Organizing Principles

At the end of the 2-part season premier, there is a camera angle of the principals—minus Sisko and Dax—as they look on from the middle of the Promenade at the returned, restored Sisko and the returned, new Dax. It struck me as I re-watched the scene—for the first time since it premiered over a decade ago—that it was a kind of family portrait. The director was showing us that this group of people was back together, their bonds strengthened by the strife and trauma of the previous year of war. And that the station was the home where this family belonged.

The first regular episode of the season dealt with the new Dax host, but also served to showcase how the principals were like a family—supporting one another, and sometimes fighting with one another, over the new addition. The next one—the baseball episode—was one of the most effective depictions of camaraderie, loyalty and love ever seen on Star Trek. Killing yourself by dipping your hand into a warp core to save your ship and crew from destruction—that’s your duty. You swore an oath to do that. But playing a game you don’t know or care about with a bunch of Vulcans who will surely win and rub your nose in your defeat—that’s what family is for.


I wasn’t an Internet-based Star Trek fan at the time, but I recall people commenting that “Take Me Out to the Holosuite” was a colossal waste of time. It’s the final season. We only get 20-some episodes. There is a war going on. There are so many other stories to tell. I admit, at the time I didn’t love it. But now, it is clear that this is an indispensible episode.
First, it is a war story. The subtext of the initial conversation between Sisko and Solok is dark—wonderfully written and acted as menacing, a great trick before we learn it is the set-up to a whimsical plot. The subtext is that these two captains, despite their personal animosity, know that their crews need a diversion from the stresses of the war.

Sports are ritualized human combat. So the baseball game allows everybody to vent physical and emotional energy in a highly competitive, but low-stakes way. This brief pause from battles—like the Christmas Eve football matches on the Western Front—make the war just as real as will the Siege of AR-558 later in the season.

Second, we see the DS9 family in full bloom in a way that makes the space battles to come more important. None of the characters—except Sisko’s actually family, including Casidy—know anything about baseball. But they all hit the books, studying the byzantine rules, and then practicing together on and off the field. Even Quark practices with his Ferengi servers. They do this because Sisko is their leader, the head of the family. He motivates them with a great speech from the pitchers mound. Like him, they are motivated to beat the Vulcans, but also to play together and have fun. When Sisko kicks Rom off the team (for sucking) all the others threaten to quit. They are willing to abandon Sisko for Rom. Think about that. They would not do that in the trenches of the war, just the opposite. But because they are willing to abandon their captain over a meaningless game, only proves the strength of the bonds that have developed between this family. That Odo even ejected Sisko from the game is a sign of that bond because it shows Odo followed Sisko’s directive to learn and follow the rules of umpire with Odo-esque impartiality.

Furthermore, this is a diverse, modern (Trek) family. There are eight aliens to five humans on this baseball team, between all the Fenrengi (3), Bajorans (2), Shapeshifters (1), Klingons (1) and Trills (1). This is a subtle continuation of DS9’s major strength, which is to give voice to non-Federation perspectives, even though they all end up chewing gum with the best of the Hew-mons. The family bond transcends not just species, which is typical for Trek, but uniforms, which is not what we are used to seeing on Trek. By the end of the game, the Star Fleet Captain cedes the field to the barkeep, the Dabo girl and the former waiter. (Speaking of diversity, it has to also be said that it is touching even today to see a black family—Sisko, Jake and Casidy—portrayed so plainly.)


This is not the first time Sisko has invited his friends into a Holosuit baseball game. He says as much in this episode. It took seven years for Picard to sit down at the poker table with his crew—and what a moment it was. But on DS9, this personalization was done way back in Season three, when it was revealed that Sisko had “niners” over to his quarters and cooked for them regularly. Sisko is a different man than Picard, and this is a different crew.

“Take Me Out to the Holosuit” is one of the few episodes in all of modern Star Trek that has no B-plot. The writer—Ronald D. Moore—wanted to be very clear. This episode was just about a baseball game, but that fact allows it to be about so much more. This was no light-hearted romp. This was about family, making it one of DS9’s most important episodes.

Several years ago I started to re-watch the Trek series of my childhood—TNG and DS9—in episode order. I am now at the end of that process with the 7th season of DS9.

I feel like the question that you ask about a novel—what was that about?—can be asked of DS9, and in a way that may only be possible to ask of one other Trek series, TOS. Unlike TNG, and perhaps moreso that TOS, DS9 seems to have central and recurring messages. These themes were about the stories we saw on screen like religion and genocide and terrorism, but also about the nature of Star Trek itself and how a Trek series should be written.

So what was DS9 about? To answer that I am going to write some essays as I watch the final season. I will refer back to the previous seasons, but I feel that how the writers decided to end the series is the clearest statement about what it all means, at least based on the writers intentions.

(Note: I haven’t seen this season since it aired, and I only watched them on grainy VHS because for some reason my local TV station stopped airing it, and a friend taped them and sent me the cassettes. So I don’t remember the details and nuances of the episodes that I hope to write about here.)

Discussing the 7th season in the DS9 Companion Ira Behr says, “The show wasn’t geared to be what we kept turning it into.” This is true on many levels.

Let’s look at what DS9 was geared to do. First, DS9 began as a mandate from the studio, which realized two Star Trek shows in syndication were better than one. TNG was making X number of dollars per episode in profit for Paramount, so the executives figured two shows would double that amount. According to Erdmann’s account in Companion, it was the head of Paramount, Brandon Tartikoff, who planted the germ of the concept: a man and his son in a remote frontier outpost, a sci-fi version of the western The Rifleman.

