Last Battlefield...

“Last Battlefield,” 47 years later, StarTrek.com, January 10, 2016

© October 23, 2023, the Griot Poet 

 

January 10, 1969,

“Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” premiered in,

The third and last season of the Star Trek original series,

Arguably, Trek is at its best, or WAY too simplistic and heavy-handed.

 

The premise:

Bele, a constable from the planet of Cheron, pursued a political dissident named Lokai,

Lokai’s people were the pariahs of Cheron‘s planetary caste system:

 

Bele, the “superior race,” was black on the right side of his body and face.

Lokai, the despised, was black on the left side, his mirror image.

 

Science Officer Spock logically postulated that they descended from a monochromatic common ancestor.

 

“Change is the essential process of all existence” is still one of the most classic lines Leonard Nimoy, the grandson of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants fleeing the Nazi pogroms, in character, uttered.

 

Both men scoffed and tried to kill each other with their pyrotechnical powers,

They put the Enterprise in jeopardy of destruction.

 

The faster-than-light chase had been long: 50,000 years of anger, animosity, bitterness, hatred,

Based on a duo-chromatic caste system,

Predating humanity becoming a spacefaring species,

They had been at war since we emerged from the caves.

 

The powerful beings hijacked the Enterprise, forcing it off course in orbit to Cheron,

 

Finding it a lifeless planet, radiated buildings, charred surfaces and bodies, climate utterly disrupted, and no sentient beings to convene a trial or mount a defense.

 

The inevitable consequence of the Hatfield and McCoy feuds is mutually assured destruction.

 

Bele and Lokai, the last beings of their kind, beamed down to complete the genocide.

*****

 

January 10, 1969,

“Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” premiered in,

The third and last season of the Star Trek original series,

 

Seven months after the assassination of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Sr.,

Nine months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,

One year and seven months after the Six Day War between Israel versus Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, the only one since that Israel arguably “won.”

 

Whether you believe scripture,

Israelis and Palestinians are the descendants of a common ancestor.

Their religions are monotheistic, 

They are imago alterius of one another,

They are kindred.

They are sisters and brothers.

Trying to kill each other with physical pyrotechnics,

Fighting a duel that started thousands of years ago.

 

Which is the chosen nation?

Which is the child of promise?

Which is the more excellent sacrifice, Cain’s or Abel’s?

 

Cain and Abel. Brahman and Dalit. German and Jew. Catholic and Protestant. Hutu and Tutsi. Ukrainian and Russian. Ishmael and Isaac. “Black” and “White” and all shades in between America created for its racial hierarchy.

 

Quoting a Facebook meme:

 

“We were all humans until:

“Religion separated us.

“Politics divided us.

“Wealth classified us.

“And race disconnected us.”

 

All inhabitants of the same planet,

All members of the same human family,

 

What will it matter?

 

How will we call this “The Holy Lands” if you reduce it to ashes and cinders?

 

An example of negative impacts:

The wholesale slaughter of Native Americans changed the climate of the planet!

 

Source: https://www.sciencealert.com/new-study-says-europeans-killed-so-many-indigenous-americans-the-planet-cooled-down

 

What would the departure of Israel and Palestine trigger?

Know this: World War Three will have no sequel.

 

I figure that the only resolution is a two-state solution,

Or a 50-50 framework for shared powers of an egalitarian representative government.

 

News flash: NO ONE is going to like it!

It’s called compromise: What you should have learned in kindergarten.

 

But returning lands seized would look and sound a LOT like reparations,

Which would have repercussions in the United States’ hierarchical system of government.

 

England, France, and other European nations would have to return their mineral wealth to the nations and peoples on the African/Akebulan continent.

 

Exodus 11:2 states:

The Hebrews left captivity after 400 years carrying Egypt’s gold, silver and jewels on their backs.

 

Star Trek’s self-proclaimed number one fan said: “The choice today is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Last lines of the last act of “Battlefield”:

 

SULU: But their planet’s dead. Does it matter now which one’s right? 
SPOCK: Not to Lokai and Bele. All that matters to them is their hate. 
UHURA: Do you suppose that’s all they ever had, sir? 
KIRK: (Ruefully) No, but that’s all they have left. Warp factor two, Mister Sulu. Set course for Starbase Four.

Source: http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/70.htm

Two James'...

