Star Trek

When I was a kid, I thought I liked science fiction. Then I tried reading it. I realized that I just liked movies where people wore strange clothes and killed each other with futuristic weapons. I began to lose interest in movies like that when I realize that, in any armed conflict, I would almost certainly be killed immediately.

I only watched one episode of Star Trek the Next Generation. The plot involved a teenager in a weird, tight-fitting uniform who had a new girlfriend. He got dating advice from Whoopie Goldberg.

"This is terrible. Why are they friends with the Klingons? Where are the Ju-Jitsu fights? Where are their phasers? Why are there children there?"

I can't believe how popular that crap was.

The old Star Trek was all Oedipal. People were always challenging Captain Kirk for control. I liked the episode where he changed bodies with a woman.

The Emmy Award winning episode, "City on the Edge of Forever"-----Dr McCoy goes back in time and screws up history. Captain Kirk and Mr Spock have to go back in time after him. It seems Dr McCoy saved Joan Collins from getting run over by a car in the 1930s. She's a pacifist. She runs for office and somehow keeps the U.S. out of World War Two.

"Millions will die who did not die before," Mr Spock says.

Although, how did he know? Would an entirely non-violent response have been any worse? Tens of millions of people died in World War Two as it was. Maybe millions of different people would die but the overall death toll would be about the same.

I don't know how a pacifist could have kept the US out of the war anyway. Japan and Germany each declared war on the United States, not the other way around. There were people calling for the US to enter the war and people who opposed it before then, but ultimately, it was Pearl Harbor and the German's inexplicably declaring war that did it.

Germany lost the war at Stalingrad. Their fate was sealed when the Soviets packed their factories onto railroad cars and moved them east, out of their reach. The US and Britain spent most of the war trying to re-establish Britain's control over their empire rather than defeat the Nazis.

The U.S. role in the Pacific was another matter.