Michael Piller and Berman took it from there. And Piller at least was clear about the crucial break from TOS and TNG that this setting would create: “We felt there was an opportunity to really look deeper, more closely at the workings of the Federation and the Star Trek universe by standing still.” He equated the standard stand-alone Star Trek episodes, where the Enterprise swoops into a solar system for an adventure, to one-night stands. DS9 would show what happened after the Enterprise left: the marriage. It was the later show runner—Ira Behr—who showed how fulfilling and challenging that marriage could be (Rapture, Call to Arms, Inquisition, In the Pale Moonlight, etc.).

What Behr meant in the above quote is that no one could have expected of this frontier outpost in Season One for the point-of-view of the natives (Bajorans, Ferengi, Cardassians) to take precedence over the Federation, for the sacrosanct values of the Federation to be challenged by gritty realism, and for the lawman to join the natives’ religion, abandon his family, and finally be transformed into one of the natives’ gods.

This radical departure from convention is refreshing, especially considering the two Trek series that were developed next (and Braga’s recent admission that Enterprise was intended to be an Earth-bound show at least for its first season, and the studio demanded it be space-based http://www.geekexchange.com/ ). Imagine it: a team of writers are handed a multi-million dollar science-fiction franchise and actually decides to do something interesting with it. How novel.

That said, the final story arcs of DS9 do not have a promising start with the two-part premier. While the episodes themselves were fine--paced well and with good charcater bits for all involved--the central themes of the show were not started out on the best foot.

When Season 7 opens, the Prophets are in a battle with the Pah-wraiths inside the wormhole. The orbs are dark. Bajorns feel cut off from their gods. Sects of Bajorans are beginning to worship the Pah-waiths instead of the Prophets. We are told this, not shown. Damar has a line of dialogue where he asks Weyounn what he thinks the battle inside the wormhole must be like. But we never go into the wormhole to find out—we aren’t even given a description of the battle to go on. So the dramatic tension over Sisko’s work to restore the wormhole never builds. All he does is stumble upon an orb in the desert of a planet we’ve never heard of before, and has no connection to Bajor, opens the box and sends a ball of light across space into the wormhole, which ejects the Pah-wraiths.

There are a few problems. The Prophets work when they are shown interacting with mortals, whether Sisko trying to teach them about humanity or Quark trying to teach them about profit-making. There is a sense of spooky, foreboding, divine mystery about them. Their collectivism and paternalism gives them an epic, Mount Olumpus-like feel. In this two-parter, we only see a single Prophet, Sarah. It is the first time a Prophet does not embody characters familiar to the mortal who is having the Prophet vision. In the scene between Sisko and Sarah we don’t learn anything that we didn’t already learn earlier in the episode: that she is his mother. There is some abstruse Prophet-like dialogue that means everything and nothing. Apparently the writers are only prepared to give us the fact about Sisko’s lineage and nothing else. Hopefully they will be able to do more with this as the season unfolds.

[The vision scenes of the episode are also undercut by the inexplicable return of Benny Russell, who was never mentioned again. See my previous essay.]

The Pah-Wraiths are another problem. In their first two episodes they possessed Kieko, and then Jake, two of the least essential characters of the series. So the audience always had the feeling that these evil spirits had the minor purpose of creating dramatic tension and danger in a couple stand-alone episodes.

They were never properly folded into the mythology of the Bajoran religion or of the series. They did not appear until Season Five. If there were devils in the Bajoran religion that could destroy the wormhole you’d think we would have heard about it before then. Even still, the writers could have shown us instead of told us. So much dialogue had to be written about Pah-Wraits and ancient texts, but if Sisko was always pulled into Prophet Heaven, why not a visit to Pah-Wraith Hell? So far in Season Seven, even after they killed Jadzia, the Pah-Wraiths aren’t real to the audience, and therefore they don’t feel like a real threat.

The two-parter ends with Sisko, a new Dax, and the rest of the family back on the station. While the set-up is flawed, the board is set for the final season: Sisko’s maternal lineage to the Prophets must be explored; the Pah-Wraiths will stage a counter-attack, aided by Dukat, who is unquestionably a real threat; the Dominion War is still raging, but the leader of the Cardassian Empire appears to have a drinking problem. We will see how things develop.

Science Fiction has always used thought-experiment stories. These stories allow us to think about society, history, and our own lives in a different way. A common version of this type of story is to present alternate interpretations of reality, and invite us to ask if our reality is real at all? A character is forced to question if what they experience as reality may not actually be true reality. The very first Star Trek episode, The Cage, did this with Pike and the Thalosians. Sometimes it involves psychosis, like Riker in Frame of Mind; or alternate realities, like the Mirror Universe and Worf in Parallels; or time travel like in Yesterdays Enterprise or All Good Things.



The Holodeck allowed for this type of story to be told many times. Star Trek Holograms achieved an archetypal status that rivals robots in the annals of sci-fi. The hologram allows us to imagine a situation where a human’s self-awareness could be called into question. It allows us to question the veracity of our surroundings. It makes us question how free freewill truly is. From the Ricker’s date in 11001001, to the mobsters in The Big Goodbye, to Morarity, to Barcly’s creations, to the pinnacle of this archytype in the Doctor—these themes were hit again and again. The best example is Ship in a Bottle where Moriarty tricks Picard, Data and Barclay into thinking a holographic Enterprise is the real thing. The title captures the concept. Is the crew on the deck of the ship in the bottle any less human than the rest of us? What is our bottle? What is beyond it? Who put us inside of it? The metaphysical frame allows our imaginations to flirt with the fundamentals of existence, limits of understanding, creation, God, etc. Picard sums it up at the end of that episode by saying, “Who knows, we may all exist only inside of a device sitting on someone’s table.”