Bond: https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a34540639/sean-connery-eulogy-james-bond-action-hero/

Kirk: https://treknews.net/2017/05/06/star-trek-tng-type-i-phaser/captain-kirk-star-trek-phaser/

© June 26, 2023, the Griot Poet

 

James Bond,

And James T. Kirk:

 

The name James is the English translation of the Latin name Iacomus, derived from the New Testament Greek form of the Hebrew name Ya’aqov (Jacob), which means supplanter, substitute, or trickster.

 

Source: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/08/14/james-the-meaning-origin-and-other-facts-about-the-name_n_7329710.html

 

Two creatures of Cold War literary fiction,

The 1960s were poised between utopian hope and mutually assured destruction.

 

“Bond, James Bond,”

Was the literary child of Ian Fleming,

A writer for Reuters,

A correspondent assigned to Moscow,

He was a promiscuous Naval officer,

Working with MI6 during the “Great War,”

Later, finding itself WWII’s prequel,

He went on dangerous missions for the Queen and country,

He was helped with gadgets by his creative inventor friend, Quincy (“Q” in literature).

 

We can assume that James Bond replaced the previous 007, as the number is not special, just an assigned placeholder in Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

 

James T. Kirk,

The “T” was for Tiberius.

Tiberius was the name of the second Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus,

Gene Roddenberry pitched a “wagon train to the stars,”

To Lucille Ball and Desilu Productions,

Captain Pike was fine,

So was Science Officer Spock,

But his “Number One,” Umma, a woman,

As the second-in-command of a starship, a naval vessel, had to be reworked,

It was the “age of Aquarius” sixties, and sexism still existed.

 

Pike was out,

Spock stayed.

Majel Barrett was demoted to Nurse Chapel,

To be second in a starship sickbay to the curmudgeon, Bones McCoy,

And the big chair on the bridge inhabited by Captain James T. Kirk.

This James supplanted Christopher.

They added Lieutenant Nyota Uhura (Swahili: “Freedom Star”) without stating the Communications Officer was third in command.

 

Both James had swashbuckling swagger:

One had machine guns, the other had phasers,

Both were promiscuous with the ladies,

One had lovers on every continent, the other expanded to parsecs,

Both were dedicated to the ideals of their respective governments,

The British Empire was still a thing, and a United Earth workshopped “Federation” to mask their ambitions and expansion in space.

 

In their fictional universes,

SPECTRE: Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion,

 

It was a metaphor for the KGB: Committee for State Security, the foreign intelligence and domestic security agency of the Soviet Union,

 

It was a sleight-of-hand by screenwriters,

Commenting on the Cold War while not making it nuclear hot!

 

The Klingons were [clearly] the Russians,

Gruff, warlike, and unreasonable,

Twenty-four houses that were warring factions,

A metaphor for eleven time zones and Soviet satellites.

They would start a brawl over their equivalent of selecting the wrong station with a television remote,

They found it better to drop their rocks and form a government,

Colonizing and conquering other planets at sub-light,

Until they stole warp technology from the Romulans,

Upgrading from sleeper ships to birds of prey,

 

The Federation was us,

After WWIII, preambled by The Eugenics Wars in the 1990s by Khan Noonian Singh,

And his mother’s augmented race of supermen,

Translated from the German Übermensch,

The illusion of perfection that the Nazis preferred.

Spock said, “Superior ability breeds superior ambition,”

Probably recalling the neutron bomb devastation on Vulcan.

The “supermen” devastated our planet.

They toppled our respective governments,

After creating a collective, radiated mess,

They fled on the Sleeper Ship, The SS Botany Bay,

Escaping summary judgment for their crimes against humanity.

 

After the Phoenix flight of Zephram Cochran,

After the Deus ex Machina discovery by the Vulcans,

The remainder of humanity discovered,

Boarders were bullshit,

So were the hierarchies and gaslighting that formed them.

Now, scientifically advanced and logical,

Only a unified humanity could survive, reverse climate change, and build starships.

 

And we lived in these live-action, cartoon universes,

Poised between yet unimagined utopia and the real politick of mutually assured destruction.

Cheering the swashbuckling supplanters:

Bond. James Bond.

And James T. Kirk.

 

And for our species’ continuance,

I am hoping that someone like them exists.