Star Trek and History

by Reagin, Nancy

  “What Hope Is There for the Empire?”

  We have already noticed that the Klingon Empire is frequently shown as corrupt and in decline.20 In Deep Space Nine, “Blood Oath,” Kang laments, “There was a time, when I was a young man, the mere mention of a Klingon Empire made worlds tremble. Now our warriors are opening restaurants and serving racht to the grandchildren of men I slaughtered in battle.”

  Problems of corruption and faction fighting became endemic in the highest levels of Klingon society and government. For example, the Klingon High Council declares Worf’s dead father, Mogh, a traitor at the instigation of Duras, the head of a powerful house. In reality, Mogh was innocent and Duras’s father was guilty, a fact that the chancellor, K’mpec, freely recognizes, in the episode “Sins of the Father.” He justifies accusing Mogh of being a traitor by his wish to preserve peace in the Empire, and he convinces Worf to accept discommendation, an official form of ostracism. In “Reunion,” Duras continues to prove himself dishonorable, murdering K’Ehleyr and later poisoning K’mpec. K’mpec’s attempts to preserve peace fail, and after his death civil war breaks out. In the Deep Space Nine episode “Tacking into the Wind,” Ezri Dax later points out to Worf how much the Empire has declined:

  Who was the last leader of the High Council that you respected? Has there even been one? And how many times have you had to cover up the crimes of Klingon leaders because you were told that it was for the good of the Empire? I know this sounds harsh but the truth is, you have been willing to accept a government that you know is corrupt. . . . Worf, you are the most honorable and decent man that I’ve ever met and if you’re willing to tolerate men like Gowron then what hope is there for the Empire?

  In the end, Worf takes matters into his own hands and challenges Gowron to combat. He wins but refuses to lead the Empire—choosing instead Martok, a man of humble origins who has suffered prejudice within the Empire for being a man of great integrity and honor—perhaps because he is from outside the ruling class. His appointment signals real hope for the future, especially since Worf becomes the Federation ambassador to Kronos. Under Martok’s leadership and with Worf’s support, the Klingons will almost certainly become more like their Federation allies.

  Although Enterprise concerns the early history of Starfleet before the Federation, it is the most recently produced series. It explores in some detail the initial contact between humans and Klingons in order to explain the origins of the hostile relations between the two in Star Trek. Much of this is linked to corruption within the Empire. Jonathan Archer, commander of the Enterprise, is put on trial by the Klingons for aiding and abetting “rebels.” We first see the official Klingon version of events and then Archer’s—and we are left in no doubt that Archer’s is the correct one. The “rebels” are only refugees who have been stripped of all resources after their annexation by the Klingons: “[They] left us with nothing. . . . They said they’d bring food, fuel. They never came back” (ENT, “Judgment”).

  We see that, from the start, the Klingon Empire is a corrupt, aggressive, and expansionist power. Archer’s trial is a farce, and Kolos, his advocate, talks about how justice has become a parody. Kolos explains that in his career he has won over two hundred cases, but all of them were much earlier, “when the tribunal was a forum for the truth and not a tool for the warrior class.” He laments:

  Now all young people want to do is take up weapons as soon as they can hold them. They’re told there’s honor in victory. Any victory. But what honor is there in a victory over a weaker opponent? Had Duras destroyed that ship he would have been lauded as a hero of the Empire for murdering helpless refugees. We were a great society not so long ago. When honor was earned through integrity and acts of true courage, not senseless bloodshed. (ENT, “Judgment”)

  This episode aired in April 2003; one could see it as a commentary on the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which began in March of that year. Archer makes the point that “for thousands of years my people had similar problems.”21

  Over five series, eleven films, and numerous books, Klingons have changed and developed in parallel with evolutions in American society and foreign policy. Originally representing an extremely negative view of the Soviet Union, reflecting Cold War tensions, the Klingons became over time a mirror of the worries of a multicultural America. In the process, they went from tyrannical dictators to honor-bound warriors who fail to live up to their cultural ideals. In all cases the Federation, that representative of Western democracy and liberalism, is held up as the better civilization and the one toward which the Klingons should evolve. However, it is also made clear in the later series that Klingon civilization had been different and nobler in the past—more like that of the Federation—and that departing from this has led to tyranny, dishonor, and endless fighting between factions. An entire history has been created for a fictional people, but this history reflects the reality of American experiences over the last fifty years.