The truth is that Picard and crew do exist inside of a device sitting on someone’s table—our DVD boxsets and streaming Netflix boxes.

I want to explore the one time when Star Trek experimented with the notion, in an on-screen canonical way, that all of Star Trek was a fictional product created by an actual, “real” science-fiction writer. It was done in Deep Space Nine’s Far Beyond the Stars and Shadows and Symbols. In the end, the serious storytelling implication of those episodes were then quietly forgotten and ignored.

In FBS, Sisko flashes back to the 1950s. He is Benny Russell, a struggling pulp writer in the Golden Age of science fiction. The people in his life are all played by actors who portray characters in Siskos’ life, from Nog to Kira to Dukat. When Russell/Sisko (literally wearing the Starfleet uniform and Russells’ glasses) asks the Prophets who he is, they respond: “You are the dreamer and the dream.”

Later, in the DS9 universe, Sisko says to his father:

“What if it wasn’t a dream? What if this life we’re leading, you and me, everything, what if all of this is the vision?... Maybe just maybe, Benny isn’t the dream, we are. Maybe we are nothing more than figments of his imagination. For all we know, somewhere beyond all those distant stars, Benny Russell is dreaming of us.” Then we actually see Benny Russell reflected in the glass of Sisko’s window into space.

That last line taps into the ancient wonder that a starry night inspires in all of us. Is it like a ceiling that we might punch through one day? What would we find on the other side?

This dialogue coming at the end of the episode might have been similar to Picard’s dialogue to Barclay at the end of Ship in the Bottle, and we the viewer are supposed to enjoy the thought experiment but not take it literally and apply it to all of Deep Space Nine or all of Star Trek.

But this time was different. FBS and its implications could have been another stand-alone episode that was not meant to be interpreted as having ramifications for the series as a whole—but for two reasons. First, Sisko’s vision of Benny Russell came from the Prophets. Whenever the Prophets sent characters visions there was a purpose behind the vision. It was always to set up plot that was coming later in the season or series. It’s why they are called Prophets. They exist with an awareness of all time. They know what is coming while Sisko doesn’t, so they dribble visions like bread crumbs to affect his and others’ choices. Second, Benny Russell returned next season in Shadows and Symbols. He was writing DS9 stories on the walls of his asylum cell. When the doctor, played by the same actor as Damar, gets Russell to stop writing and consider painting over the story, Sisko actually stops doing what he is doing in the DS9 universe. Sisko only commits his next action when Benny Russell chooses to write that action on the wall. What are we to make of this?

Absolutely nothing. Because the writers—the real “real” writers Ira Steven Behr and Hans Beimler—because of a lack of chutzpah, or excess of prudent wisdom, or both—chose not to follow through with what they started.

Here is a thought experiment for you. Imagine if the DS9 writing room had decided to confirm that Benny Russell actually wrote all DS9 stories. You say, wait a minute, Deep Space Nine is not a self contained sci-fi show. It contains Star Trek in its title. Picard was in Emissary I and II. Bashir was in TNGs Birthright. Quark was in a TNG and VOY episode. Spock and Kirk were both mentioned in DS9 episodes, and four TOS Klingons actually reprised their characters in DS9 episodes (Kor, Kang, Koloth and Arnie Darvin). Canon links DS9 to all other Trek series. So Benny Russell must be responsible for all of Star Trek. Imagine if after Russell wrote DS9 in the 1950s—most of it inside of his asylum—he was released and went to Hollywood, where he met an ambitious, idealistic TV writer named Gene Roddenberry. By this point, Russell has given up on the idea of the public accepting a black captain, but he still wants his idealistic future vision to survive. He gives Roddenberry the concept, introduces him to Nichelle Nichols, and the rest is the history we all know.

This could have been done, but it would have been all that DS9 Season 7 could be about. The last episodes of DS9 would have been about the first episodes of TOS. Interesting, maybe, but it would have betrayed the DS9-centric characters, stories and actors that built that series, and the fans that followed it (in the same way ENTERPRISE’s finale became about TNG).

Realizing this quagmire, the writers decided to chalk Benny Russell up to “The ways of the Prophets are strange” and leave it at that. Probably wise. Even in Russell’s second and last episode, his narrative logic was breaking down. Dramatic tension was created when Sisko stopped an action because Russell stopped writing his action, but the B-plot about Kira’s standoff with the Romulans, and the C-plot about Worf attacking a Dominion shipyard both continued even though Russell wasn’t writing. Russell was never mentioned after this episode.

I’ve always felt like the writers saved face by having Sisko say to Kasidy in the finale that since “time doesn’t exist here” he might return “in a year” but that “it could be yesterday,” implying that his work might be in the past. Maybe the Prophets sent him back to Benny Russell’s reality.

For years, Star Trek has provided us with opportunities to imagine that our reality is not special, that it is but one perspective among many. They did this by placing “real” characters in false realities. For a brief moment, Star Trek writers flirted with the idea of going completely through the metaphysical looking glass and declaring that all of Star Trek “reality” in all of its canonical glory was purely fictional. These writers dared to suggest that this purely fictional imaginative playground we beam into through our television sets, which we have to trick our brains into accepting as real as we watch it, is actually a fiction created by a fictional writer that we have to trick our brains into accepting as a real one, who will remain one dimension removed from the actual Hollywood writers that created the whole thing. In this way, Benny Russell is not a meditation on God and creation, but on storytelling and storytellers. Too bad the writers couldn’t figure out how to maintain this concept while also doing justice to DS9 seven season arch.

