or a manipulator. He truly believed we could optimize outcomes and make humanity better using improved technology and more data.

Harvard University political historian Jill Lepore stumbled upon the history of Greenfield’s Simulmatics Corporation accidentally, while researching other issues. What she found, however, seemed chillingly familiar, in light of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and controversies surrounding digital data collection. These attempts to quantify and exploit human behaviors seem new; but, Lepore realized, they have a tumultuous history going back over sixty years.

Greenfield, a staunch Democrat, originally had political aspirations for his advertising skills. Adlai Stevenson, a Northern moderate, failed to capture the presidency twice, maybe because he maintained a distant, scholarly posture. Or maybe, Greenfield realized, because his opponent, Dwight Eisenhower, embraced TV ads and 30-second sound bites. Greenfield originally wanted to create a better political ad, and deploy it to bring liberalism back into political relevance.

However, Greenfield’s ambitions coincided with rises in American social science. Where poli-sci professors had previously remained satisfied describing what happened in the past, the Cold War created incentives to control the future. What, academics and bureaucrats wondered, would it take to ensure the Communists didn’t take world control? Social scientists moved into new worlds of speculation and public relations, to ensure Communism didn’t gain an international toehold.

This confluence of sociology and advertising, with recent advancements in computer technology, gave Greenfield an insight: we could combine the newest social science theories, the slickest advertising practices, and the hottest computer technology, to predict the best possible outcome. To that end, Greenfield collected a brain trust of Democratic-leaning scholars in sociology, math, computers, pollsters, and even novelists, to write a program automatically simulating voter outcomes.

Dr. Jill Lepore

Simulation. Automatic. Why, Greenfield realized, we could call it…Simulmatics!

From the beginning, Greenfield’s Simulmatics Corporation made high-minded promises, but chronically underdelivered. They charged Jack Kennedy’s 1960 campaign beaucoups of bucks for a report basically advising them to keep doing what they were already doing. Nevertheless, they claimed triumph, boasting that their advice pushed Kennedy into his razor-thin plurality. This despite Robert Kennedy’s angry disavowal, based on his instinctive distrust of computers.

Simulmatics began looking for further clients. But politicians found their oracular promises specious, while advertisers had begun their own in-house focus testing experiments. Newspapers paid handsomely for Simulmatics’ promises to accurately forecast election outcomes faster than ever before, but as always, Simulmatics underperformed. Despite their technocratic optimism, Simulmatics never gained mainstream acceptance. Soon they found the only client able to support their increasingly grandiose budgets: the Defense Department.

Lepore, as an Americanist, specializes in finding evidence missing from historical documents. This book delivers on that reputation. Despite having its fingers in numerous pies, Simulmatics left a remarkably small footprint. She reconstructs its history from personal letters, government documents, and counter-information provided by its opponents. This last source proves abundant: even as Simulmatics collapsed into a grave of empty promises, the hippie Left charged its corpse with “War Crimes.”

Even better, Lepore finds the personalities which motivated Simulmatics’ hasty rise and lingering disintegration. Besides Greenfield, she identifies “Wild Bill” McPhee, a mathematician whose insights into algorithms was matched only by his struggles with madness; Eugene Burdick, political theorist and novelist, who turned against Simulmatics and wrote bestsellers about the coming technocratic dystopia; and Ithiel de Sola Pool, once disgraced by Simulmatics, who reinvented himself as prophet of the Internet.

Fast as Simulmatics arose, it shattered equally quickly. Its Manhattan and Boston offices began feuding, and its leftist inventors found themselves trapped in the increasingly right-wing quagmire of Vietnam. Everyone from Norman Mailer to Jerry Rubin denounced Simulmatics by name. But when the company collapsed, everyone forgot it instantly; it disappeared from America’s collective memory. So when Google and Facebook began repeating Simulmatics’ business model, it seemed brand new.

This is history as literature. By casting one almost-forgotten corporation against the larger scope of the 1960s, Lepore makes this book about the forces which attempt to control us, today, with varying success. History, Lepore asserts, isn’t the dead past; ultimately, it’s about us. The forces which once ignited violence so bad, it threatened to destroy America, have become so banal, we’ve forgotten about them. But Jill Lepore hasn’t, and neither should we.

Politics, Religion, and the New Inquisition

Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco, the Italian polymath, has an important scene in his first novel, The Name of the Rose. His protagonist, Brother William of Baskerville, debates the fugitive heretic Ubertino of Casale (who was a very real person). Ubertino questions why William abandoned his prestigious position as a prosecutor in the Inquisition. William previously took charge against Dulcineans, Pseudo-Apostles, and other violent dissidents from Roman ecclesial authority.

William notes that “confessions” extracted from dissidents, often under torture, are almost verbatim identical. The accusations leveled against Dulcineans in William’s time, are indistinguishable from accusations leveled against Bogomils, Cathars, Arminians, and Paulicians in prior centuries. Why, William dares suggest, it almost appears these confessed heretics work from identical scripts, which inevitably reinforce Roman papal authority.

“What does that matter?” Ubertino replies. “The Devil is stubborn, he follows a pattern in his snares and his seductions, he repeats his rituals at a distance of millennia, he is always the same, this is precisely why he is recognized as the enemy!”

I first read these words nearly thirty years ago. They struck me then, as now, because they’re perfect examples of projection. They assume Satan demands his followers practice ritual, not as means for achieving greater metaphysical good, but as ends in themselves; and that Satan stands changeless across the ages, deaf to evolving demands placed on his followers by society, economics, and other contingent events.

Tell me that doesn’t describe the Roman church before the Counter-Reformation—or many White Evangelical churches today.

These accusations have plagued me recently. Ubertino’s accusations describe QAnon, the conspiracy theory contending that our former President holds all the cards and would, any minute now, expose and overthrow a sinister cabal of blood-drinking kiddie diddlers who control the levers of society. The fact that this overthrow kept not happening, proves, somehow, the depths of control this cabal actually has. It’s a masterpiece of self-sealing argument.

