Star Trek and History (15 page)

9.
They also look remarkably different. While this is commented on in the
DS9
episode “Trials and Tribble-ations,” an attempt to explain it is only made in the
ENT
episode “Divergence.”

10.
See Aristide Zolberg,
A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), especially the appendix, which contains numerous charts and graphs on the subject.

11.
See Campbell J. Gibson and Emily Lennon, “Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-born Population of the United States: 1850–1990,” Population Division Working Paper No. 29 (1999),
http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0029/twps0029.html
.

12.
See
TNG
, “Loud as a Whisper.” See also Iver Neumann's essay “‘To Know Him Is to Love Him. Not to Know Him Was to Love Him from Afar': Diplomacy in
Star Trek
,” in
To Seek Out New Worlds: Exploring Links between Science Fiction and World Politics
, ed. Jutta Weldes (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

13.
A number of critics have made the same observation. See Jan Johnson-Smith,
American Science Fiction TV:
Star Trek, Stargate
and Beyond
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005); Kanzler,
Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations
; Micheal C. Pound,
Race in Space: The Representation of Ethnicity in
Star Trek
and
Star Trek: The Next Generation (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1999); Leah R. Vande Berg, “Liminality: Worf as Metonymic Signifier of Racial, Cultural, and National Differences,” in
Enterprise Zones: Critical Positions on
Star Trek, ed. Taylor Harrison et al. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996); and Carolyn Burmedi, “
Star Trek
: Multi-Race, Multi-Species, Multicultural?” in
Holding Their Own: Perspectives on the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States
, eds. Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Heike Raphael-Hernandez (Tubingen: Stauffenburg-Verlag, 2000). Others stress resemblances between Worf and the black community. See Bernardi, Star Trek
and History
, or Peter Chvany, “‘Do We Look Like Ferengi Capitalists to You?'” William Blake Tyrrell, “
Star Trek
as Myth and Television as Mythmaker,”
Journal of Popular Culture
10, no. 4 (1977): 712, sees the Klingons as an image of the Native American.

14.
The manner of Worf's death is left open at the end. Worf tells the older Alexander that he may have changed the future by intervening in the past. The fact that in later episodes of
Deep Space Nine
Alexander becomes a Klingon warrior points to a different fate.

15.
See also Leah R. Vande Berg's article, “Liminality: Worf as Metonymic Signifier.”

16.
When K'Ehleyr refuses to marry Worf in order to pursue her career, he accuses her of human reasoning.

17.
Burmedi argues on page 323 of “
Star Trek
: Multi-Race, Multi-Species, Multicultural?” that “B'Elanna's dilemma, unlike Worf's, is not only cultural or psychological in nature, but biological as well.” However, “Barge of the Dead” seems to suggest that this is only B'Elanna's interpretation and that she has been blaming her own character faults on her Klingon origins.

18.
Of course, this touches on the domain of the stereotype. There is a long bibliography of books dealing with stereotypes of Arabs in particular, both men and women. See, for example, Jack Sheehan,
The TV Arab
(Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1984); or Tim Jon Semmerling,
“Evil” Arabs in American Popular Film
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

19.
Certainly Alexander had problems in boyhood, and Worf accidentally killed another boy (
DS9
, “Let He Who Is without Sin . . .”). In
DS9
, “Rules of Engagement,” the Klingons accuse Worf of destroying a civilian cargo ship and ask for his extradition. They argue that since his heart is Klingon, he should be tried by Klingons. The whole story is revealed to be a fabrication by the Klingons, although Sisko still criticizes Worf at the end for placing the fate of his ship and crew above that of a possible civilian ship: “We don't put civilians at risk or even potentially at risk to save ourselves.”

20.
See Thomas Richards, Star Trek
in Myth and Legend
(London: Orion Press, 1997), 118–119.

21.
Lincoln Geraghty discusses how
Enterprise
links its fictional world to real events in (mainly) American history, notably through its opening sequence. This is generally presented as positive, but here Archer admits that there were difficulties, too. “A Truly American Enterprise:
Star Trek
's Post-9/11 Politics,” in
New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction
, eds. Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008).

H. Bruce Franklin

By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!” proclaimed President George H. W. Bush in March 1991, flush with what seemed to be a swift and decisive victory in the first Iraq war. Had the blitzkrieg of Iraq with wonder weapons from American technology truly liberated our nation from the “syndrome” of Vietnam?

At the same moment the president was speaking, but tens of millions of miles away, another miracle of American technology was beaming home startling images, very different from the war videos still streaming into American households. The robot spacecraft
Magellan
, peering with its radar devices through the boiling acid clouds that shroud Venus, was transmitting our first coherent view of the surface of Earth's sister planet.

Scientists watching the arrival of
Magellan
's imaging wizardry marveled at the nonstop, detailed pictures of great swaths of landscape, as sharp and as clear as photographs. Orbiting thousands of times,
Magellan
transmitted back a complete topographic map of the alien planet. “We now have a better global map of Venus than of Earth,” exclaimed one Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist, explaining that no map of our own planet had so completely traced the topography beneath the oceans.
1
One of the most exciting achievements of space exploration, this topographic picture of Venus was extraordinarily relevant to our own destiny, because it displayed what could happen to a geologically similar planet where global warming leads to a catastrophic greenhouse effect. With the aid of computers, scientists were able to create a color video that unified
Magellan
's images into a thrilling, three-dimensional flying tour of the planet.

