First Gen Trekkie

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/opinion/02mon2.html

While the poor are caught increasingly by foreclosure, eviction and food-stamp fights for their daily bread, deficit-bedeviled statehouses across the country are cutting support for legal services or dropping the programs outright.

If the Republican establishment had set out to accomplish Grover Norquist’s goal of making government small enough to “drown in a bathtub,” wouldn’t their plan of attack look a lot like what is happening now, and what has been happening for the past 30+ years? The social safety net has been shredded, possibly beyond repair, and the Treasury is effectively bankrupted by the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the bailout of Wall Street. Has George Bush’s “base” decided that it doesn’t need the vast majority of poor and middle class Americans, only enough of them to clean their homes and perform essential personal services? Are the poor just supposed to crawl under a bridge and die quietly? We’ve seen what happens in other countries when the poor decide that they no longer have anything left to lose. We’ve even seen it here, when Socialist Eugene V. Debs received nearly a million votes in his run for President in 1912.

Let me see if I’ve got this straight. The party that has for the last 30 years been telling us that “it’s not the government’s money, it’s YOUR money,” has voted, in lock-step, against the stimulus package that the people WE elected–Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid–have presented as a plan to get the economy moving again.

House Passes Stimulus Plan With No G.O.P. Votes (January 29, 2009)

I think if the Republicans  really and truly believed that it’s OUR money, they would have countered with a proposal to take the $819B and divide it up among everyone who files a tax return for 2008, the same way they did with that paltry $600 last time. We’ll spend it–you better believe we’ll spend it. We’ll pay off our cars or buy a new one; we’ll pay down the mortgage; we’ll pay off the credit cards; and if there’s anything left over, maybe we’ll put it in a bank. Yeah, we know what to do with $819B.

That’s what the Republicans would do if they really believed their own hype. But they don’t.

The Star Trek universe is a little bit emptier this week. Ricardo Montalban passed away on Wednesday, January 14. The first version of the New York Times obituary (since updated) mentioned only his role as Mr. Roarke on “Fantasy Island.” To us, of course, he’ll always be Khan Noonian Singh.

I guess WordPress doesn’t allow Javascript or other embeds. So, as of 7:52pm EST, there are 12 days, 11 hours, and 7 minutes on the Bush Countdown Clock.

Somehow I overlooked this news until today when I was reading the year-end issue of the New York Times Magazine online. Joan Winston was the Star Trek “superfan” who was one of the driving forces behind the first all-Trek convention in New York City in 1972.

Here’s the New York Times obituary from September:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/nyregion/21winston.html

Here’s the magazine’s article from the year-end issue, but it’s less about Joan than about the changes in the relationship between media and fandom from 1972 to today:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/magazine/28wwln-consumed-t.html

In 1968, this country was deeply involved in an unpopular war on the other side of the world and still reeling from the assassinations  of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4  and Robert F. Kennedy on June 6. The Cold War with the Soviet Union was heating up. There wasn’t much to feel optimistic about. But the race to the Moon that had begin with the challenge issued by President John F. Kennedy in a special address to Congress on May 25, 1961, shortly after Mercury astronaut Alan B. Shepard became the first American in space, had not faltered.

On Christmas Eve, astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders become the first humans to enter lunar orbit. After three orbits of the moon, during which all of their attention was focused on the moon, they took this photo, one of many actually, of  “Earthrise” over the lunar horizon, showing Earth for the first time as it appears from deep space. In a live broadcast that night, the crew took turns reading from the Book of Genesis, closing with a holiday wish from Commander Borman: “We close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.”

It’s been pointed out many times that you can’t see national boundaries from space. Star Trek assumes the existence of a world government by the 23rd century—a single Earth government, the whole human race finally at peace with itself and comfortable with its infinite diversity. We have a long way to go to get there, but those of us who lived and breathed ST:TOS haven’t yet given up on that vision. At least I hope we haven’t.

Merry Christmas, to all of you on the good Earth. I leave you with this New York Times essay titled Not-So-Lonely Planet by Oliver Morton. One doesn’t often find the words energy, matter, Sun, strength, beauty, light, and life in the same Times op-ed piece.

I work part-time as a reference librarian, and Wikipedia has been an invaluable resource for me. When patrons come in with a question on a topic about which I know nothing, Wikipedia is where I start. In an effort to get students to learn how to use the library, school assignments often specify that the student must use print resources and can’t use the Web, on the grounds that web resources are not as authoritative as those in print. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t use the Web! A quick scan of the Wikipedia article gives me an overview of the subject, and most articles will point me to more authoritative print or online references.