Smarter writers than me observe how QAnon precisely mimics the Blood Libel, a medieval belief that Jews control society by drinking Christian children’s blood. These same beliefs, almost verbatim, came crawling back onto dry land during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, levied not against Jews, but against day-care providers. In both cases, someone awful controlled society, in ways that, as Ubertino accused, remain unchanged across millennia.

We could apply Freudian analysis to these accusations. Correlating persistent images of vampirism and child rape, with loss of worldly control, seems so obvious, it doesn’t require deeper explication. In both cases, powerful people suck the souls from our culture’s most vulnerable citizens. Vampires (with their sexual connotations) and child rapists gain power by dominating those least able to defend themselves.

Watching today’s news, though, I notice another reiteration of Ubertino’s withered imagination. President Biden, immediately upon taking office, signed orders bringing America back into the Paris Climate Accords; and his campaign promises include a pledge to double the minimum wage. Both actions have received criticism from his opposition, which isn’t unusual. But both have achieved the same criticism.

REPORT: Joe Biden’s Proposal to Raise National Minimum Wage to $15 Could ‘Kill 3.7 Million Jobs’ https://t.co/ke4sfIEc8t

— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) January 20, 2021

Supposedly, increasing the minimum wage will—we’re constantly warned—cause massive price inflation, unemployment, and misery. I remember hearing that in college Economics 120, and from the conservative commentators I read as a teenage Republican. Don’t hoist the minimum wage, we’re always enjoined, lest we cause economic catastrophe! Yet somehow, it keeps not happening. Almost like the premise is fundamentally unsound.

Conservatives (including my younger self) constantly cite this same crinkum-crankum scare against even the most salutary efforts to improve anything. Any change, no matter how necessary or scientifically sound, will cause inflation and unemployment. Pay workers consummate with the value they create? Inflation and unemployment. Stop dumping sewage upriver from the city reservoir? Inflation and unemployment.

✔️Biden is revoking the Trump-approved permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, which is *already under construction* by U.S. union workers.

This is, again, an alarming move in Biden's War on Energy.

This will do some damage and will almost certainly be met with litigation.

— Andrew Clark (@AndrewHClark) January 20, 2021

Like the Satanic accusations Ubertino admits apply equally to any reform-minded sect, these claims aren’t factual. Rather, let’s call them liturgical. That is, they’re words repeated, in unison, to remind believers of their shared values and precepts. Liturgy serves important purposes, when believers face a hostile world that offers constant temptations to sin. But when liturgical continuity becomes a substitute for doing right, it undermines believers together.

When powerful people combine liturgy with Blood Libel, it becomes clear that politics has become religion. Half of America’s political debate isn’t arguing the best system for governing the citizenry anymore, it’s devising Inquisitions to punish heretics. Like Ubertino, who became entangled in his own accusations and vanished from history, this kind of religion always destroys itself. But not without hurting others along the way.

Severus Snape and the Backstory of Doom

Professor Snape (Alan Rickman) showing his usual patient, nurturing classroom technique

Who is Severus Snape, and why do Harry Potter fans have such high feelings about him? From his first appearance in the Harry Potter novels, Professor Snape comes across as a bully, a man-child with unresolved oedipal issues who turns his self-hatred on students. Surely I wasn’t the only reader who shrugged, remembering teachers I had like that. Some people become teachers because they aren’t done learning yet.

This weekend, I posted an internet meme to a popular discussion board, suggesting filmmakers could profitably make a film series about Professor Snape’s transition from one of Lord Voldemort’s shock troopers, to Dumbledore’s inside man. Because I don’t follow fan culture closely, I failed to anticipate the high feelings which this would generate. Besides predictable rants against J.K. Rowling personally, many fans took umbrage at anything foregrounding Snape favorably.

In fairness, I understand that anger. I remember watching trailers for Todd Phillips’ 2019 movie Joker, and reflexively rejecting the characterization. I wrote back then that giving Joker traditional motivations “devalues the character.” Besides the fact that Joker is like a hurricane, and simply destroys because it’s his nature, it also recycles a weatherbeaten writing trope. I’m tired of “nice guys” snapping because they’ve been crushed down so long.

That character arc, the broken “nice guy,” superficially applies to Snape. When Harry sees into Snape’s memories through the Pensieve in Order of the Phoenix, we witness “nice” teenage Severus trying vainly to romance the future Lily Potter, only to get bullied by tall, dashing, broad-shouldered James. Clearly, in Snape’s mind, he had the potential to become a charming teenage lover, but James and the “cool kids” denied him the opportunity.

If filmmakers wrote this story, I’d be disappointed. Not only because we’ve seen this weak story so frequently, but also because it makes Snape a reliable narrator. Please. We know Snape lies as easily as breathing. Not only does he lie to others regularly, but we learn in later books, he lies to himself. The memory Harry sees through the Pensieve has probably been edited numerous times, to offer Snape the justification he eagerly seeks.

J.K. Rowling

Rowling’s narrative emerges from her Scottish Presbyterian religious background. This requires a little theological understanding. Presbyterianism, with its Calvinist background, holds all humans are essentially sinful, or in Calvin’s words, Totally Depraved. We’re all liars, egoists, gluttons, and bigots, awaiting salvation from a merciful God whose entire being consists of everything good and beneficial in this universe. Only God can save us from ourselves.

The catechistic nature of wizard school mirrors the Calvinist journey out of sin. Three school houses encourage different virtues; the fourth teaches students to embrace their Total Human Depravity and remain sinful. Not for nothing is Dumbledore’s domicile at the peak of the tallest tower, while the Slytherin dormitories are in the dungeon. They provide two opposite aspirations… and Snape chooses the aspiration closest to the earth.

Of Snape’s many failings, foremost is his lack of self-reflection. Even after his loyalties cost Lily Potter her life, he continues whining about the unfairness to him, not to everyone Lily loved. He shows no capacity for even rudimentary repentance, because he doesn’t understand himself well enough for that. People like Snape—arrogant, convinced of their own rightness, and plush with privilege—are prime pickings for malevolent manipulators like Voldemort.

(I promise, I’m not talking about current politics.)

That’s the Snape whose backstory I’m interested in seeing dramatised. Not the “nice guy” pushed to breaking, but the deluded sinner, the self-righteous egoist who hasn’t learned to examine himself coolly and revise his faults. I want the Snape who pushes forward with the grace and discretion of a cattle stampede, failing to realize he’s the villain in other people’s stories, until he’s abruptly forced to reckon with the consequences.

I acknowledge, this justification omits many people’s most adamant objection to new Potterverse material: the person of J.K. Rowling. Her insistence on voicing opinions which her young, mostly left-leaning audience finds objectionable, isn’t insignificant. But, as I’ve written recently, it’s a mistake to expect Great Artists to be Good People. Stories like Harry Potter don’t emerge from healthy, well-adjusted minds.

Poor writing could torpedo any Snape story beforehand. Especially if the writer succumbs to sentimentality, or reaches for low-hanging fruit, Snape’s backstory could be irretrievably ruined. But if a writer accepts, in advance, that Snape’s “nice guy” self-image is a delusion, and that he’s incapable of understanding his own Total Depravity, the story produced could be engaging and worthwhile.

 

On related topics:

• Harry Potter and the House Elf Manifesto
• What J.K. Rowling Says About You and Me
• Harry Potter and the Butt-Plant of Destiny

The Artist As Public Monster

Phil Spector, during his murder trial

Music legend Phil Spector’s death, this weekend, has reinvigorated the now-common question: how do we remember great but awful people? Is Spector the gifted music producer whose “Wall of Sound” technique changed pop music in the 1960s, molding legendary songs for the Beatles, Ike & Tina Turner, and Connie Francis? Or is Spector primarily the murderer who lured actress Lana Clarkson to his house on false pretenses, and shot her?

I’ve contemplated this question before. When considering art, must we also consider the artist’s moral résumé? This goes double when art remains under copyright, and artists continue drawing residuals. If an artist also commits atrocities, as Spector certainly did—even before murdering Clarkson, Spector’s first wife Veronica “Ronnie” Bennett credibly accused him of physical and psychological torture—does that disqualify his art?

Prior generations seemed willing to accept their artists’ moral failures, which were often egregious. From the hyper-machismo of Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer, to the wild sexual escapades of John Lennon and Elvis, to the self-destructive tendencies of Kurt Cobain and John Belushi, the artists whose work defined their times, frequently left trails of destruction behind them. This was just considered the price of being an artist.

It doesn’t escape me that such “tortured artists” are overwhelmingly men. While much attention accrues in online circles to J.K. Rowling’s belligerent TERF opinions, and Carrie Fisher’s violent swings of addiction and mental illness are legendary, they remain outliers. We can debate whether women artists are socialized to be more compliant, or whether we’re more tolerant of men’s abusive behaviors. But historically, we’ve let male artists be abusive.

Today, apparently uniquely, we have the expectation that Great Artists must also be Good People. The haste with which American audiences, and the entertainment conglomerates which need them, have abandoned, say, Woody Allen, attests that we demand artists represent our values. The Internet has made the public more aware than ever of artists’ personal lives; and we’ve responded by passing moral judgement on their work, measured by our billfolds.

But good people don’t make great art. They never have. Art emerges from some form of tension, whether it’s the narrative tension of a Scottish king usurping the throne, the cultural tension of teenaged musicians rebelling against postwar conformity, or the personal tension of comedians turning their private trauma into public art. Nice people getting along peacefully don’t have raw material for art, much less the motivation to pursue their public.

Roman Polanski, Bill Cosby, and David Bowie:
three great artists who left a trail of destruction behind them

This became clear for me, surrounding two famous addicts. James Frey, whose memoir Oprah endorsed before it became clear he’d fabricated nearly everything, made his reputation spilling the beans about his toxic personality. Stephen King, whose career-making books from the 1970s were mostly written in an alcoholic haze, scolded people for getting upset about this. Addicts, King reminded us, lie about anything. Frey’s fevered imaginings arose from his damaged personality.

One can make laundry lists of famous artists, again mostly men, whose great art emerged from their damaged personalities. I absolutely love Hank Williams, but it’s impossible to separate his melancholy, autobiographical songs from his drunken, philandering life. Sylvia Plath and John Keats, two of my favorite poets, made their undying reputations by exposing their inner torment, before both dying young. One need only mention Vincent van Gogh’s name.

Please don’t misunderstand me: Phil Spector killed a woman in cold blood, apparently off his medications for bipolar disorder. He committed a violent crime, and deserved every moment of his punishment. And his art certainly wasn’t interrupted, as he’d been living in semi-retirement since 1974. Nothing I say here should serve to excuse any criminal for harming others. If anything, we need to more stringently punish criminals with high public profiles.

Phil Spector had bipolar disorder; so did Patty Duke. Both turned their inner suffering outward, transforming their pain into generation-defining art. But both, in indulging their damage, also allowed their inner torment to fester. Both mostly disappeared from public around the same time, making occasional, insignificant returns. Patty Duke handled her pain through addiction, self-harm, and sex. Spector chose to harm others; that’s the only real difference.

Let’s just accept that healthy, well-adjusted people don’t make great art. We couldn’t have Phil Spector, the innovative, pioneering record producer, without Phil Spector, the bipolar patient who resisted treatment, and hurt others to muffle his own pain. We’ll have to accept this balance. And we’ll have to decide, collectively, how much suffering artists can inflict, before it becomes more harmful than the benefits of their art.

UFOs, God, and Preserving the Mystery

The cast of revived Star Trek, an optimistic, humanist version of alien nation.

As a lifelong science fiction fan, I’m understandably excited by the news that Congress has ordered full disclosure of the Pentagon’s UFO knowledge. Buried deep in December’s government funding bill, Congress ordered the Pentagon to release, as unclassified, the full roster of information it’s gathered about “unidentified aerial phenomena.” Nice euphemism, Cigarette-Smoking Man, but we know what you really mean.

