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...Star Trek: The Next Generation" is much more high-tech than its precursor (which, let's face it, folks, was just a tad more sophisticated in f/x than 1938's Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe...

...the threatening alien may have his/her/its own pain which, once understood, makes it human...

...Homer knew it: a ship is always our world, looking for itself...

...So if the first "Trek" was really about, How do we preserve our humanity in a system gone manic...

...Edward Rothstein, in his dismissal of the work in the New York Times, said that the Israeli position "is collapsed into scorn of American Jews and anybody else without mythic claims on the world's attention," and he cites the chorus of Hagar and the Angel as an instance of staking the Arab claim...

...Let's talk about "Star Trek...

...After a decade of Reagan/Bush greed, vulgarity, and sanctioned-in-high-places cynicism, the Enterprise--and doesn't that name start to shine with the sad glow of our all-but-lost hope?--the Enterprise is still Dorothy, America looking for its center, which is of course its best possible self...

...As the phenomenon that picked up an infinitely wider audience in seventies' and eighties' reruns than it had ever garnered when it was "live...

...652: Commonweal In fact, I suspect that one reason for "Trek's" astonishing popularity in rerun after it was canceled has to do with the Vietnam syndrome...

...Or as "Star Trek: The Next Generation," the series now beginning its fifth season, with a completely different cast from the original, and the hottest item in syndication...

...As the lead-pipe-cinch movie product that will continue this Christmas with the release of Star Trek VI, the "very last"--hardy har har--Trek film...

...That's "Vietnam," which is itself a mythic name for the dismantling of every psychic edifice of cold-war American triumphalism...

...It should, because it's just the configuration of the only truly original American fairy tale...

...Jean-Luc Picard is as enviably gifted as in any other role you could think him into...

...The one who has to learn that the People-in-Charge--a very bad wizard, but a very good man--can't be trusted farther than the reach of the heart itself...

...like] their predecessors in the ethnic immigrant slums...

...And I must tell you, old symbol-shuffler that I am, I trust "Star Trek's" answers to that question a hell of a lot more than I trust anything offered by anybody currently in power anywhere on the planet...

...And its scripts are--sorry, Harlan--more philosophically sophisticated than most of the originals...

...None of these facts absolves American society of its racist history or from responsibility to redress the effect of historical inequities...

...But now, at the beginning of my third season with Commonweal, I figure it's time to cut to the bone...

...And the Klingons became our pals four years before Gorbachev and Yeltsin nailed that plot-change down in the real world...

...And George Herbert Walker Bush...

...How do you map the forest you're in the middle of...

...When NASA unveiled its prototype Space Shuttle--remember the space program?--it was named the Enterprise, and the Marine Band played the "Trek" theme...

...That doesn't mean, of course, that it's "art"--a word that, as Amiri Baraka says, Americans always pronounce with simultaneous awe and contempt...

...McCoy= Scarecrow, Spock=Tin Woodsman, Kirk=Cowardly Lion...

...I do not think that the piece is anti-Semitic and pro-Arab, although it is easy to see where that response comes from...

...I ' m not kidding here...

...But they do challenge the arid political radicalism that too eagerly assigns the black underclass (10 percent of the black population) center stage...

...In the first week of September, "Star Trek" celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary as--what...

...And it's subversive, corny, sentimental stuff: like the regnant themes of any religion worth following...

...the second, it seems to me, is about, How do we preserve our differences and our individuality in a New World Order that wants to make us all the same...

...These people are friends of the Klinghoffers and presumably representatives of their society (although their name--Rumor--suggests something more metaphorical...

...They want to get out of the ghetto...

...They're generally a more artsy-schmartsy lot than mystery writers, and most of them express unqualified contempt for "Trek," especially the original series...

...McCoy, ship's doctor, who is all compassion and who therefore never thinks before he acts...

...One needs a brain, one needs a heart, and one needs the nerve or, as Bert Lahr made the phrase forever his, "da noive...

...And yet...

...Herbert," by the way, was immortalized in one "Trek" as a generic name for an officious, soulless bureaucrat...

...The new Enterprise even has a bar, tended by Whoopi Goldberg, which considerably eases my future shock...

...That's a good question, as we coast toward the year 2001...

...Harlan Ellison, who is one of the best writers I know and who contributed the two best scripts to the original show, used habitually to refer to it as "Star Dreck...

...The twin choruses in the prologue--the exiled Palestinians and the exiled Jews--are supposed to set the noncommittal balance of the work (the creators hoped that it would reflect the complexity of the situation in the Middle East), but that balance is thrown off by the fact that the Palestinian chorus focuses on the loss of home in the immediate sense, the Jewish one speaks more generally...

...We are all victims of delayed stress over that war (the appalling Desert Storm being only the latest flashbacktwitch), and maybe it wasn't till after the war was over that we could afford to look full-face at the internal carnage we had wrought upon ourselves, and see in "Trek" some kind of reassurance that, even in the midst of the craziness, some of us still kept in touch with the human factor...

...A liberal politics that continues to dismiss the traditional claims for personal accountability and social conformity dramatized by these films will find itself as irrelevant to the lives of the next generation of middle- and working-class African-Americans as liberalism is to the white ethnic middle class today, v3 MEDIA "LIVE LONG & PROSPER" THE 'TREK' GOES ON kay, okay...

