To Boldly Go Where No Tea Party Has Gone Before
My first encounter with the US Constituion is so clear, I can still taste the fizzies and shake-a-pudding I was scarfing. There I was breathing in the immortal words of our Founding Fathers for the first time. It was forty years ago and I was perched on a pillow in front of the family fruitwood encased Sylvania watching "Star Trek".
In the episode "Omega Glory", the gang from the Enterprise has beamed down onto a planet that’s a parallel version of Earth. Except on this planet, Viet Nam had turned into some biowarfare catastrophe such that civilization has devolved into a tribal struggle between the "Yangs", who were these cavemen surfer dudes, like Flinstone frat brothers, and the "Khoms", who were like Mongolian henchmen with Ghenghis recast as a sultry Mandarin empress. Yankees and Communists, locked in allegorical struggle, except instead of ICBMs all they had left were rubberized spearpoint hand props.
At the end of the episode, Captain Kirk finds himself in the Yang stronghold where he unearthes a tattered copy of the US Constitution out of a lockbox and corrects the Yang corruption of "E Plebnista" to the proper English "We The People". William Shatner, in halting cadences that resonate like a computerized Canadian translation, recites the entire preamble. I was eight years old and I was absolutely entranced.
So now when I hear tea partiers talking about this or that being unconstitutional, be it public schooling or the federal reserve or health reform, I can’t help hear the Yangs’ Chief Cloud William invoking "E Plebnista". "E Plebnista see King Obama birth paper." "E Plebnista drill maybe drill." "E Plebnista want country backward." The constitution has been corrupted, just like Gene Rodenberry predicted, a neanderthalic fetish of primitive caucasian aggression. But my favorite Yangism has become, in retrospect, a fitting homage to the tea party’s conflation of Christianity and laissez-faire capitalism- "Freedom? That is worship word!"
You see, that’s the first thing we hear Cloud William utter in the episode. He’s imprisoned by the Khoms in a strangely westernized jail cell with his skimpily bearskinned consort, along with Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, as though all four had somehow driven through Khom Arizona without their proper ID papers. Cloud William overhears Kirk plotting with Spock on how to achieve their freedom. "Freedom? That is Worship Word!" exclaims Cloud William, right before suckerpunching Kirk and slipping out the window with Wilma. My child mind, only an hour removed from a Catholic schoolyard, lit up like St. Paul on the road to Damascus- The Constitution as Bible, of course! They’re both sacred. Why even the tattered American flag the Yangs bowed to bore the marks of battlefield abuse like stigmata.
Sarah Palin, as today’s Yangs’ proud warrior queen, would actually look rather fetching in a bias-cut bearskin. I see her now, dressed in the height of Yangette fashion (borrowed from Bloomingshales?), an armband of barracuda teeth, her glasses framed in delicate eagle bones, as she vows to her tribe to "take our country backwards toward a God-fearing nation"-
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Much as Sarah Palin folksies on Youtube about the need to govern "by divine intervention", so a distant code red blares away in my Proustian child mind. Now I hear the pleas of Scotty, the Enterprise’s chief engineer, sweating in the bowels of the ship’s power plant, pleading to the bridge that the "dilithium crystals are fadin’". It was always a moment of great jeapordy on the show since any Federation fanboy knows that dilithium is what regulates the reaction of matter and antimatter in a spaceship’s warp drive. They’re not Folger’s crystals.
In the impulse engine room of democracy, the dilithium is, say, separation of church and state. As it fades,"antimatter leaking everywhere", religion and politics cross contaminate: Constitutional notions like equal protection become apocryphal, archived away by an officially Christian nation. In the same way Christian notions of biblical charity and care for one’s fellow man become primitive and obsolete in the laissez-faire, cake snarfing of priviledge-protecting political principle. Witness Glenn Beck’s assault on ‘social justice’ and his ironic condemnation of religions that practice it as Marxist: As the oily hogwash of politics backwashing into the radiating heavy water of religion, the reagant bubbles over and out spills bitter political criticism of established churches that dare to do good, God forbid, through the ‘socialism" of aiding the poor. This is exactly how theocracy is as bad for the beneficience of spiritual faith as it is for effective governance.
Climate change is the Devil’s Communism? In our neo-parallel Yang Universe, even Dr. McCoy’s beloved science gets antimatter spattered all over it: evolution becomes evil and environmentalism is an affront to Divine Purpose. Shrinking ice caps, rising seas, what heresy, you elitist eggheads, drop that apple! Satan made those fossils! Pagan planet worship! Global warming witchcraft! Sheesh. I hope mankind doesn’t have to abstain from reason until stardate 2286 when Mr. Spock, ever the consummate technocrat, finally figures out how to synthesize dilithium. As I remember the future, Mr. Spock wasn’t around on "Waterworld".
Meanwhile, back in 1968, "Star Trek" was over and Petticoat Junction was ringing the dinner bell. It was my favorite meal, smiley face baloney, where my mom would decorate the round pink lunch meat with olive slice eyes and a cheesy-saucy mouth. What it lacked in nutrition it made up in appearance. You Betcha.
But first I was sent back to the bathroom to scrub off the Latin. Sister Cleophas had missed it, but mom never did. During third period, with a pungent Flair pen, I had tattooed on my palm something my past pupil was unable to otherwise remember. The fog of past childhood invokes prosaic license, so in the present tense, the lava soap abrades away the bluish scrawl "liberi". Plural noun, nominative, second declension.
You’d think it means "freedoms", but it actually it’s "children".
Thu May 02, 2013 at 3:57 PM PT: I loved Rimjob's analysis of Star Trek so much I decided to repost this (my first!) diary in homage. Although Sarah Palin's limelight has faded, I hope you find it still relevant. Enjoy!