People like me joke that, if the UFOs came tomorrow, they wouldn’t need to abduct us; we’d volunteer. This recurrent joke ignores the fact that not all UFO abduction narratives involve gracefully drifting among the stars. Many present extraterrestrials examining humans like specimens collected for an undergraduate biology class. Others present evidence that extraterrestrials are prepping for invasion. Yet the romance of aliens persists.

“Aliens” narratives break along two lines. One, embodied in Star Trek and Doctor Who, suggests that a starship or similar craft might whisk us away from humdrum activities, and give us the opportunity to travel widely, have deep experience, and combat injustice. In this view, ordinary life is deterministic, controlled by forces frequently invisible but always inexorable, and we’re doomed to eternal work and boredom, but travel might permit escape from determinism.

Alternatively, aliens threaten humanity with violent, disruptive uncertainty. In The X-Files or Independence Day, powerful people want to maintain, or re-establish, the equilibrium we’ve created through work, commerce, and authority. (Very Joe Biden.) But intrusive elements from outside our equilibrium want to smash our balance for selfish purposes. We therefore seek leaders able to repair the damage these horrible outsiders have done.

Both narratives deal with power and control. Where one wants to escape outside control, the other seeks an acceptable power figure to displace the unacceptable one. Like religion, which physicist Don Lincoln postulates alien narratives have replaced, we seek either liberation from unjust control, or protection from unjust liberation. These mirror narratives agree that injustice is endemic and widespread; they only differ in our relationship to it.

Tom Baker as the Doctor

Much UFO mythology arises from the Cold War, with its competing narratives for humanity’s future. We now know the Roswell wreck, once dismissed by skeptics as a “weather balloon,” was actually a rudimentary aerial spy device. America needed the narrative of individualist Capitalism to confront the Red Menace, but this created paradoxes. To prevent Communist infiltration, America built a massive, intrusive national security state. We became what we hated.

Even the demands for unclassified information reflect this. Reading the headline of the mandatory release of UFO information, my immediate response was: “Yay! We’ll know whether we’re alone in the universe!” Again, shades of religion; that’s like having a definitive answer to whether God exists. But the actual news report suggests Congress cares more about potential state enemies and national security. Cold War Redux.

“But wait!” I hear some readers crying, because I’m off my medications. “What about Ancient Aliens? Giorgio Tsoukalos is certainly a wing-nut, but you wouldn’t suggest he’s either a hippie demanding freedom from The Man, or a closet authoritarian, would you?” Indeed I wouldn’t. The third-path narrative shared by Tsoukalos or Erich von Däniken, has definite overtones of racism and xenophobia, but it doesn’t fit neatly into my previous binary.

Rather, they straddle the line between these alternatives. By claiming they’ve unlocked “real” history, hidden for millennia, Tsoukalos and von Däniken claim to understand reality better than anyone else. They’ve achieved secular gnosis, and therefore, like The Doctor, gain freedom to see the universe clearly. Then, by evangelizing their Truth, they gain authority to gather humanity against Outer Darkness and keep us safe and stable within.

Therefore I find myself in an awkward position. When the Pentagon releases its UFO information, it’ll answer many lingering questions, and I realize: maybe these questions should remain unanswered. If these “unidentified aerial phenomena” are human spy technology, perhaps that information shouldn’t be declassified, because we shouldn’t risk important intelligence sources. The Pentagon keeps its defense intel secret for a reason.

But if they’re not human, if these phenomena are truly extraterrestrial, what stops powerful people misusing that information just the way they misuse God? Whether aliens mean to invade and shatter our sovereignty, or they intend to help us escape our tedium, they threaten people who currently hold power. If we’ve learned anything recently, powerful people (and their supporters) will torch their own houses to prevent loss of control.

Whatever the Pentagon report contains, it will cause harm. We should find ways to resist its release. Aliens, like God, are meant to remain a mystery.

Americans and the Lost Art of Repentance

Insurgents attack the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021—
the first such successful breach since the War of 1812

I first remember hearing “forgive and forget” in third grade. Six bullies, including one former friend, had surrounded me—an unusually tall, skinny kid and therefore highly visible—while walking home from school. They made a circle, screaming insults and shoving me around, while other kids, equally terrified to intervene, watched in silence. I eventually escaped, but had to leave my sweatshirt behind, in one kid’s thick, grabby hands.

“Forgive and forget,” my mother said, when I tearfully pleaded for my parents to do something. “That’s the Christian thing to do.” I told her, if I forgave them immediately, they’d simply repeat their attacks; she remained unmoved. My inability to forgive became pointed in coming days, as I saw that bully wearing my sweatshirt; unable to prove ownership, I had no choice but to watch him wearing it. “Forgive and forget,” my mother urged.

Episcopal theologian Fleming Rutledge writes something important in her book The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. “When affluent white Americans think of heaven, we tend to think of celestial serenity, natural beauty, and family reunions. Black Americans… would be much more likely to think of God’s promise that there will be ultimate justice.” I’ve read similar statements before, but Rutledge removes the waxy-apple finish and exposes the core.

Well-off people, especially but not necessarily White, love thinking of God as merciful, forgiving, and generous. The disadvantaged more often remember God as just. This isn’t coincidental. White America’s creeping abandonment of religion reflects an internalized belief that we’re good enough, even blessed, as we are; even White Evangelicalism, the religious bloc famous for supporting our outgoing President, sees religion as a ratification of presupposed godliness.

We’re witnessing this currently in American politics. Defenders of the status quo demand we “move on” and “unify” following last week’s attack on the Capitol Building. These demands for unity are a secular, political equivalent for “forgiveness.” Like my well-meaning mother, these politicians want everyone to forgive the attackers, and more importantly the politicians who encouraged them, without any secular form of God’s justice.

