RALEIGH – Well, it’s been a nice run. But today will be my last day.
No, don’t get your hopes up. What I mean is that today is the last day I will give my Daily Journal column a title identical or similar to the title of an episode of the original Star Trek television series.
As many CJ Online readers have noticed, I’ve been using Star Trek episodes to name all my columns for nearly two months. I began on June 29 with “Where No Gov Has Gone Before,” a play on the title of the second Trek pilot “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” featuring guest star M*A*S*H’s Hot Lips Houlihan (Sally Kellerman) and the weird dude from 2001: A Space Odyssey (Gary Lockwood). Since then, every fresh Daily Journal and most of the repeats have borne a Trek title in one form or another.
I guess at this point I am obliged to explain myself, if I can.
Well, for starters the spectacular new Star Trek film out this summer inspired me to rediscover elements of Trek lore that I hadn’t seen or read in years if not decades – and to which my sons had in most cases never been exposed.
It’s been a very Treky summer at the Hood household, what with taping the newly remastered episodes of the Original Series, piloting sleek Klingon battlecruisers in dogfights against lumbering Gorn dreadnoughts in the Star Fleet Battles computer game, and watching Next Generation and Enterprise reruns on the indispensable Sci-Fi Channel (which in midsummer changed its name to the ludicrous SyFy).
Admittedly, that’s a poor excuse for my excursion into excessive entitlement. Please let me offer another one. The challenge of it all was, well, fascinating. I did something similar to myself this spring as a regular blogger at National Review Online’s The Corner, when I decided to title all of my blog posts with excerpts from song lyrics by Neal Peart of Rush. In that case, as in this one, many readers immediately caught on to the gimmick and recommended increasingly obscure lyrics, daring me to come up with a way to quote them.
Presto – we had fun. But in the end, I had to ask the readers to hold their fire.
Still waiting for a persuasive explanation? Well, then, I’m not sure I can give you one. The fact is that, quite against my better judgment sometimes, I’ve been a captive of Star Trek in all its forms since I first glimpsed Saturday afternoon reruns of the Original Series on my great uncle’s snowy black-and-white television in the mid-1970s. As I later wrote for National Review, my fascination has extended beyond escapism, the Shatner method of scenery-chewing, and an appreciation of space-hippie music:
When serious people seek to draw serious lessons from a goofy sci-fi series of the 1960s and its pop-culture progeny, please consider cutting them a little slack. For one thing, they may not be able to help themselves. For another, Trek fans worldwide number in the many hundreds of millions. I’m a writer, not a sociologist, but even I can see that there might well be significant insights about human behavior and modern society to be gleaned from a cross-cultural phenomenon so pervasive.
For me, the great lesson of Trek — both internal and external to the stories themselves — is the Law of Unintended Consequences. A basic insight of the social sciences, it refers to the fact that human actions often yield results far different from the intentions, or even the preferences, of the actor. Unintended consequences are evident within all sorts of institutions, from business and government to church organizations, art forms, and personal relationships. In public policy, we talk about them routinely. Minimum-wage laws create unemployment among the least-skilled workers. Rent control destroys affordable housing. Above a certain rate, tax increases can reduce government revenue by reducing reported incomes and investment. And so on.
No matter what flavor of Trek you imbibe, you can’t help swallowing story after story about unintended consequences. It’s one of the stock plots (I’m a policy wonk, not a Hollywood scriptwriter, but I know formulaic television when I see it).
So if my two-month mission of Trek titles has been so rewarding, why am I calling it quits? Because I have run out of feasible entries. Try as I might, I couldn’t think of a way of using the likes of “The Corbomite Maneuver” or “The Trouble With Tribbles” to title a column on North Carolina politics with even a semblance of rhetorical grace.
Now, where’s that list of Deep Space Nine episode titles. . .
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation