The Prime Directive

I must have jinxed myself by writing about Covid. I got sick as a dog 2 days later. I thought, for a bit, that it might be Covid, but luckily it was not. I hear a lot about Covid and don’t care much about any of it. Covid is one particular endpoint of a system. Maybe a real-life Breaking-the-Seven-Seals type of apocalyptic endpoint of a system. But the system itself is the thing. 

So I was off work for the first time in over a year. I never take off except to use vacation that I’m pretty much forced to use. Use it or lose it. My old-timey Protestant work-ethic remains firmly intact. That’s America. Although I’m getting the impression that America is regressing to something different. Something more feudalistic like simple fear of the cold and the dark. 

At any rate, being off work, and being too sick to want to think about anything, I decided it would be a good opportunity to finally watch Star Trek: Picard. There’s way too much Star Trek (and Star Wars) stuff out there now, but I wanted to at least see this one last vision. I’ve often wondered how many boys in the 60s and 70s really took to heart Spock’s absolutist philosophy of emotion suppression, the way I did. Spock seems like a very American character to me. Clint Eastwood compressed into the singularity of a scientist.

I watched the first episode of The Next Generation sitting on a mattress next to a staticky black & white TV. I’ve seen that episode so many times now, I can barely remember what I thought of it that first time. The only thing I clearly remember is seeing Data and identifying Spock and being fully satisfied with the whole endeavor. 

We’re always seeking out the familiar. 

I got all the way through the first season of Picard, and part of the second season. The first season is not too overtly political. The second season very much is. Too much so for somebody like me who can so easily read MSNBC between the lines. But also fine. It moves the story along in the same absurdist sort of ways as The Voyage Home. You need local villains to throw wrenches into the plan and who better than ICE? But the first season was better. There was a scene there that I particularly liked. Picard (Admiral, retired) is arguing with the head of Starfleet. He is saying that they were wrong not to rescue millions of Romulan refugees and the Starfleet commander is saying that doing so would have damaged the Federation. I saw something in that argument that I’m always trying to get at. The Federation is directly at odds with the embodiment of the Federation’s core values. 

I read an interview with Patrick Stewart in Esquire and got the impression that this whole thing was sort of about the Trumpification of the Federation. But that’s not what I took from it. Trump isn’t quite an endpoint the way Covid is, but he is the result of a system. In a sense, he’s a rejection of the system, which is what frightens boomer liberals like Sir Patrick so much. But Trump himself is not a rejection of the system anymore than he is a real populist. Trump is taking advantage of the fact that so many people want to reject the system and those people see literally no other way.

But fuck Trump. The point is The State vs. the ideals of the state. This was not an uncommon theme in the final seasons of TNG. Picard often found his true adversaries to be intransigent Federation bureaucrats and less-than-ethical flag officers. Very much a metaphor for America. I think about our sailors in the Red Sea and how much time they must spend at general quarters. Their strength and dedication and professionalism and patriotism are a powerful force, but it is not their role to save intransigent technocrats from their own failures. It’s not even something that’s within their power, but those very technocrats have set them the task nonetheless. Our entire Middle Eastern policy has been boiled down to a containment policy. Containing the fallout from Israel’s own containment policy. It’s unnecessary and counterproductive, and it is being done in direct opposition to the core values of our state. But the US doesn’t operate under core values. It operates under the hegemon principle. Containment through deterrence. The core values option merely requires not violating the Prime Directive against intentionally starving babies to death. But under hegemonic principles, that option “rewards the terrorists” for their terrorist ways. Babies have to be starved so long as Hamas doesn’t agree to line up against the wall and be shot. The Navy has to exhaust expensive, difficult to replace munitions, and exhaust our sailors and ships in the process, in order to reestablish “deterrence”. 

I should congratulate the feminists who’ve been fighting for so long for equality. They’re finally going to draft women into the military. A huge victory. And a great time for it too. NATO membership is at an all time high. We’ve announced that Ukraine will be a member of NATO. That should be exciting. Guaranteed war with Russia. Finally. We can have a big inclusive draft of every gender and sexual preference and descend on Eastern Europe to die in the rainbow blaze of nuclear glory.

I assume that such a thing is actually highly improbable, but the way our leaders and the leaders in Europe behave makes it seem merely improbable. Bullying everybody into attending a “peace conference” so we can declare that there will be peace just as soon as Russia lines up against the wall, seems somewhat less than productive. Putin doesn’t seem impressed. I’m not sure why he even should be. He’s already fighting NATO intelligence, NATO satellites, NATO training, and NATO weapons. What else are we going to do? Seize Russian assets and give them to Ukraine?

This is all Hitler’s fault. And that scoundrel Hirohito. Starting that stupid war and dragging us down this cursed timeline. But there’s no more villainous villain than Neville Chamberlain. He taught us that “appeasement” is the direct opposite of the correct path. There can only be containment through deterrence. Short of that, total war. Dresden in Gaza. Dresden times ten. Or more. The stats on this stuff are ridiculous. But nothing is happening. Don’t believe your eyes. 

I give Picard a 7/10.