After Hurricane Sandy so easily sent New York Harbor rolling up so many streets in Manhattan and Jersey City, it was a bit of a shock to see the capital city of Amsterdam vivisected every two bocks by canals. If the Dutch had built their New Amsterdam like the old one, there would be nothing left today of the Big Apple.

Of course, the Netherlands have had their super storms. In the Saint Peters Flood of 1651, 26 years after they founded New York City, 15,000 Dutch people are estimated to have been drowned. Our Dutch hotel clerk, and our breakfast chef, Yost, told us that there was a terrible flood in the 1950s that killed scores of people in Holland. After that, they decided they weren’t going to take it anymore.

He was referring to the North Sea Flood of January 1953, which killed 1,850 people and tens of thousands of animals, and destroyed 4,500 buildings. It was the result of a high Spring tide and a massive windstorm that swept across Europe into the North Sea. The sea swell was 18.4ft (compare that to the nine feet we were worried would hit Jersey City during Sandy).

The response was to build a massive flood defense system in the estuaries of all the major rivers leading into the Netherlands. (In another Dutch connection, the Hudson River at New York City is not a river but an estuary.) It’s called the Delta Works, and it was not finished until 1998.

According to Yost, problem solved. Now he said, when there is a flood in America like Katrina or Sandy, Dutch engineers go over to consult.

Here is an article on Dutch ideas for NYC post-Sandy:
http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/real-estate/dutch-innovations-prevent-sandy-type-flooding-new-york-article-1.1202840

Of course, Yost said, before the high-priced engineers fly over, they send this little guy:



But as others have pointed out, and as the little Dutch Boy well knows, you stop water from coming in one place, it will go someplace else, and probably not the direction its coming from.

Ben Sollee is a cellist/singer-songwriter from Kentucky. Today in his World Café interview he described the “superhuman pace” of his former tour schedule, multiple flights per week across the country.

“I found myself spending a lot more time in-between places than actually in them,” he said. He described the unsettling feeling a lot of frequent flyers have of waking up and not remembering where he was.

After seeing a commercial on Current TV for a cargo bike company called Xtracycle, Sollee decided to slow down his tour schedule by bicycling to his gigs.

His first trip was from Lexington, Kentucky to the Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee, and he hasn’t looked back since. He described the new connections he is able to make with the communities he passes through on the road. You might argue that he spends even more time “in-between places” than before because of the time it takes to get there under pedal power, but it is really the opposite. When you are pedaling through a town, stopping to get water, or eat, or just say hello, a ‘wherever you go, there you are’ mentality sets in. It’s hard to have that in an airport, squeezed into economy seating, or even on a tour bus.

Sollee is an activist, especially on mountain-top removal, but he was quick to point out that he doesn’t bike to his shows for the environment. “It’s not about being Green… or even sustainable, but rather to use the limitations of the bicycles to slow us down so we could really be in these communities.”

Sollee’s approach is to harness the limitations of the world to serve our needs (and learn how not to be frustrated by the slowness).

I think the way to foster mass appeal for sustainable, “green” living is to push the emotional, psychological, and spiritual benefits of slowing down on the individuals themselves. This may be more effective that trying to get people to care about big abstract consequences of climate change.

What are the ways we can choose slow, low-impact technology alternatives in our daily lives?... Perhaps the first question we should ask ourselves is what aspect of our daily lives do we even want to slow down?

Check out the whole interview and songs here: http://www.npr.org/2013/01/02/168355523/ben-sollee-on-world-cafe

He is described as suffering seasickness for the first half of the novel. Towards the end of the book he is not much bigger. At age nineteen, he has to borrow a fellow midshipman’s clean stockings for a state dinner, and he has to pad out his thin calves with wood shunts and plaster so the stockings don’t sag. He loses two ships he is put in command of, the captured French vessel Marie Gallant and the small sloop Le Reve. (Although he captured or helped to capture as many ships as he lost.) He is no nervous during is promotion review for lieutenant that he freezes up, and would have been rejected if the review was not interrupted by Spanish attack. His missteps and deadly mistakes often lead him to a fit of weeping, or the necessity of staving off such a fit for dignity’s sake.

So why is this a fitting beginning for the legendary future captain and admiral? Because Forester is explicit about young Hornblower’s strengths. First, we learn that Hornblower studied hard in school. He often refers to Norie’s Eptiome of Navigation and other tomes that he had undoubtedly poured over in the naval academy. The second thing we learn (in the very first chapter) is that this weak, knock-need boy has courage. He instigates and follows through with a duel (by luck of a misfire, both shooters are unharmed). This episode shows that Hornblower has no qualms about putting his life on the line. And he does so in each of the subsequent nine chapters. One great example is in Chapter Four. The Indefatigable is trying to sneak upon and capture a French ship. Hornblower’s only job in the boarding party is to drop the mainsail so that the ship can be sailed out of the bay. To do this he has to climb up the mast 100 feet and drop the sail. He is afraid to do this job, and during the mission briefing he wants to protest that he is not the man for the job. Tellingly, he stays quiet. During the boarding, when he reaches the top of the mast he finds that the French had removed planks and cables so he is required to run along a single cable for the length of the sail, a feat that, “in a circus at home would be receive with ‘oh’s and ‘ahs’ of appreciation.” Suffice to say, he completes the task and the ship is successfully taken. It is a moment where he learns what he is capable of.

