Views from Crestmont Drive

• Follow-up to yesterday’s topic about utopias and dystopias, and Star Trek;
• How Trump and Vance have no idea about the reasons for Obamacare;
• Robert Reich on how Trump appeals to base hatefulness;
• Charles M. Blow on Trump’s bigger agenda;
• And David Lay Williams appeals to Rousseau to explain Trump.

A follow-on to yesterday’s topic. About those dreams of utopias. At the risk yet again of oversimplifying a vast literature on no doubt complex and subtle themes, very roughly one might align utopias with democracies, egalitarianism, justice, and being ‘woke’; and dystopias with tribal values and demonization of other ‘tribes’ and being ‘anti-woke’. It all boils down to different psychological takes on how the world should be. That range will likely never change. (And in ways we can only dimly imagine, such diversity could well be beneficial for the long-term survival of the species.)

Star Trek, at its beginning, was a kind of utopia. Gene Roddenberry, the show’s creator, explicitly laid out a premise in which the ancient conflicts of the past (meaning the 20th century) had been overcome, and peace and understanding (this was the ’60s) ruled over all, even among some of the alien civilizations the Enterprise encountered. From the beginning writers complained that lack of conflict between characters made stories difficult to write. And over the decades, as the movies were made and subsequent TV series were produced, Roddenberry’s vision got pretty watered down. Even today, you see references to this or that episode in one of the series as one that “Gene Roddenberry would have hated.” Well, that’s narrative drift for you. The same thing happens in every franchise. Thus the sympathetic creature created by Dr. Frankenstein became a rote monster in virtually all the movies and sequels. And so on. Another topic.

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Now to cover a batch of the past few days’ media links.

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