Showing posts with label Star Trek. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Star Trek. Show all posts

Sunday, September 01, 2024

Profaning the Mothership...

 

Image sources: Pinterest, Mothership Connection Back Cover – Vinyl Distractions, Nichelle Nichols, Lieutenant Uhura of Star Trek, Dies at 89 – New York Times

© August 28, 2024, the Griot Poet 

 

“Conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.”

A literal quote from the previous, and now fifth indictment,

Focused on his role as a “candidate,”

Jack Smith cleverly bypassed the constitutional mulligan given by the Supreme Court,

I used to equate them with religious mullahs.

They’re more like fascist hacks in robes, spitballing.

 

For the first time, an election had been thwarted by a candidate for president,

Staging a coup and insurrection to resist what up to that day had been a “peaceful transition of power.”

The high mark of our democracy was that, unlike Europe, it did not involve wars or bloodshed.

 

January 6, 2021: like 9/11, and Pearl Harbor, never forget!

They’re trying hard to gaslight us into believing it was a tourist visit.

They’re distancing themselves from Project 2025, when they wrote it!

Trying to remove reality and replace it with “alternative facts.”

They’re trying to gaslight us into WHATABOUTISM.

Ask ex-Russian citizens who escaped the gulag how that works!

 

“The Mothership Connection” is one of my favorite songs from Parliament Funkadelic.

 

The fact that it’s in two related indictments,

Profanes the memory suggested by the lyrics:

 

“Well, all right!

“Starchild, Citizens of the Universe, Recording Angels

“We have returned to claim the Pyramids

“Partying on the Mothership

“I am the Mothership Connection

“Getting down in 3-D

“Light year grooving

“Well, all right, if you hear any noise, it ain't nobody but me and the boys

“Getting down, hit it, fellas!”

 

My childhood memories of jamming at house parties have been obliterated.

 

The first influence was surprisingly, Dr. Martin Luther King,

Who talked Nichelle Nichols out of leaving Star Trek after the first season,

His reason was that we needed to see ourselves as surviving into the 23rd Century,

Which means that we made it through the three preceding it.

 

Herman Poole Blount,

Jazz musician, poet, and composer, AKA “Sun Ra”

Inspired Parliament Funkadelic, and Earth, Wind, and Fire.

He taught a course at UC Berkeley called “The Black Man in the Cosmos.”

His college course was the basis for the film “Space is the Place.”

His philosophy would eventually be called “Afro-Futurism,”

Seeing the diaspora survive in the future,

Decolonizing science fiction that was initially influenced by the pseudoscience of eugenics.

The future both H.G. Wells and H.P. Lovecraft envisioned was utopian and whitewashed.

 

Dr. King saw what Star Trek was trying to tell us: we could have a better future, not just with warp drive, but with diversity, equity, and inclusion.

We missed the point that Nyota Uhura, whose name means “Freedom Star” in Swahili, like the North Star followed by Harriet Tubman, and the enslaved escaping to Canada,

Was herself the third-highest officer on a Naval Space Vessel,

If Kirk, Spock, or Scottie weren’t around, Uhura would have the Conn.

After the misogyny that dismissed Majel Barrett as Number One in the series pilot.

The Next Generation suggested women were Admirals,

Which meant they were first Captains,

Admiral Nechayev was Captain Jean Luc Picard and Benjamin Sisko’s boss!

Which means, she wrote their Performance Reviews.

I’ll let the Incels chew on that a bit.

All of this was made possible because,

Lucille Ball saw the future,

And Nichelle Nichols listened to a Civil Rights preacher.

 

“We have returned to claim the Pyramids.”

Cesare Borgia, son of a Pope, inspired Niccolò Machiavelli's political treatise, The Prince.

He was also the image Leonardo DaVinci painted to represent Jesus,

Because previous images looked “too Egyptian.”

They didn’t like his brown visage, so they changed it.

It also helps when you’re starting global trade predicated on human enslavement.

 

Pythagoras studied in Alexandria, Egypt.

“Alexa” AI is named after it.

The center of learning was on the African continent,

Recognized by scholars,

Until the British Empire in the 19th Century created the non-direction, “Middle East,”

Cleverly not associating the nation with the continent.