Wikipedia is Isaac Asimov’s Encyclopedia Galactica and Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, all rolled into one. Please help to keep it going.

…the rest of us can just walk.

I have no particular love for American cars. Not the new ones, anyway—a 1965 Mustang is a whole ‘nother thing. I learned to drive in 1972, and I’ve only owned one American car—a 1994 Geo Prizm—and even that was really a Toyota under the hood. It got 40 miles to the gallon on the highway, and I wish I still owned it.

I remember the hours I spent waiting in gas lines back in the 1970s. I had a custom license plate that read “WARP-O.” It was meant to read as “warp zero,” which is way, way less than light speed. Gas rationing dictated that there were even-numbered days and odd-numbered days, based on your license plate. A custom plate that ended with a letter was considered an “odd-numbered” plate. I regularly had to persuade the folks at the gas station that the “O” was a zero. (Presumably Warpo was one of the unknown Marx Brothers.) I wanted to be consistent, darn it, but if they wanted to sell me gas on odd-numbered days, that was okay, too. Just my luck, some odd-numbered days I’d get the one attendant who was sure it was a ‘zero.’

So that was the 1970s oil embargo. My point being that the car companies, and the American public, have had plenty of warning and plenty of time to adjust to high oil prices and limited supplies and the questionable wisdom of depending for so much of our energy needs on supplies from countries whose people are very displeased with many of our foreign policy decisions. Yes, prices are down right now, but I don’t really believe that they’re going to stay there for very long. We should have started working our way to energy independence 30 years ago, when Jimmy Carter turned down the thermostat in the White House and had solar panels put on the roof—panels that Ronald Reagan had ripped out when he moved in.

And now here come The Big Three, hats in hand, asking the American people for just a little loan to tide them over. The same companies who have been spending millions to send lobbyists to Washington to fight tooth and nail against higher mileage standards. The same companies that in the 1950s bought up all the intra-city electric trolley and streetcar services and replaced them—when they did replace them—with diesel-powered buses. No, I have no sympathy at all for them.

But I do have sympathy for the auto workers, who are not responsible for the bad business decisions of the auto makers, but who are now being asked to give up all the gains they have made in the last 30 years and take pay cuts that will reduce them to the level of non-union auto workers. Or were being asked, until talks fell apart the other night. We just can’t risk putting millions of people out of work in one fell swoop. We don’t have the infrastructure in place to deal with that kind of catastrophe. And we have millions of American cars on the road that need parts and service right now.

So let’s help out the American auto companies, but let’s attach plenty of strings to the money: everyone at the highest levels of management resigns immediately; all federal and state mileage standards to be met or exceeded; the manufacture of trucks and SUVs to be replaced by new rail cars and fuel-efficient buses that we’re going to be needing Real Soon Now.

Sounds like “socialism,” you say? Afraid of socialism? How do food riots strike you?


(The fine print: “You probably thought it was smart to buy a foreign import of superior quality, with better mileage and resale value. Maybe you even thought that years of market share loss might prod us into rethinking our process and redesigning our products with better quality in mind, But you forgot one thing: We spend a shitload of money on lobbyists. So now you’re out $25 billion, plus the cost of your Subaru. Maybe next time you’ll buy American like a real man. Either way, we’re cool.”

“We’re The Big Three. We Don’t Need to Compete.”)

It’s 45 years and 3 days since November 22, 1963. I was 12 years old, in a junior high classroom in Dallas. Our teacher came in and told us that Kennedy had been shot. My first question was, “Not here, right? In Ft. Worth?” (where the entourage had spent the morning). JFK’s death, and later RFK and MLK, changed our country in ways that we are still only beginning to understand. I think that’s one of the reasons that Barack Obama’s campaign and election has generated such enthusiasm and, yes, euphoria (or O-phoria, as David Brooks has coined), and why Ted Kennedy’s symbolic passing of the torch meant so much to me. I feel like we are coming out of a long dark tunnel back into the light. Finally we again have a leader who is both pragmatic and inspirational, who assures us that we are all in this together and we will be okay if we just stick together. My own fears have been calmed considerably each time I hear him speaking in that calm, confident, competent voice.

In one of JFK’s last speeches, the commencement address at American University, he said, “So, let us not be blind to our differences–but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

He was talking about the Soviet Union, but he might just as well have been talking about our internal divisions. It’s been a long time since we’ve heard sentiments like that from any of our leaders, of any party. Until now.