Christian scripture, however, links forgiveness strictly to repentance. Unless somebody demonstrates a changed heart, forgiveness is an empty show, simple permission to keep transgressing. Repentance, in Hebrew, is shuv, “to change one’s path”; in Greek, it’s metanoia, “to think again.” God’s forgiveness, in scripture, comes after God’s judgement, which depends entirely on human willingness to change one’s mind and walk a new road.

An insurgent carries General Lee's battle flag into the Capitol
Building during the same attack, a first in American history

Recent culture is replete with examples of what happens if people don’t demonstrate repentance. Politics is only one example; the President’s refusal to amend his ways, after his impeachment, show he learned nothing and wasn’t remotely chastened. Likewise, comedian Louis CK, rather than relinquishing his career, turned his performances into fascist rallies. Fill in your own blank: powerful people want forgiveness, without pausing first for repentance and justice.

My mother urging me to forgive bullies, who hadn’t expressed an inkling of repentance (and, with the kid wearing my sweatshirt, the opposite of repentance), plagues me today. When my bosses are exposed lying to me, I feel guilty that I cannot immediately forgive them; my guilt makes me swallow my objections and comply even more vigorously. Same with deceitful politicians, thieving neighbors, and other wrongdoers: I feel guilty when I cannot instantaneously forgive.

This internalized script probably isn’t coincidental. Powerful people, both religious and secular, have hijacked the concept of forgiveness to support their agendas. By taking religious teachings, and other moral principles, out of context, and repeating them aggressively, they’ve successfully reprogrammed our thoughts to accept powerful people’s prerogative. The demand that we constantly forgive, for instance, the president’s sexual crimes, makes it easier to rewrite law to support his rich friends.

Don’t misunderstand me. My mother wanted me to live without the heavy burden of petty grudges. Anger and resentment can stunt the human soul, as anybody knows if they’ve witnessed the damage wrought on themselves when they can’t forgive somebody who’s dead or otherwise gone. Sometimes it’s necessary to forgive someone who hasn’t expressed repentance, because the beneficiary is yourself.

But when powerful people demand your forgiveness, they usually want it because they hope to short-circuit the need for repentance. If forgiveness is something they expect from others, something they shame well-meaning people into providing, it’s because they hope to avoid justice. That’s what we’re seeing in Washington now, and elsewhere, too. When others demand forgiveness, before even attempting repentance, that isn’t Christianity or morality. That’s ethical gaslighting, plain and simple.

James Cameron's Long Vietnam Hangover

Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn)
near the culmination of their journey, in The Terminator

“Listen, understand,” Kyle Reese urges Sarah Connor in the first Terminator movie. “That Terminator is out there. It can’t be reasoned with, it can’t be bargained with. It doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.” His eerie, clenched-teeth delivery is famous. The future’s most villainous forces have sent a monster to kill Sarah, and Kyle must be equally monstrous to protect her.

Nearly forty years after its debut, it’s easy to forget the ambiguity which greeted The Terminator’s first-generation audiences. Though Schwarzenegger’s stone-faced murderer is clearly a monster, and kills people from the beginning, Kyle Reese appears hardly better. He steals a lawman’s gun, flees the police, and carries a shotgun into the night. The only difference between Reese and the Terminator is that Reese shows emotions, mainly desperation.

As the movie develops, Reese’s context becomes clearer. He’s never known anything but war: born into a nuclear-scarred hellscape, he trained in military tactics from childhood. He lives in a bunker, sleeps in his uniform, and cradles his gun like a teddy bear. Unlocking the story, it becomes clear that, where the Terminator lacks emotion because it’s essentially bad, Reese shows damaged, battle-scarred emotions, because he’s basically good.

In my youth, this transition seemed perfectly reasonable. As I’ve written recently, science fiction often tends toward simple binary morality, pitting veritable heroes against straightforward villains. Since I was nine years old when The Terminator dropped, I didn’t understand the cultural context, that America was suffering lingering growing pains. It would be years before I understood PTSD, something many adults were first grappling with then, among Vietnam veterans.

Years later, I watched writer-director James Cameron delivering an interview about his follow-up movie, Aliens. Cameron acknowledged he’d essentially written a Vietnam movie. He asked himself: what would compel a survivor to willingly return to the jaws of combat? In the first Alien movie, Ripley didn’t much fight the xenomorph; every direct challenge got someone killed. Except for the final scene, Ripley’s triumph came from simply staying alive.

In the sequel, though, Ripley chooses combat. She directly challenges the monsters which bedevil her, and destroys them. Like Sarah Connor, she goes from workaday drone, somewhat adrift, to a warrior. But both do so because they have something worth living for: Kyle Reese, in Sarah’s case, and Newt, in Ripley’s. When a meaningful relationship becomes important enough for each woman, she becomes able to kill.

Ripley (Siguorney Weaver) and Newt (Carrie Henn)
near the culmination of their journey, in Aliens

War, Kyle Reese implies, destroys relationships. Though surrounded by people, he’s essentially alone. Sarah Connor’s Polaroid becomes that staple of Vietnam-movie tropes, The Girl Back Home. Even amid constant death and destruction, Reese retains that shred of humanity, because he’s fighting for something outside the theatre of combat. But when he reaches her, he’s so war-scarred that he can’t express it. Sarah is initially terrified of him, and rightly, too.

Private Joker, the narrator of Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam classic Full Metal Jacket, famously muses: “The Marine Corps does not want robots. The Marine Corps wants killers. The Marine Corps wants to build indestructible men, men without fear.” This seems contradictory. An indestructible, fearless man would seem robotic. The Terminator is fearless and almost indestructible. Isn’t Arnold, then, the prototypical heroic Vietnam soldier, rather than fear-stricken, haggard Reese?

Reese, the Terminator, Ripley, and the Alien Queen are, for Cameron, four manifestations of Vietnam’s imprint on American society. Reese and Ripley have had war define themselves so thoroughly that, like their Baby Boomer culture, they can’t imagine life without it. Reese, the soldier, is scarred, carrying the war inside himself. Ripley, the civilian, simply accepts the mental image of the pursuing xenomorph as her constant shadow self.