I, as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson,

Chaff at the notion that ancient civilizations populated by Melanated humans couldn’t build pyramids in Egypt, or Mexico without aliens.

Or build sailing ships to cross the ocean and cross-pollinate knowledge.

Not that there aren’t any,

But why would an advanced civilization travel parsecs to construct a building they could never live in?

 

“Lightyear grooving'”

That doesn’t preclude it,

But blaming it on aliens takes away from Melanated human agency and intelligence.

 

“Conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.”

Suggests a spectrum of mental disorders that has yet to be documented.

 

The two related indictments,

Profane [a] pleasant childhood memory that I would like to reclaim.

And like Dr. King, Star Trek, Sun Ra, Parliament Funkadelic, Earth, Wind, and Fire, Afro-futurism,

I’m working on all of us moving positively forward:

 

Dr. Ruth Ben-Ghiat on her Lucid Substack,

Wrote “Why Joy Is an Effective Anti-Authoritarian Strategy.”

I agree with her,

And not New York Times opinion writer, Paul Healy who said, “Joy is not a strategy.”

Neither was “hope and change.”

 

The strategy I chant to pimp slap the killjoys:

“If you hear any noise, it ain't nobody but the girls and the boys

“Getting down, with the band!”


“When we fight, we win.”

And “we’re not going back!”

Wednesday, June 23, 2021

The Politics of Hyperspace...

© June 23, 2021, the Griot Poet

 

Star Wars and Star Trek:

The latter preceded the former,

Both involved world governments,

And Galaxy-spanning empires,

Superluminal speeds enabling them,

And Deux Ex Machina plot twists,

 

May 25, 1977,

George Lucas gave us

Star Wars,

The original script,

“A New Hope”

Stole the nation’s imagination,

Like “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,”

There were costumes and imitation,

Matinee prices at $2.00,

Gasoline at $0.30 per gallon,

As fans watched it over and over again,

Memorizing each line and lyrics,

The plot started in the fourth chapter,

In the aftermath of a fallen republic,

Star systems, and planets,

Under the boot heel of a malevolent fascist,

Once known as Senator Palpatine,

Now god-emperor,

Elected after his disfigurement,

In a battle with Mace Windu,

Causing the fall of Anakin Skywalker,

And the rise of Darth Vader,

 

Puppeteer of a factional, fake rebellion,

Pumping fear into the Galactic Senate,

Promising “I alone can fix it,”

Orchestrated “order 66,”

Turning clones against the guardians of the republic,

Ending his Jedi opposition,

As a viable option to contest him,

 

In dark, mechanical armor,

The man who was once known as Anakin Skywalker

Existed,

Labored breathing after battling his friend,

Obi-Wan Kenobi,

On the volcanic planet Mustafar,

[Literally], half the man he was,

Succumbing to the siren lies from the dark side of the Force,

 

Scarred beyond recognition,

Or love,

He made the best of losing Padme,

And his twins Luke, and Leia, hidden from him,

Nazi helmet, and lightsaber,

He would destroy the order he once was a member,

“The chosen one” turned against them,

By Palpatine’s lies and deception,

He would replace his self-loathing and regrets with strutting,

His cape billowing and flowing:

He will be feared if he cannot be loved.

 

September 8, 1966,

The debut of a diverse cast,

Skewing the vision piped in,

By “Lost in Space,” “The Invaders”

That the exploration of space would only be white,

Inspiration to Dr. Ronald E. McNair,

First black astronaut from an HBCU,

From North Carolina A&T,

And MIT for his Ph.D. in Laser Physics,

Aggie Pride took flight,

On the Space Shuttle Challenger,

I would meet him after his maiden flight,

Sadly on its second voyage, his and his crew’s demise,

 

Star Trek,

[Was] pitched by Gene Roddenberry,

As “wagon train to the stars,”

Following “cowboy diplomacy,”

Hints that the Federation,

Was keen on colonization,

A selling point for Viacom executives,

Real estate became whole planets,

Territories measured by parsecs,

 

But:

