Complaint Containment

I grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation.

As I’m sure I’ll go into in another post, my family’s German-American.

I’ve tried to explain how I think this affects them and me before, but people who aren’t motivated by a kind of interpretive generosity say things like, “My family’s German-American, too, but they’re not like that.”

I haven’t really delved into the genealogy yet, but based on a really superficial search of ancestry.com and having heard my family’s oral history growing up, it appears both sides of my family immigrated from what was then eastern Prussia in what’s now Poland¹ in or by the 1890s. I’m not sure when they started replacing what the book Becoming Old Stock, which is about German-Americans being forcibly assimilated in Philadelphia as the result of World War I, would call their Deutschtum or Germanness and family dynamics with progressive politics, but I assume it was either at that time, during the Great Depression, or around the time of the Civil Rights movement. NOTE: German-Americans were overwhelmingly on the side of the Union in the Civil War, being that they identified the Confederacy with the landed aristocracy they immigrated to get away from and, their country of origin undergoing a very stringent union, their new country’s breaking up didn’t make sense to them. The point I’m making is I think there’s a German-American reason both sides of my family were very, like, progressive and pro-immigration and things, at least for white small-towners and eventual suburbanites or whatever.

So, being that Star Trek is all about tolerance and progress and stuff, it’s not a surprise to me that my family promoted Star Trek.² There’s a lot I think my German-American family or at least grandparents in particular did to prove they weren’t like the Nazis.

Growing up watching ST:TNG and, when I was that young, never really asking myself why I did anything, I never really asked myself why I liked it. I think it’s a cognitive error for people to feel completely justified in doing things just because they like them, i.e. not to ask themselves why they do things they like.³ Looking back on it now, my assumption is that… well, I’m ostensibly a cisman and my dad introduced me to it, but, additionally, it’s a prominent feature of the show that there’s no interpersonal conflict among the main characters; they’re supposed to be, as a society, evolved beyond that kind of thing. I think that was soothing as, as I’m sure I’ll go into in another post, my parents’ relationship was marked by a great deal of interpersonal conflict (which, to their credit, only very rarely reached the level of any kind of physical conflict).

There’s a lot of idealism in Star Trek.⁴ As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to wonder if it’s too much. As I mentioned in another post, I don’t like the idea of escapism a lot. Gene Roddenberry, the original creator of Star Trek, was of my grandparents’ generation. He experienced the Great Depression, World War II, and the post-war economic boom. I’m sure someone who experiences that kind of scarcity and abundance, struggle and conflict, and then success and abundance has good reason to be hopeful, being able to recall a time when either they might have been hopeless or they at least experienced good reasons to have a hard time keeping hope alive and then, apparently, overcoming it. I just think, like in that movie 24 Hour Party People, history is more of a wheel.

Like, I think I said it in that other post I referred to, but, like, the same science that proves global warming is happening makes global warming possible and that makes nuclear power possible makes nuclear bombs possible. I don’t think the evidence for human nature through the archeological or written records indicates something like the Federation, the “protagonist” interplanetary government body, possible.

At the time of this writing, I’ve been meaning to rewatch an old anime series I haven’t seen in 20 years by a… if I recall, Satoshi Koh, who’s somebody in anime, Paranoia Agent. One of the reasons I remember liking it so much is that it admits bad vibes exist. For a present example, i.e. why I bring it up, is there’s a point at which one of the characters, who, if I recall, is a nut, invades a family’s home and assaults them, all the while obsessively thinking of and pretending to be the masked hero of comic books he likes, imagining himself defeating villains as the family tries to fight him off.

That kind of thing is all too common.

I may write about it in another post, but it’s the kind of thing the movie Idiocracy and the miniseries Chernobyl made me think about: these stories call upon us to do more than sit on ass and watch them. To the extent you watch Idiocracy and feel smart or watch Chernobyl and feel, y’know, apolitical or whatever, you’re not doing what the stories are warning you against.

People talk about tech bros or whoever building “the Torment Nexus from the renowned science fiction work, Don’t Build the Torment Nexus,” and we’re all supposed to just shut our brains of and hop on their side, but then people kind of do the same thing in a less impactful way themselves, feeling ritualistically clean and pure because they’ve imagined way, way up in their heads that they’re the Federation.

Like, I, definitely, feel I was influenced in my youth by the Federation (or the TRUE Federation) always being depicted as always using intense physical violence only in self-defense. I think it’s a thing that that makes people feel justified in their interpersonal aggression elsewhere.

1. A high school friend whom I’ll probably write (tastefully) about in another post once told me that this makes me Polish and not German; while, according to my mom’s DNA test, I have some eastern European ancestry, the people in my family who immigrated lived in the country of Germany, spoke German, and considered themselves German. I imagine my distant family who stayed in Germany moved when Germany’s border moved as they were wont to do. ↩︎
2. Yes, I suppose if your family is German-American and didn’t like Star Trek, that would still count. I’m not saying all German-Americans are logically necessarily manufactured to certain progressive and tolerant specifications; I’m saying I think there are German-American things about my German-American family’s history that lent themselves to the state of affairs I’m describing. ↩︎
3. I’m sure it’s another post I’ll make about my relationship with my father that his shtick of refusing to consider whether anyone likes things at all as a criteria whether or not to do them, i.e. his being hostile to people liking things, isn’t the move, either. ↩︎
4. Or at least was; newer series have things I’ve heard of like, if I have it right, “The Burn,” where, some time in the future, the crystals that are said to power the ships all blow up and stop working one day, bringing the interplanetary social, political, economic, etc. life to a standstill. ↩︎