WELL, APROPOS OF NOTHING BUT SILLINESS, I was sent the below video recently and for some reason can't stop watching it and laughing like a demented teenager after a loud fart. My only explanation is that in my younger years I used to smoke pot with my roommate and watch TNG all the time. I particularly liked listening to his analysis of the semiotics of race in the Star Trek universe.
He was convinced, as I recall, that the Klingons were Arabs and the Romulans were the Soviet Union. Of course, once the Soviet Union had collapsed the federation could make peace with them. But then, like the return of the repressed, the spectre of communism is never far off and it returned as some kind of Red Cult of Death in the form of the Borg with their identical clothing and the merging of man and machine.
Vulcans were Japanese, representing Asiatic who had gotten their mojo under control and could focus on their rational selves. The Ferengi, meanwhile, were 19th century stereotypes of Jewish merchants. I mean, lookit those guys - they could have been drawn by some racist newspaper cartoonist. In the Deep Space Nine Series we had the Cardassians, who were Israelis and Bajorans who were Palestinians. I didn't buy this particular ethnography one bit. Palestinians are never the poor and oppressed in western mythology - always terrorists and fundamentalists, Jew-haters even. More likely they were Tibetans, made to look cute with those crinkly noses of theirs. Or perhaps Irish - there was definitely something elfin about them.
In any case, the larger picture is that Star Trek is a big outer space, liberal nerd wet dream. The workers are made to disappear - or only appear long enough to be killed in horrible ways. Can you imagine living in a world where the only people are supervisors? Fuck, kill me.