...And then came Reagan...

...Just where she was in 1900, when L. Frank Baum wrote The Wizard of Oz as America was entering an unparalleled age of economic growth and greed, and in 1939 when MGM filmed The Wizard of Oz as America was on the brink of entering the still-after-tremoring cataclysm of our century...

...and Kirk, the captain, who must be brave and decisive, but who is forever prey to his anxieties and self-doubts...

...Imagine being a literate fourteenth-century person asked the question, "But sir (or milady)--what is Arthurian romance...

...And though each of them already has what he "needs," they only get what they need when they give it to one another...

...and what these films suggest, is that despite the significant historical differences between black and white American experience, the road to middle-class security taken by both groups looks remarkably the same...

...I assume that out of this bromidic background, the authors of the opera wanted to rescue the Klinghoffers, to transform them through death and suffering, but to many viewers (including the Klinghoffer daughters), the prologue demeaned the events...

...And when Roseanne Barr--remember when she was funny?--said "My first marriage was a mixed marriage...

...To make matters worse, these choruses are wrapped around a sequence in which a stereotypical affluent American middleclass Jewish family is presented satirically, an odd introduction to the hijacking of the Achille Lauro...

...Indeed, in his explicit moral code and fierce sense of earned virtue----even in his quirky ethnic paranoia and pride--Tre Styles's father is not so very different from the fathers and grandfathers of most white Americans...

...And that's what "Star Trek" was/is...

...How do you codify the grammar of the way you speak...

...As each of these movies documents, African-Americans, like most Americans, believe in the necessity and efficacy of such moral sanctions...

...Dorothy is the idea of the Republic that justifies the reality of the State at the same time she undermines it...

...And better actors: William Shatner as Kirk always tried hard but always failed, whereas, Patrick Stewart as Capt...

...Sound familiar...

...Dreams are the stories that get us through the night, but myths are the stories that get us through the day...

...But plus ~a change, right...

...Blacks do not want a 'gilded ghetto,'" Lipset observes in looking at the statistics on black employment and social mobility...

...For only a community cohesive enough to impose severe moral and social sanctions on aberrant behavior can curtail the kind of violence and social pathology afflicting the urban poor...

...Despite the presumed connection between the hijackers and their mythic past and the gentle presentation of Mamoud in a scene with the ship's captain, the Arabs are hardly designed to win the hearts of the 654: Commonweal...

...Think about the central characters...

...he called it Star Wars, surely a play on the name of our puzzling and lovely monster...

...She's America and, in "Star Trek" in the sixties, she's the Enterprise: in a word, us...

...As all of the above and more...

...Not a Joseph Campbell/Bill Moyers discourse for the brie-and-chablis set about the proper pronunciation of "Krishna," but a set of concepts, stories, names, and jokes to fit, and fit us into, the helter-skelter of the quotidian...

...And though "Trek" never confronted that wasteland directly, its themes--and I've seen every episode at least thrice--seem uncannily responsive to the uncertainties and panics we all felt back then: The Enemy may not really be an enemy...

...In these columns I've tried to talk about TV and politics, the Gulf War ("War" used as a courtesy to George Bush, whose prevarications I'm getting too tired to point out), the national psyche, the information-explosion, American mythology, and all that...

...It's internationalized, perestroikated (a word I am proud to coin) now: even the hated and feared Klingons are part of the crew now, voyaging with us "where no one has gone before" --which, of course, is where you and I are always, we can't help it, going...

...I hang out sometimes with sciencefiction writers...

...There is nothing in that scene that has not been presented frequently on the American stage, but the caricature is grating in this context...

...to appear at a high-powered s-f conference and discuss the show seriously in terms of the genre (what a concept...

...we may be better in our shared vulnerability than in our corporate self-assurance (ever notice how often things just break down on the Enterprise...

...Prophecy or dumb luck...

...You must remember this: the original "Trek" was being made, under the auspices of that brave fellow, Gene Roddenberry, during probably the most shattering time most of the people reading this can remember...

...For a quarter century--God, that's half my life--this story, this situation, this myth, this thing has been entwining with, feeding, and feeding upon the national selfimagination, to the degree that by now I don't see how a serious attempt to describe the late twentieth-century American spirit--such as it is----van afford to ignore "Star Trek" as crucial to the equation...

...Now that's what a real mythology is...

...Spock, the Vulcan who lives by logic and fights down--or tries to--any human emotion...

...But where's Dorothy...

...And much of that road is paved with the same mundane moral strategies and social values...

...Those are the regnant ideas of the original series...

...Dorothy is the one who just wants to go home...

...And when George Lucas made the most-successful-till-then film in history--remember when we judged films by their quality and not their first-week gross...

...I was an Earthling, he was a Klingon," she brought the house down, no footnotes needed...

...As the series that ran for three years in the mid-sixties...

...FRANK McCONNELL STAGE DESTRUCTIVE IDEALISTS 'KLINGHOFFER' & 'DIE TOTE STADT' ow that John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer has come and gone at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, perhaps it is possible to recollect the work in tranquility, to deal with the ideational attacks that confused the reception of the opera...

...And it's still worth your academic reputation (what a concept...