The Terminator, by contrast, simply kills, because that’s his programming. No officers, no end-point, just a mission to kill. The Queen is arguably worse: she doesn’t just kill, she teaches the homeland a culture of killing and appetite (see Kathleen Belew’s history of White Power). Reese and Ripley adapt to their circumstances: Reese by actually expressing love, Ripley by defending her surrogate daughter Newt. The Terminator and the Queen never adapt.

Therefore, the moral binary in James Cameron’s early work isn’t between Good and Evil. It’s between those capable of change, and those incapable. In post-Vietnam America, haunted by the reality of our shared culpability, Good and Evil seemed increasingly outmoded. We’ve never successfully embraced these paradigms since. Cameron’s early movies remain timely because they offer an alternate morality, asking: are we able to change?

Why This Strange Appeal to the Civil War?

An insurgent, tentatively identified as Jake Angeli,
during Wednesday's attack on the Capitol (source)

I can say one good thing about Wednesday’s insurgent attack on the U.S. Capitol Building: it was incompetent. As horrific as it was watching ravening crowds surge into the Capitol, its first physical breach since 1814, carrying General Lee’s battle flag into the building for the first time ever, it could’ve been far worse. The insurgents clearly had no strategy to hold the building. They also, despite fine-sounding promises, didn’t have the President’s support.

Many hard-right extremists have long believed we require only one significant violent display, to push America into a second Civil War. Besides isolated events from individual bigots, this belief plays large into many violent groups’ principles, including the Boogaloo Movement and The Turner Diaries. Some of Wednesday’s attackers, if their rhetoric is correct, believed they’d start such an uprising. Many violent traitors believe Civil War is one good hard push away, like a bowel movement.

This Civil War rhetoric isn’t new. Us news junkies remember July 2018, when tinfoil hat wearer Alex Jones claimed “Democrats Plan To Launch Civil War On July 4th.” Please, the Democrats have proven we can’t organize a two-car funeral, much less a violent uprising. But by priming his audience that war is inevitable, Jones helped justify his audience preparing for violence. Conservatives apparently believe, if another Civil War happens, they’ll somehow win this time around.

It seems counterintuitive. When Confederates shelled Fort Sumter, they presumably believed they were striking a blow for regional autonomy. But the first Civil War resulted in consolidating federal authority. As historian James McPherson writes, every Constitutional amendment before the Civil War placed limits on federal authority; almost every amendment after the Civil War expanded federal authority. The war didn’t protect slaveholders, grant Southern autonomy, or accomplish anything its fomenters intended. (Bear with me, don’t nitpick.)

The first Civil War was arguably a rear-guard action. Growing mechanization of farming made slavery an increasing financial burden, besides its inherent injustice, and Northern industry had moved money into a handful of cities. Cotton feudalism simply lacked further funds. The Solid South needed to either modernize, or revolt against modernity. Like today’s coal miners, demanding protections for their increasingly obsolete trade, Southern plantation farmers chose rebellion, rather than be dragged into the 19th Century.

Alex Jones' ineffective 2018 scare

We see the same happen time and again in American history. Racists would rather bomb the 16th Street Baptist Church than admit their philosophy was odious and antidemocratic. The White Power movement would rather blow up the Oklahoma City federal building than admit America was moving on without them. Defenders of the status quo always think killing people and destroying property will stop America’s slippery slide into modernity. Civil War is an alternative to retreat.

Alex Jones’ 2018 Civil War scaremongering served the same purpose. Jones prepped his audience for violence so he wouldn’t have to admit the President he admired was corrupt, philandering, and inept. The Boogaloo Bois would rather shoot people than admit Americans, in the aggregate, reject their backward, racist philosophy. Wednesday’s insurgents had to attack the Capitol, or admit America voted against their guy. In every case, diehards think violence will prevent the ignominy of retreat.

I used to wonder whether arch-conservatives believed their Civil War rhetoric. Did they really believe the stories of threadbare Confederates around a campfire, cooking their meager rations of beans while Jebediah strums a plangent hymn on his guitar? Their ongoing embrace of Confederate regalia would suggest it. But now I see, they aren’t embracing the myth of delayed victory. Like the Chicago Cubs, the Confederacy exists specifically to lose; victory means relinquishing a lucrative story.

Therefore, American conservatives love Confederate mythology to the exact extent they know they’re losing. Like their grey-clad forebears, these reactionaries hope defeat will transform them from dirt farmers and White trash, into noble heroes of a Lost Cause. Maybe that’s why these antimodern relics love costumes so much, because they’re attempting to curate how they’ll be remembered in defeat. They don’t want Civil War because they’ll win; they just want to control the narrative later.

Wednesday’s fleeting triumph helped secure their noble defeat. Senators who’d planned to object to the election, reversed themselves quickly, and President-Elect Biden was certified just hours after the insurgency ended. The administration immediately pledged “an orderly transition.” The attackers got what they wanted: history will soon forget the elected officials. Going forward, the shared public narrative will be about the angry, pulsing mob of ordinary people, who temporarily brought the American government to its knees.

America, and the Klingon Way

Klingon warriors, as depicted since the 1980s

“You look for the battles in the wrong place,” Lt. Commander Worf admonishes a fellow Klingon, in the episode “Heart of Glory.” “The true test of a warrior is not without—it is within.” Worf has been quarreling with Korris about the nature of Klingon valor, a recurring theme in Star Trek: the Next Generation. His ongoing efforts to define himself as Klingon, while serving in Starfleet, are his greatest character arc.

In another recent Trek essay, I wrote: “America has become darker, more violent, more brutal—dare I say, more Klingon-ish.” I meant to describe how Trek responds to developments in wilder culture. An outside respondent replied: “I don’t know that America is any darker or more brutal now than it was, especially for persons of color, women, and members of the LGBTQ community.” Which is, in fairness, pretty accurate.