Chief among young Hornblower’s strengths is that he learns from his mistakes. As he realizes that the Marie Gallant is sinking he immediately understands how his pride over his first command blinded him to critical dangers that were beneath his feet the whole time he was aboard her. The personal shame he feels that the ship “had been entrusted to him to bring into port, and he had failed” is what brings on one of his weeping fits. The absolute necessity of completing his charged duties with success becomes a mark of his character. He is always making mental and actual notes for future reference. He is an active learner. (As a sailor, I can say that a boat has a way of forcing this mindset upon you. You know that certain conditions on the water and in the equipment will occur, and something invariably goes wrong. Experience and learning from it are the only means of survival.)
Note this comparison with Lieutenant Soames, who, along with Hornblower, commanded a jolly boat in the battle with the Spanish galleys in Chapter Seven:

Soames had been a grey-haired officer of vast experience. He had sailed the seven seas, he had fought in a score of actions. But, faced with a new situation, he had not had the quickness of thought to keep his boat from the under the ram of the galley. Soames was dead, and Acting-Lieutenant Hornblower would take his place.

Hornblower not only avoided being rammed by the galley, he boarded and captured it. This was above and beyond what duty required. But he was so morally offended by the stench of the 200 slaves rowing the galley that he was overcome by “fighting madness, sheer insanity” against the Spanish. Forester tells us that “Hornblower had never realized the black depths of lunacy into which he could sink,” but that “only good fortune had allowed him to live through it. That was something worth remembering.” We can imagine the young acting-lieutenant thinking about future engagements when he should trust this all-consuming rage and act on it, and when he should not.

A corollary to all this introspection and learning is self-doubt. Hornblower constantly doubts himself and his decisions, but this is ultimately a virtue. By asking hard questions of himself he keeps arrogance in check, and can apply the answers he comes up with to future problems.

So Hornblower is knowledgeable and brave, and quick enough (in body and mind) to apply these qualities to take the necessary action. But there is one last quality that Forester shows again and again. Hornblower is deeply committed to the Code of Honor and Duty of the British Navy. One of his first acts is to challenge a superior officer to a duel because that Lieutenant had “touched [his] personal honor.” When he discovers crewman gambling, he orders them to never do it again and threatens floggings. The most striking example comes at the very end of the novel. He has been a Spanish prisoner for two years. A ship grounds on a reef near the prison. Hornblower devises a plan to rescue the Spanish sailors trapped on the reef. He is allowed to take a small boat manned with Spanish fishermen. They rescue the sailors but must go out to sea to seek refuge from the reef. They are picked up by a British ship. Not only does Hornblower argue with the British captain to free the fisherman, he requests to be sent back into captivity. Under the rules of war, because he was on parole when he went on the rescue mission, he is honor bound not to try to escape. So he goes back to the Spanish, who then free him for his service. Hornblower knows that without honor, and self-sacrifice in the name of honor, a navy cannot function. Tellingly, the voice in Hornblower’s head that tells him not to reveal to the captain that he was on parole during the rescue, is referred to as the Devil.

By the end of this book, you can see the young man’s entire valiant career spread out before him. And you want to watch it unfold through all the coming adventures.

Now, Roddenberry has said many times that James T. Kirk is Horatio Hornblower in space. There are many similarities (and differences) between these two characters, and their chosen homes—the sea and the stars—which I will explore in future posts. But I don’t want to leave this analysis of Hornblower’s prequel without mentioning Kirk’s prequel.



Shatner’s Kirk enlists in the Academy at 17 (the same age Hornblower becomes a midshipman on his first vessel). Four years later he is on his first starship as an ensign. He is given his first command at age 31. So his career from ensign to captain took 10 years, which I believe is a Starfleet record. Some Original Series episodes filled in details of this early career, and there are themes that align with Honrblower, such as Kirk’s guilt over a moment of indecision that led to the deaths of 200 Farragut crewmembers including the captain.

Many fans have always wanted to see these details fleshed out on screen, which is why the Star Trek ’09 film left so many of us disappointed. In the altered timeline of the film, Kirk enlists in the Academy at age 22 (presumably after spending his young adulthood carousing at bars). But once focused on a life goal, he makes for a good student and he is scheduled to graduate after three years. It is important to note that Kirk never actually graduates. His hearing for cheating on the Kobayashi Maru program is interrupted by the attack on Vulcan. When he returns to the Academy after Nero’s threat is neutralized, Starfleet makes him a captain. He is 25. He is given command of a Ship of the Line, after three years of schooling and mere days of active duty.


In all previous Trek, the rank of its officers has always been depicted as a matter of importance, governed by strict rules and tests of competence. Much like rank is treated in the Royal British Navy. Which would you rather have? A captain made out of a crass young man after one test of his character and skills. Or this, from acting-lieutenant Hornblower’s musings on the eve of his examination for lieutenant:


I have great respect for those film makers, like Nick Myer, who actually read the Star Trek Ur-texts before they set about refashioning the Star Trek story world. If only we would get more of them.

I am beginning a review of what I am calling Star Trek Ur-texts. An Ur-text, for those non-English majors out there, is a text that is a source that had an explicit and major influence over a later work, a direct antecedent, a kind of literary father. You mostly hear about them with Renaissance plays, especially Shakespeare. The Hamlet and Macbeth stories existed in earlier versions, which Shakespeare took, refashioned for the stage and stuffed with the lines that high schoolers now have to memorize.