In late 1991, I was working at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum as the advisory curator for “
Star Trek
and the Sixties,” an exhibition due to open in February 1992. Each day, I passed two large video monitors flanking the entrance lobby. The one on the left was playing that spectacular video of
Magellan
's grand tour of Venus. The one on the right was playing “Weapons of the Gulf War,” familiar footage of missiles and warplanes that had aired endlessly on TV. The largest group I ever saw watching the Venus video was three people; sometimes nobody at all was at that monitor. But every day, a huge crowd of people, many with beaming smiles, jostled for viewing space in front of “Weapons of the Gulf War.”

When “
Star Trek
and the Sixties” opened, it turned out to be the most popular exhibition in the history of the Air and Space Museum, which had to issue tickets to control the huge influx of people. After more than a million people attended in Washington, the exhibition traveled to the Hayden Planetarium in New York City's American Museum of Natural History to be seen by another huge audience.

What was the appeal, not just of the exhibition of course, but of
Star Trek
, which by then had already become a major component of American culture? Where did
Star Trek
's allure fit in the continuum between the video of the Venus flyby and the video of “Weapons of the Gulf War”?

The actual exploration of space had been one matrix of the original series. In 1961, after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had become the first human in space, President John F. Kennedy committed the United States to land humans on the moon during the 1960s. A month after the last episode of
Star Trek
aired in June 1969,
Apollo 11
landed the first astronauts on the moon. But was the enormous U.S. space program and its attendant hoopla designed primarily to advance human knowledge or to win a Cold War contest with the Soviet Union? Where did it fit between those two competing videos and among all those other objects of flight and exploration—and warfare—housed in the National Air and Space Museum? During the three years of the original
Star Trek
series, American attitudes toward the space race were being transformed and splintered by the Vietnam War. Indeed, by the time of the moon landing, many Americans saw it as a Nixon administration attempt to glorify the military and to deflect attention from the war.

If the U.S. race to send people beyond Earth was really about the exploration of space, why did the program abort in 1972, so soon after that first lunar landing? Despite all those predictions about lunar and Martian colonies by the late 1980s or 1990s, the last time a person went beyond the Earth's orbit was on December 18, 1972. That same day, President Richard Nixon began Linebacker II, the twelve-day aerial blitzkrieg of North Vietnam, a few weeks before the United States officially ended its war in Vietnam by accepting peace terms originally proposed by the Viet Cong in 1969.

And if
Star Trek
was really about the exploration of space, why was its audience so meager during the days of space travel and so immense after that era ended? Ironically, the blastoff of
Star Trek
culture coincided with the end of the Vietnam War and the simultaneous end of human extraterrestrial travel. Thus the show with the slogan “to boldly go where no man has gone before” became a central feature of a culture that was abandoning all plans for sending people to other worlds.
Star Trek
culture went into orbit in the 1970s and early 1980s just as space exploration was being replaced by the militarization of space. By 1981, multibillion-dollar military space programs had gobbled up the budget for the peaceful exploration of space. As one NASA astronomer lamented, “The space science program has been almost destroyed.”
2
A perfect symbol of this cultural juncture came in 1974 when an eleven-foot model of the
Enterprise
used for special effects on the TV show went on permanent exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum, coequal with such actual spacecraft as the
Apollo 11
Command Module.
3

The space program of the 1960s was not the dominant feature of that decade in America, a distinction that clearly belongs to the Vietnam War. We designed the entrance hall into our “
Star Trek
and the Sixties” exhibit to send people time traveling back into the decade. So as those endless queues of the million visitors entered the exhibit, they filed slowly past a series of huge, iconic black-and-white photographs that projected the upheavals of a society shaken to its foundation as the Vietnam War shifted the nation's tectonic plates.

The exhibition was designed to show that the original
Star Trek
series was conceived and broadcast during one of the most profound crises in American history, a crisis from which we have yet to escape.
4
At the center of the maelstrom swirled the Vietnam War, which was radically transfiguring America during the thirty-three months—September 1966 to June 1969—when the series was first aired. In the midst of this disastrous war and its domestic spin-offs—sporadic warfare in the streets of our own cities, rising inflation and crime, soaring debt, and deep challenges to hallowed cultural values and gender roles—
Star Trek
assumed a future when Earth had become a wonderfully prosperous, harmonious world without war and social conflict, a future in which the aptly named starship USS
Enterprise
embodied a unified and disciplined society capable of making traditional American ideals and roles triumphant throughout the galaxy.

Looming over the mind of every thinking American, the Vietnam War was threatening to tear the nation asunder even as the series was being broadcast. The war was thus both a launch vehicle for
Star Trek
and a subtext for the entire series. Earth's utopian twenty-third-century future assumed in
Star Trek—
although never shown—was presented as a happy sequel to the Vietnam epoch, and the starship
Enterprise
projected an alternative to the actual America of the 1960s.

As one of television's first dramatic series to face the Vietnam War,
Star Trek
was actually quite daring.
5
Back then, TV networks rarely allowed disturbing or controversial issues into shows designed for entertainment. So following its usual gambit for dealing with contemporary issues,
Star Trek
projected its visions of the Vietnam War as parables set in a faraway time and space. But
Star Trek
itself was also being profoundly changed by the war, and its own rapid shifts on the war mirror similar shifts that were rapidly transforming American culture. Within those mere thirty-three months of its first life,
Star Trek
transformed from a reluctant supporter of the war to an ardent opponent of the war. In this brief life span, its creators, like tens of millions of other American citizens, were beginning to learn that the entire history of the war was radically different from what they were supposed to believe.