They were more like hippies with starships,

They put on plays, poetry readings, and concerts,

They were STEAM before STEM came in existence,

Their weapons defensive,

Their goals exploration, and understanding,

Surviving a Third World War,

Colonel Green eugenics post-apocalypse,

Xindi bloodshed,

It puts things collectively in perspective for a species:

They shed the prejudices that separated them,

And made near self-annihilation possible,

 

The Emmy winning,

“Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,”

Fifteenth of twenty-four in the third and last season of the Original Series,

Lokai, a political refugee from the planet Cheron,

Half black on one side, and white on the other,

Pursued by a constable from the dominant caste, Bele,

One the mirror image of the other,

Finding each of their people slaughtered one another,

They beamed down to finish the extermination,

 

Forlorn, Lt. Uhura asks if their hate is all they ever had. Kirk ruefully says no...but it is all they have left.

 

The episode premiered nine months after the assassination,

Of its number one fan: Dr. Martin Luther King,

Apropos as that one year later,

1969 was the hippie anthem “Dawning of the Age of Aquarius,”

By the Fifth Dimension,

 

Star Wars and Star [Trek] were both visions and warning:

Superluminal speeds are unlikely,

Nor are Deux Ex Machina Vulcans,

Nor benevolent wielders of “Force lightning,”

Descending to save us,

From runaway greenhouse gases,

From plastics decaying twenty-to-five-hundred years consumed by tortoise and dolphins,

From billionaires offshoring assets and gaslighting,

From social media making all of us the product,

From “mutually assured destruction” nuclear madness,

Utopia is hard, but its opposite only requires time, apathy, and Entropy,

Let’s not be like planet Cheron:

Let’s save [US]!

Sunday, December 13, 2020

Reality-Truth...

Leonard Nimoy as Spock from “Amok Time,” TOS, first aired September 15, 1967


 © 13 December 2020, the Griot Poet


It is defined as “reality-truth” in Vulcan religion/philosophy, emotional self-control methods, and pacifism teachings. The term “o’thia” is also known simply as logic.

 

From: The Original Star Trek, created by Gene Roddenberry, See TOS novel: Spock’s World, by Diane Duane.

 

The fictional Vulcans are not without emotion,

It’s just that they watched their civilization,

Descend into tribal warfare, and ruin,

 

Sarek made his people face o’thia: “reality-truth,”

Probably ignored at first,

Until the reality of

 

Neutron bombs ripped relativistic particles,

Through Vulcan copper green blood, and flesh,

Cynically leaving idols and buildings,

Forging valleys filling with calcified dry bones,

 

Vulcan women, men, and children,

Ponn Farr – the season of “mad loving” suspended,

For last rite ceremonies,

 

Enough!

 

Experience isn’t the best teacher:

Other people’s experiences are the best teachers,

Even if those people are fictional,

Gene Roddenberry tried to envision,

 

At least between a world’s citizens,

There would be cooperation: peace.

Wars over territories would cease,

Passions and irrational emotions moderated with o’thia: reality-truth, logic,

 

Not the fantasy of “reality TV,”

That puts a two-bit tweeting conman,

In charge of the nuclear triad,

And a mad, personally cult led by a psychopath,

 

We are a country in the aftermath of being gaslighted by a man his clinical psychologist niece says is so delusional, he can gaslight himself.

Whatever he says in a given instance is “true” at that moment,

As truth has become fiction,

To a sizable faction,

Of the United States electorate,

And their elected representatives,

Violating section III of The Fourteenth Amendment,

One-hundred, twenty-six in the House of Representatives,

Ken Paxton, and seventeen other attorneys general,

Co-signed sedition:

 

The 14th Amendment, Section III:

 

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

 

Let us learn from this experience,

If The Constitution is our founding document,

Why not try following it?

Remove the perpetrators of this sedition from the American experiment,

 

Artemis is our next “small step,”

Before we can cooperate to build relativistic starships,

 

It would guarantee

Our survival as a species:

It would be o’thia - reality-truth: logic.

 

“Wakanda will no longer watch from the shadows. We can not. We must not. We will work to be an example of how we, as brothers and sisters on this earth, should treat each other. Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis, the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe.” Chadwick Boseman as King T’Challa in the movie Black Panther, Rest In Power.