The classic 79 Star Trek episodes are the most literary inspired of all the Trek series. Naturally, because the writers were creating something never before seen on TV of film. So they had to reach into fiction to find character and story-telling models. The later series just copied each other instead of fresh material, and the genetic drift resulted in some retarded children. (Interestingly, the most unique later Trek, DS9, was heavily modeled on classic Hollywood movies--and not just westerns--that were favored by the various producers).  

In this analysis, I will try to base my label of Ur-text on accounts that the series writers actually viewed them as important sources. The writers were steeped in Sci-fi from the 30s, 40s and 50s, but not every Amazing Stories piece has imprinted its DNA into Star Trek. But some of them may have, and I will eventually try to find them.

The one text that we know is a definitive Star Trek Ur-text is the Horatio Hornblower novels. I will begin with these.


  

The Sandy recovery & reflection period started one month ago. Four weeks ago today our power came back on, and like the flip of a switch, we changed from spooked, cagey, flinty survivors to 'what's on Bravo?'

The big take-away for me is how the storm is viewed in the context of global climate change, or as some prefer Global Weirding. It is shocking to me that climate change has been so frequently connected to discussions about this storm, when it wasn't so long ago when to do so was taboo and politically dangerous. So many New York Times stories have been written about basically proclaiming New York City doesn't have a chance in a the coming warmer world. Last week's Sunday Review literally prepared New Yorkers for the day when they will have to move their city to Rochester. Bloomberg's surprise endorsement of Obama the week of the storm was directly linked to climate change. And his rebuffing of plans to protect the city with sea walls stems from his long held view that we need to stop the climate from changing by changing our behaviors (he needs to devote his time out of office to figuring out how we have to change our economy to facilitate that goal). Meanwhile, Governor Cuomo supports the idea of building protections. Both men attribute storms like Sandy to climate change.

Even Obama makes the connection. He prefaces his statement by saying that "no single weather event can be attributed to climate change", but he goes on to talk about the importance of increasing our efforts to reduce human impact on climate change. This would have been impossible for a politician to say a few years ago.

[In a 4th season 2002 episode of The West Wing, there was a story line about a flash flood in Alaska that killed some people. The liberal writers had one of the liberal characters claim this was "the first death attributed to global warming." And in the episode this caused a backlash and mini-scandal. As usual it was the writer's way of representing politicians as they should be, not as they are.]

I remember the feeling the climate change acceptance shift as it was happening, between the 2004 and 2008 elections. We rapidly switched from the Dick Cheny "the American way of life is not negotiable" attitude to where we couldn't talk about these things except in the most left of liberal circles, to the broad understanding of the public that the American way of life is going to change whether we negotiate or not. It was a shocking, palpable shift in the public perception, and one that was already underway well before Obama and the democratic senate passed their cap and trade bill. Whether it will ever become law may depend on a few more years of droughts, fires and storms, and how much the American people really want to change their economy.
      
In eight years living here (and all the previous years of my life) I never had to prepare for a hurricane--until Irene last year and Sandy this year. There is an emotional acceptance among people that this may well happen every year from now on. And if it does happen in September or October of 2013, the modifier "new" will be lopped off of the oft-quoted expression, and we will just have "normal."

We are able to get gasoline without any wait, but the rationing is still in effect. Im told if you ask nicely or refuse to leave, they will let you buy gas even if it is not your day.

As of Friday I had kids without power. Hopefully Newark is back online for all the students. This is exam week.

Allright, the vast majority of NJ plates have 6 figures: 4 letters and 2 digits. The two digits form one number--76 or 15 or 03, etc.

Christie only has to change his EO to say that the number on the plate, being odd or even, determines the day the driver can gas up.

What to do about out of state plates that have more than 2 digits... that will take more subsections of the EO to figure out.

For those of you outside the region, there is def a need for rationing if only to keep people from flocking to the gas stations. We live three blocks from the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, which is closed. All the gas stations along that road are closed--either because of power outage or more likely because police do not want people on that road.

I have a third of a tank of gas, and was thinking of gassing up. But there is a logistical problem. The rule is during even days of the week only people whose license plate ends in an even number can fill up. On odd days like today--Nov 3--only people whose license plate ends in an odd number can fill up.

Here is the problem. My license plate, and every NJ car that I studied as I walked Samson around the block, ends in a letter instead of a number. I probably checked over 100 cars. One website said that if your license ends in a letter, then you fill up on odd days. But many other websites are simply reporting the rule as if every plate ends in a number.

Sidebar: On thursday night I over heard a guy at a bar on his cell phone say the following: "I'm not going to go down there and commander the gas station. That's not my job."

The Hamilton Park area of Jersey City has power as of Thursday at 11:30am. The neighborhood is getting back to normal, but there is a tension in the air. Police, fire and ambulance sirens are heard almost every hour. At night blue and red police lights triwl up and down the street--I assume the police want their presence to be known. When the streets were dark there was a 6pm curfew. And I was glad to have it. There is a sense, even now, that there might be desperate people out there. There is talk of mobs of people going to town hall in Hoboken where there is still power out and standing water in buildings and streets.

Gasoline is another issue. I dont need to drive anywhere until next week, but there are long gas lines at the operational gas stations. The problem is that only half of the gas stations in New Jersey are operational due to power outages or other problems. The Obama administration has ordered the military to truck in gasoline, and they have removed restrictions on tankers.