  Notes

  1. The language, invented by Marc Okrand, has devotees at the Klingon Language Institute, which publishes HolQeD, a scholarly journal; jatmey, a journal of poetry and fiction; and Qo’noS QonoS, which is entirely in Klingon. The Klingon Language Institute also offers a course to learn the language. See http://www.kli.org/.

  With regard to Klingon role-playing groups, see Jennifer Porter, “All I Ever Want to Be, I Learned from Playing Klingon,” in Alien Worlds: Social and Religious Dimensions of Extraterrestrial Contact, ed. Diana Tumminia (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007). Also Peter Chvany, “‘Do We Look Like Ferengi Capitalists to You?’ Star Trek’s Klingons as Emergent Virtual American Ethnics,” in Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, eds. Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).

  2. Gene Coon to Don Ingalls, August 21, 1967, quoted in Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, “Cold War Pop Culture and the Image of U.S. Foreign Policy: The Perspective of the Original Star Trek Series,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 78. Leonard Nimoy also admitted as much: “I was mulling all this over and thinking about the similarities between Federation/Klingon Empire relations and U.S./Soviet Union relations—the ‘Cold War’”; Leonard Nimoy, I Am Spock (New York: Hyperion, 1995), 313–315.

  3. Rick Worland, “From the New Frontier to the Final Frontier: Star Trek from Kennedy to Gorbachev,” Film and History 24, nos. 1–2 (1994): 19. Mark Lagon made similar comments in “‘We Owe It to Them to Interfere’: Star Trek and U.S. Statecraft in the 1960s and the 1990s,” Extrapolation 34, no. 3 (1993): 251–263.

  4. For other commentaries, see: Daniel Bernardi, Star Trek and History: Raceing toward a White Future (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 51–52; Rick Worland, “Captain Kirk: Cold Warrior,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 16, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 113; Lincoln Geraghty, “Creating and Comparing Myth in Twentieth-Century Science Fiction: Star Trek and Star Wars,” Literature Film Quarterly 33 (2005): 195; and Sarantakes, “Cold War Pop Culture and the Image of U.S. Foreign Policy,” 80–81.

  5. Lagon talks about “the zealous desire of James T. Kirk . . . to spread the Federation’s way of life.” “‘We Owe It to Them to Interfere,’” 252.

  6. John F. Kennedy, Announcement of the formation of the Peace Corps, March 1, 1961, http://www.peacecorps.gov/about/history/speech/. Worland also comments on the Kennedy influence in “From the New Frontier.” See also Denise Bostdorff and Steven Goldzwig, “Idealism and Pragmatism in American Foreign Policy Rhetoric: The Case of John F. Kennedy and Vietnam,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 24, no. 3 (1994): 515–528.

  7. Rudyard Kipling (1899) in Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1940), 323–324. There is a large amount of literature on the imperialist elements in Star Trek, most of which does not directly concern Klingons. Katja Kanzler, for example, in Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations: The Multicultural Evolution of Star Trek, American Studies Monograph Series no
. 115 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, Winter 2004), 103, sees Jean-Luc Picard as representing European imperialism.

  8. This has been frequently analyzed, so it will not be discussed at any length here. For more, see H. Bruce Franklin’s chapter in this volume, and also his “Star Trek in the Vietnam Era,” Science Fiction Studies 21, no. 1 (March 1994): 28–31; and Worland, “From the New Frontier” and “Captain Kirk”; Sarantakes explains in detail the rather muddled development of the episode in “Cold War Pop Culture and the Image of U.S. Foreign Policy,” 90–96. See also Jon Wagner and Jan Lunden, Deep Space and Sacred Time: Star Trek in the American Mythos (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), 154; and Paul Christopher Manuel, “‘But What of Lazarus?’ Taking Individuals Seriously in the Star Trek Saga,” in New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction, eds. Donald Hassler and Clyde Wilcox (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 169.

  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).

  Chapter 6

  Vietnam, Star Trek, and the Real Future

  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 audien
ce.

  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.