Adult Supervision

I've been looking around for some different blogs to read, because if I'm going to waste my time I at least want to be entertained, and I have developed a very low tolerance for earnest progressive chest-beating. Barack Obama inviting homophobic pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the inauguration isn't something to get the vapors over, as the time for that is if the policies aren't getting us out the very deep hole Republicans everywhere have dug for us.

Who is IOZ ruminated on another blogger's ruminations about Star Trek, and it's overall spirit of optimism and human endeavor, so reminiscent of JFK at least while Gene Roddenberry was running things. Later on, though, TNG and DS9 would get pretty grim and militaristic. Recalling how Kirk said to Trelaine, the immortal, godlike six-year-old how he was missing out on "the terror of murder, the suspense - the fun",** I guess the producers just couldn't hold out, giving in to the notion that watching shit get blown up was more fun than optimism and human endeavor.

IOZ skewers the fatuousness that would infect particularly the later Star Trek programs, saying,

You'll often hear the claim that Star Trek posits an ideal of a cooperative, post-scarcity, universally tolerant and largely utopic future, when in fact its fictive universe presents a deracinated, militaristic hierarchy as humanity's destiny. Which, when you think about it, is Kennedy-esque, isn't it? Star Trek was mostly zippity-doo space opera, and I feel a little guilty for picking on its tissue-paper politics, but you do have to wonder why enlightened humanity chooses to whisk among the stars in a bad facsimile of a 19th-century navy? In that regard, the missing detail is a realistic portrayal of sodomy.

In that same vein, other missing details in a realistic portrayal of a 19th-century navy were rum and the lash.

While it's nice to speculate about the hope of a post-scarcity utopia, we're going to have to get through the scarcity phase, which we're beginning to make the transition into. This brings me back to President-elect Obama selecting a homophobic bigot as the pastor to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. I find it deplorable, but in a tiresome sort of way because it distracts progressives whose energies should be devoted to other areas such as, say our unsustainable way of life, a topic that is relentlessly ignored by the media. Unfortunately, we as progressives are going to have to be the adults here (since the Rick Warrens of the world apparently aren't enlightened enough for that yet), which means sometimes sucking it in for certain aspects of life such as, say a finger stuck in the eye of homosexuals everywhere, to focus on bigger picture stuff. . . such as, say our unsustainable way of life. Being dead from starvation, disease or conflict makes it harder in the long run to combat hate and bigotry.

Therefore, I'm much more impressed with President-elect Obama appointing Jane Lubchenco as administrator of NOAA, than I am discomfited by selecting the Purpose-Driven-Life guy to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. Very adult-like.

** And if that just went past you, you need to question how much of a Trekkie you really are.