One thought on the tankers: Ive sailed my little boat out in the New York harbor section known as the Parking Lot. They call it that because tankers have to park out there on moorings or anchors before comming in to off load their cargo. First of all, the tanker captains have to be replaced with a harbor captain because the skills that brought the tanker across an ocean are not the same as needed to navigate  the harbor. But gasoline and oil tankers are know to stay out there for months at a time waiting for gas prices to rise. The companies pay the tanker crew to sit out there for weeks and months because of the profits they will reap by an extra 10 or 20 cents on the gallon. Not sure if that is happening out there now. And if it is, not sure who would have the authority to make them move.  

Hello.

Engineers of complex technology should be studying the Fukushima nuclear disaster for many reasons, but one of the most important reasons has to do with belief. According to a New York Times article (6/25/11) the Japanese utilities, government and citizens all succumbed to the mass delusion that their nuclear plants were “absolutely safe”—this phrase is repeated so many times in the article that you get a strong sense of the propaganda that must have been disseminated in Japan for years.

The article traces the nuclear “safety myth” to Japan’s post-World War II restructuring. Japan did not have oil or other natural resources, a big part of why it was defeated. Despite being hit by two atom bombs, nuclear power must have looked like a free lunch card, assurance that they would not slip backwards into the old world development status of primitive Pacific island cultures. But if nuclear power was the only way Japan would survive as any kind of respectable world power, then, by god, nuclear power would just have to be safe. Too much national identity was at stake for it not to be. And once the island nation was peppered with 54 plants, to paraphrase Dick Cheney, nuclear safety was not up for negotiation.

This mindset led to a rash of irrational, if very familiar, bad decisions. The (Japanese!) utility did not invest in radiation-capable robots. At Fukushima, when workers needed to pump water to cool the reactor, the pump they used had to be imported from China. The plants have robots of course, but they are positioned in the visitor centers and on tours for the education and amusement of tourists. If you go on one of these tours you will also see many friendly anime cartoons extolling the virtue and safety of nuclear. You will be guided by an attractive, childbearing-age female tour guide, the likes of whom were hired at Japan plants after Chernobyl to specifically ally the fears of mothers and prospective mothers worried about radiation birth defects.

A misleading PR offensive is one thing, but to willfully neglect to amass safety technology and tools that will be needed in the event of an emergency strikes me as a new page in the history of engineering disasters.

The “Safety Myth”, like all myths, was accepted on pure faith. Therefore, any emergency contingency plan directly challenged that faith. Since the faith stood on a shaky foundation to being with, everyone who clung to it was overly defensive about it. Any thought of the nuclear plans not being “absolutely safe” needed to be ignored at all cost.

I can relate. I used to feel the same way about my old Subaru Legacy, especially after she passed the 225,000 mile mark. What’s that grinding sound? What’s that odd smell? Nothing, absolutely nothing!

The problem is that the accident always hits eventually. With complex interactions between components that are tightly coupled (see Figure 9.1, Normal Accidents, Charles Perrow, or below) you will have an accident within the system. It is mathematically guaranteed to happen. The accident might not blow the plant to kingdom kum, but there is no guarantee that it won’t either.

Engineers are familiar—or should be—with the idea that redundant safety measures don’t necessarily make the system safer. They add more layers of complexity, give something else an opportunity to break down, all while lulling the human operators into a false sense of security. The Japanese appeared to have skipped this step. They created their false security without paying for the safety systems. Belief is a powerful way to circumvent the laws of physics, until it’s not.

David Linden’s book The Compass of Pleasure describes the latest neuroscience research on the medial forebrain pleasure circuit (interesting, these computer metaphors for brain anatomy).

One fascinating entropy-related finding is that the pleasure circuit activates with less intensity after each subsequent stimulant dose. A thirsty Cro-Magnon man roaming through the Sahara comes upon a stream and takes a long drink. The sandy water is the best thing he has ever tasted. A thunderstorm of pleasure is flashing inside of his head. He takes another drink. The cold water runs down his throat and seems to spread its coolness throughout his entire body. He takes a third drink. The inside of his mouth is saturated, no longer parched. But after the fourth and fifth slurp, he begins to taste the imperfections. He feels the sand in his teeth and the back of his throat. The water doesn’t seem as cold and refreshing. It doesn’t taste quite so watery. He takes one last drink for good measure and moves on.

A modern corollary is the fancy New York restaurant that only serves small steaks (heresy most everywhere else in America) because, as the restaurateurs say—as if facts mattered when the size of a man’s steak is at question—after the twelfth bite the pallet is so deadened as to render the remaining bites useless. What we call pallet is nothing but the pleasure circuit’s sensors in the mouth.

What fascinates me is that the concept of entropy is imbedded deep in one of the most fundamental processes for how we interpret reality. This must account for the bedrock and universal human psychological/emotional concept of carpe diem, stopping to smell the roses, and the joys of simple pleasures. While the pleasure circuit itself ensured that our ancestors stopped to take that drink and was quenched by it, that they lusted for sex, that they relished the taste of fat and protein and sugar. But the diminishing pleasure return may have taught them to be self-reflective about those brief moments of heightened experience. The loss of pleasure may have started those early humans to think about their emotions, and—a small leap here—to think about their thoughts. This might have been one key to the evolution of human consciousness, the brain in all its self-aware glory.

A thermodynamics question: why did the pleasure circuit have to work this way? Why not have the fiftieth bite of chocolate butter cream cake taste as exquisite as the first? Apart from the answer that the Universe just doesn’t work that way, which we all feel intuitively (what would Heaven be for?), I hazard two interpretations. The pleasure circuit is beholden to the same laws of thermodynamics as anything else. It requires energy to produce that initial burst of pleasure, and it cannot be expected to maintain that any more than you can do an infinite amount of pushups.