Science fiction, probably more than any other mainstream genre, is innately tied to the years in which it’s created. First, and most obviously, because science fiction always reflects its authors’ relationship with science and technology, which evolves rapidly. But in visual media, continuing improvements in visual effects make more complex depictions of non-human worlds increasingly possible. Sometimes that’s bad; after all, Jar-Jar Binks exists.

However, the development of visual effects also made Klingons possible. Though the conflict between the Federation and the Klingon Empire is a background story throughout original Trek, the Klingons appear in only six episodes. Their culture is vaguely “oriental,” reflected in their original makeup design, with bronze-colored skin, thick eyebrows, and slightly slanted eyes. They look less like aliens, than like White actors in Charlie Chan makeup.

Only with the big-screen movies did Klingons develop any real identity. In 1977, they had distinct physical features; by 1984, they had a language. And with TNG, they began developing a culture. We saw images of their religion, their government, even what Klingons did during their off hours—which apparently consists of getting drunk and brawling. We especially saw Worf’s efforts to maintain his warrior ethic and proclaim his honor.

So, to refine my previous statement, I’d say America is more Klingon-ish today, not because it’s necessarily more brutal, but because it’s more brutal in a specific, highly organized way. Klingons don’t fight because they’re genetically predisposed toward violence; that’s why puppies and grade-school boys fight, and it’s something they hopefully outgrow. These Klingons fight because they have organized philosophies of individual and collective might.

Klingon Warriors, as depicted in the original Star Trek

Even more important, Worf repeatedly protests the importance of honor. I have many friends who believe American culture today suffers because we’ve lost the importance of “honor”; these friends are all current or former military, or children of military. But “honor” means something specific in scholarly circles, a cultural standard based on performance of important rituals which establish one’s standing and protect one’s name.

Honor culture arises from peoples who have, or think they have, nothing to lose but their names. Military personnel, who are rootless and must often possess only what they can carry, are natural honor societies. So are poor people living on marginal land, as among Scottish clans or Appalachian farmers. When you have nothing to lose but your reputation, you must defend your reputation at any cost. So honor cultures are violent.

Recent years have seen rises of mostly White, right-wing honor organizations. The Proud Boys are the most famous. Their initiation ritual, a cringe-worthy satire of street gang culture, reflects that the Proud Boys’ mostly working-class membership, conscious that our economy no longer rewards hard work or loyalty, must seek advancement elsewhere. Their members think they’ve lost everything else, so they strive to establish a name.

Yes, America has historically been violent toward women, POC, and LGBTQIA+. I dare take nothing away from that. But the ritual aspect of this violence, formerly embodied in organizations like the Klan, and highly programmatic lynchings, was pushed underground for nearly two generations. In 1966, when Trek debuted, ritual violence maybe seemed like a dying relic of a prior civilization. Gene Roddenberry believed humanity was constantly progressing, and his universe reflected that.

Worf’s Klingon brethren engage in ritual violence and war to enhance their reputations and build social standing. So do many right-wing organizations like the Proud Boys, Boogaloo Movement, and Christian Identity. Once concealed, America’s highly ceremonial violence has become visible again during our lifetimes. Our Klingon-ish declension comes, not from violence, but from the rituals of honor attached to it. To some Americans, today is a good day to die.

Quantum Leap, the Enlightenment, and “Laplace’s Demon”

Dr. Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula, left) and Al Calavicci (Dean Stockwell) in Quantum Leap

“Ziggy says…” These words became a recurring mantra in the early-1990s cult TV hit Quantum Leap. Al Calavicci, the comic relief and exposition bringer, carries a handheld computer unit which appears made of Legos, which beeps sporadically, and sometimes needs struck to work correctly. This is Al’s connection to Ziggy, a supercomputer programmed with all human knowledge through 1999, the year the series begins.

As the series progresses, it transpires that, before jumping back in time, the show’s protagonist, supergenius polymath Dr. Sam Beckett, programmed Ziggy with all known and speculated information available in the then-distant year 1999. Once Sam leaps into various characters, Al uses the iPad-like handheld unit to quickly uncover any information Sam needs to complete each week’s quest. Between Ziggy’s knowledge and Sam’s wisdom, they always ultimately restore justice.

Ziggy’s premise derives from the idea that lack of cogent data is the only impediment between judicious humanity and a fair universe. If humans only had better information and higher education, we’d all be reasonable and just. This idea didn’t begin with Quantum Leap or its creator, Donald P. Bellisario. It permeated much early American science fiction, most prominently Isaac Asimov, and derived from the philosophy of the French Enlightenment.

During the Enlightenment, self-appointed keepers of knowledge postulated that humanity was on a path toward perfection. Rejecting the Catholic doctrine of Original Sin, they asserted (with notable exceptions) that humanity began life savage and ignorant, and life was, in Hobbes’ famous phrase, “nasty, brutish, and short.” But continual improvements in knowledge and social structure continued bringing humans closer to perfection, as measured by Enlightenment philosophers’ own personal yardsticks.

This philosophy contained important blind spots. Enlightenment thinkers tacitly accepted that all past societies were mere rough drafts for the present, which was a stepping-stone to a perfected future. They also accepted that non-European societies were deviations from European greatness. The Enlightenment was inherently, but not overtly, racist; thinkers like John Locke and the Baron de Montesquieu were instrumental in European conquest of the Americas and Africa.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Okay, so. Enlightenment philosophers considered the past a rough draft, the present an edited but improved intermediary step. But they only saw time moving in one direction; “time travel” didn’t exist as a philosophical concept until H.G. Wells, in 1895. Therefore perfection existed only in the future. Our beautiful, Eurocentric Utopia remained yet to come.

After the Enlightenment, another Sam Beckett-like polymath, Pierre-Simon Laplace, postulated an idea that remains controversial in physics. If some supernatural being, Laplace suggested, could know the location and velocity of every particle in the universe, that being could compute where they’d all been, and where they were going. This being, termed “Laplace’s Demon,” had God-like knowledge of the universe’s existence, though no power to influence it.

