If this was the 23rd Century we would have long ago sent out an interplanetary distress call in our battle with Covid-19. With any luck the USS Enterprise would pick up the distress call and before the opening credits: Space the Final Frontier where spoken Captain Kirk or maybe Captain Picard and crew would be moving at warp speed to the rescue.
I have always been a Captain Kirk fan. I think he had more of hands-on approach to crises management. He knew the Klingons were not just going to go away and took appropriate measures in dealing with them. He could, along with Mr. Spock’s cool logic and Dr. McCoy’s prickly ethics, get to the root of the problem. It could be dealing with Klingons trying to take over a peaceful planet or getting some mining operation open that’s plagued with a rock-eating creature that’s wreaking havoc deep the mine. I particularly liked that episode because Dr. McCoy heals the injured creature, a Horta, with a bag of Portland cement. A spaceship that is a ready mix plant and can make cement. What a time to be alive.
Picard on the other hand was more unflappable, more refined—a tea drinker—and specifically not an American. Picard had a good crew, too. Number One, a big tough, tow-the-line Alaskan, who was really number two to Picard. And then there was Data a never tiring android with just about unlimited capabilities. Like Kirk, Picard was surrounded with the best ship and crew in the galaxy. The USS Enterprise never had to be made great again. They faced some of the same adversaries as Kirk: Klingons and Romulans. But, as the Federation moved further out into space they came into contact with the Borg, an alien group of cybermetric beings that injected people with nanoprobes that assimilated them into their “collective.”
But this is not the 23rd Century, and we have no collective injecting us with nanoprobes to protect us collectively against the Covid. However, the coronavirus pandemic has been steadily moving across the Earth for almost 10 months or so. Despite beliefs and pontifications that it will miraculously disappear, it seems to be finding a nice home in the here and now. The argument could be made as to which will disappear first: the Covid or the glaciers. Meanwhile, we have hurricanes and typhoons spinning like gyros across the ocean all the while California and the West are burning. Last year it was Australia that was on fire. The only thing we seem to be lacking right now is swarms of locusts or frogs.
And although I am not a doctor or a clinical psychologist I think the pandemic has affected not only our bodies but our psyche. It makes me wonder are we moving into end times or are we players in somebody’s bad reality show gone off the rails. It harkens to Shakespeare’s all the world’s a stage. I lean towards a bad reality show for obvious reasons. I think the end times are inevitable and are non negotiable. Just look at all the fossils we have collected in our time of creatures who roamed, swam and flew on the Earth. Will some future creatures or aliens hear rumors of our long ago civilization that ruled the planet for maybe 50,000 years. Will they begin looking for the lost cities of New York, Beijing or London for their buried treasures?
But as I said, I tend to believe that we are on toxic reality show. It appears a lot more manageable than the end of world. The problem is this reality show is like a bad dream that just will not go away. It is melding into our present day collective consciousness, warping it to a point where we are debating the merits of wearing masks and underwear. It has us looking back into the past and how to interpret history with conflicting storylines flying off into space every which way. That however, is a whole other container of smelly rotten eggs that has us stuttering about what is what.
As a nation we have become psychotic about just about everything. Ask more than two people about anything and we have good chance (maybe Mr. Spock or Data could give us the odds) that we will get a variety of absurd delusional answers based on hallucinations. Numerous conspiracy theories are running rampant. Stories of pizza eating, blood drinking pedophiles. You cannot fabricate this stuff. As Hall of Fame manager Casey Stengel said: “You can look it up.”
All of this gets compounded when we throw in a copious amounts of neurosis with a strong does of deep state swirling around. We take our beliefs from yahoos behind a mikes ranting away with bulging neck veins and eyes ready to burst out of their sockets as if their asses were on fire; their brains ready to ooze out their ears like hot lava down a volcano. Giving a false belief, like Chicken Little, the person who is running around and yammering the most has to be right. We do not know what is up or down; or if the sky is actually falling. It is hard to figure out what the fraze is going on now. It is no wonder we cannot figure out the past.
The problem is that this sort of thinking is moving faster than the Covid. We have armed civilians patrolling state capitals and city streets killing fellow demonstrating citizens. As if the shotgun, or in this case the assault rifle will save us. Cops choking and repeatedly shooting unarmed Black men in the back. Police are out in military regalia as if they are on the streets of Fallujah instead of Kenosha acting as if they are hunting down terrorists instead of protecting property while people exercise a First Amendment right to assemble.
And to prove further you cannot make this stuff up, security forces in Washington DC were talking about confronting demonstrators using some sort of heat ray (maybe the heat ray can be with a dash of bleach that can be used against the coronavirus). According to NPR the military was looking into “a Long Range Acoustic Device, a kind of sound cannon known as an LRAD, and a device called the Active Denial System, or ADS (which I think has already been used on a large portion of our populations) …It uses millimeter wave technology essentially to heat the skin of people targeted by its invisible ray.” This sounds similar to Godzilla’s “atomic breath” pumping out some sort or toxic radioactive beam. If it works on protesters maybe we can commercialize it so I can use it on the raccoons that keep getting in my trash.
At the rate 2020 is playing out, I am not sure if we are going to make it to the 23rd Century. The original Star Trek series was canceled after three years. Star Trek the Next Generation ran for seven. We have a 74 year old president looking for four my years, and even has suggested another four after that if he wins. These would make him close to beyond 80 years old. Captain Kirk disappeared in a energy anomaly called the Nexus at the age of 60. Shakespeare wrote “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and entrances…” I think it is time for some of these people to just disappear or at least be pushed off the stage. I am not sure if we can take four more years of this current reality show. It is time to start streaming something else.
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