A second idea: in order to function in the world, we have to be able to move on, especially from things that provide pleasure. We must learn to take in all substances and experiences in moderation. The fact that pleasure (happiness) doesn’t last, and that shoving that fiftieth forkful into our mouths actually leaves us unsatisfied and unhappy, teaches us not only the necessity of moderation, but the pleasure of moderation. And as has been catalogued on this blog already, moderation is what slows the degradation of energy in our bodies, our environments, or families, our societies.

To write this blog is to realize over and again this fundamental, universal, spookily pre-ancient truth.

Much of the book is also about addiction. Listen to a great interview with Linden on Fresh Air:

http://www.npr.org/2011/06/23/137348338/compass-of-pleasure-why-some-things-feel-so-good

When I began this blog on energy depletion I knew that there would not be any topic that was off-topic, since there is not a single event, practice, belief or thing you can think of that does not epitomize the expenditure of energy, including he act of thought itself. But being an English Major I was especially excited to write about the different ways energy sources and usage is depicted in literature.

How is entropy—especially social entropy—handled by writers?

Let me kick off an Entropy Law summer-reading surfeit with the summer reading novel that inspired me with this idea several years ago. Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.

What happened in Paris in the late 1780s and early 90s is a case study in misspent social energy. The hungering, oppressed masses in so much need of the basics for survival, witnessed the aristocratic few burning up all of France’s resources (milk for crème puffs, firewood to heat mansions, gold leaf wallpaper, in essence the entire economy) for their own needs and pleasures. This drove the commoners into the kind of sane madness that engulfs all societies when energy is likewise misspent. It is the trick of every government—democratic or dictatorship—to either balance the energy expenditure or disguise the imbalance (see Saudi Arabia). The Bastille became a symbol of the fools at the top stealing all the energy and oppressing the people who tried to take a little for themselves. Interesting that by the time the commoners stormed the prison, the government had already gotten smart to its symbolism and moved the convicts out (see Abu Ghraib). The place was mostly empty. But the act of breaking through a government-sanctioned wall also became a symbol, one that was repeated in greater, bloodier proportions (see Lybia, Syria).

The grisly image of the grindstone early in the third book is so horrific that I want to believe Dickens’ was exaggerating, but I secretly don’t want to know that he did, so I haven’t looked up the historical research. It is one of the most arresting images in the novel—perhaps second to the women knitting by the guillotine—but it is central when one is thinking about the social energies pulsing through the people committing the slaughter. The grindstone becomes a kind of engine on which the entire Revolution is run. For the commoners in Paris, the fact that it is spinning becomes reason to sharpen blades on it, and the fact that it is bloody becomes a reason to sharpen blades on it for one particular purpose. The energy that was being channeled into crème puffs and Versailles is being wrested back with each grinding turn.

The key passage for me (and the worldview of this blog) is Chapter VII of the second book, Monsignor in Town. It also happens to be a pair of beautifully constructed sentences:

“The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance upon the Monseigneur. In the outermost room were half a dozen exceptional people who had had, for a few years, some vague misgiving in them that things in general were going rather wrong.”

Does that ring any bells? From global warming denials to pension-budget chicanery, dealing with the effects of real energy depletion is hard work, requiring much cold-eyed sacrifice. It is far easier to cloak yourself in the “leprosy of unreality” and surround yourself with lepers. Until it’s not.

A recent David Brooks column declared that we are living in a progressive era, which he defined as a centralized government, alternately run by technocrats of both parties, spreading its centralizing tentacles into more and more decentralized systems. He suggests that this model has little public support and the public may eventually rebel French-Revolution style.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/opinion/20brooks.html?ref=davidbrooks

Assuming that happens, it is highly likely that whoever would take power in the aftermath would continue along the same centralizing path. America, and increasingly the world, is already fundamentally centralized in physical, social and psychological ways. The centralizing we see in government is a reaction to that reality, not its cause.

The problem is that decentralized institutions do not have decentralized effects—they impact the whole. Diverse financial services are not centrally controlled in this country but their complex interactions are tightly coupled, making financial catastrophes widely felt throughout the economy. Two skyscrapers are knocked down in Manhattan and people in Missouri become terrified.

In following columns Brooks wrote about the partisan theories to cope with this bipartisan reality. Liberals seem to be able to admit that more centralization is the solution, and that the only debate worth having is over how to make government more efficient and fair in the process. Conservatives seem to have a gut reaction against the fundamental centralization in our society and think that decentralizing government, dispersing power to local control, will somehow change the underlying reality. Put this way, I think the liberals are at least being intellectually realist, while the conservatives serve the purpose of putting the breaks on the centralizing apparatus. Not many republicans—there are a few—are recommending restructuring American society to pre-Civil War levels of centralization.

The fundamental truth of American connectivity remains. The result is that Washington becomes more centralized. The forces Democrats to become more activist to keep pace with the perceived needs of the system. It forces Republicans to become more uncomfortable with squaring their ideological position with the reality of governing. This is probably why partisanship has increased. If that is true, Washington may become truly broken and completely unable to function in the coming years no matter what white knight rides into town promising to change how Washington works.

My Dad likes to say that the Peter Principle has come to Washington: government has risen to its own level of incompetence. There is a sense that things have become too complex. And that a little entropy is not only in order, but inevitable.

One day, when I am my Dad’s age, the liberals and conservatives, out of sheer desperation, may come to a grand bargain: decentralizing the country form the bottom up, while sowing incentives that allow people living in the new decentralized America to have good quality of life. But if that happens there wouldn’t be a need for liberals and conservatives…