One important consequence of Laplace’s Demon is that information, at least hypothetically, exists both forward and backward in time. Though Laplace’s speculation holds little water in contemporary physics, it remains important as philosophy, evidenced by the existence of the supercomputer Ziggy. Though Ziggy doesn’t hold all knowledge, it holds all knowledge available to humans, and therefore can map the movements of society, and transmit that information into the past.

This marks an advancement in Enlightenment philosophy. Philosophers like Voltaire and Descartes saw the past as a rough draft of the present, but they also saw it as fixed and immovable. Dr. Sam Beckett sees the past as subject to amendment and improvement, as a draft he can change. Using the perfect knowledge of the present, he can redress injustices in the past. He can spot imperfect knowledge, and use his information to make the past good again.

Series canon asserts that Sam always leaves the past improved, some injury or cruelty prevented. Sam leaps into situations and, aided by his “demon” Ziggy, patches moments of ignorance through gentle application of information. But the series occasionally acknowledges that not everybody is as beneficent as Sam. On occasion, he meets others who use future knowledge to exacerbate cruelty and inequity, to make the past measurably worse.

Therefore, although Sam attempts to do good—as, undoubtedly, Enlightenment philosophers thought of themselves as good—his actions nevertheless open doors for colonial despotism. The precept that we understand reality better than our ancestors, contains at least the possibility of seeing ignorance as a sin worthy of punishment. Sam and Al aren’t colonialists, as Voltaire and Newton weren’t. But as their philosophy held doors for the real colonialists, so too does Ziggy permit others to become cruel.

Star Trek, Injustice, and Our “Real” World

Lieutenant Saavik (Kirstie Alley) and Captain Kirk (William Shatner)
discuss the meaning of the Kobayashi Maru exercise

“A no-win situation is a possibility any commander may face.” Captain Kirk speaks these words to Lieutenant Saavik, his newest bridge officer, after she endures the Kobayashi Maru test. To science fiction fans, this moment from Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan is iconic, establishing the moral complexity of the movie, and the later franchise. The words “Kobayashi Maru” have become, among fans, a shorthand for moral impossibility.

Science fiction often defaults to simple ethical binaries: the Jedi vs. the Sith, for instance, or the Federation vs. the Klingons. Even authors like Isaac Asimov, who pooh-poohed simple black-and-white, often had their novels end with heroes and villains clearly established, even if we needed to adjust our viewpoint partway along. So the Kobayashi Maru, while not diminishing the Federation’s supposed goodness, nevertheless admitted that “good” is seldom clearly defined.

When this movie dropped, in 1982, I didn’t understand this. Sure, I could understand that doing right sometimes came at personal expense; when we feed the hungry, we still need to pay for the food. But on macro-scale issues, like the themes of justice and war often addressed in Star Trek, I wasn’t prepared for this. I was eight years old; my family was Republican at the height of the Cold War. Right and wrong, I believed, simply existed.

I enjoy science fiction and fantasy, in part, because they’re free to address sweeping ethical themes in ways other genres aren’t. Mysteries, Westerns, and “literary” fiction have anchors in real life, and cannot contradict what we know about reality (even if our “knowledge” is sometimes misinformed). Science fiction and fantasy don’t have this; they create worlds afresh every time. There’s no need to reconcile their reality with ours.

That said, exactly how science fiction addresses certain themes changes with the times. Original Star Trek often upheld White colonial stereotypes of intrepid homelanders taming savage species; the first-ever episode, “The Man Trap,” featured a vampire species invading the Starship Enterprise. Despite its notably racially diverse cast, Star Trek was a powerfully White story, reflecting the unambiguously triumphant early-Vietnam culture of 1966.

By 1982, things had changed. America has survived Vietnam, Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” years, and Ronald Reagan’s reactionary militarism. Gene Roddenberry’s cheerful humanism of 1966 seemed remarkably dated, and the belief in unquestionable American goodness hardly seemed true. Maybe the Soviet Menace still needed quashing, but would that triumph mean anything if it cost America its soul?

If these conundrums seemed difficult in 1982, they’ve only gotten worse since. America arguably won the Cold War, but then immediately burned down the edifice we’d built to fight it, as I’ve written before. America stopped subsidizing arts and education, and perhaps not coincidentally, we’ve seen a rise in racism, even overt Naziism. America has become darker, more violent, more brutal—dare I say, more Klingon-ish.

Fixing these problems creates new problems. It seems straightforward to institute hate-speech laws to silence Nazis. But as journalist Mick Hume writes, governments, when invited to squelch some noxious speech, have a history of using that authority to silence all forms of dissent. Do Americans really want to invite another Cointelpro explosion, even if it muzzles Nazis? I have no easy answers. It’s a real Kobayashi Maru problem.

Am I, like Spock, willing to die to preserve my ship and shipmates from destruction? I can’t answer that easily. I maintain fantasies of charging heedless into enemy fire to save the kitten, but I haven’t always done so. On occasion, I’ve literally broken up fights with my own body; other times, I flinch from even small confrontations. I’d like to live in a more just world, but die for it? I’m not really so sure.

Maybe another science fiction franchise matters here. The original Battlestar Galactica, in 1978, featured the human race driven to near-extinction by nuclear assault from faceless robotic invaders. Definitely a Cold War metaphor. But by the 2004 reboot, the conflict had become more nuanced. The robots were attractive, even sexy, while humans descended into infighting. Humanity’s survival seemed much less of a foregone moral conclusion this time around.

Star Trek, in 1968, simply assumed that the Federation’s eternal outward expansion was good for everybody. In 1982, it assumed this expansion would exact a price upon humanity. By 2019, Captain Picard had abandoned Starfleet, and the bridge crew of Discovery were battling one another. Our team’s innate goodness had abandoned us; our loyalties needed tested to destruction. Congratulations, nerds: we’re now living aboard the Kobayashi Maru.

 

Follow-up:
America, and the Klingon Way