Two anniversaries today demonstrate the fickle nature of the pop charts. This is the number one song today in 1960:
Three years later, the Kingsmen released “Louie Louie.” Some radio stations refused to play it because they claimed it was obscene. Which is ridiculous, because the lyrics were not obscene, merely incomprehensible:
Today in 1969, while the Beatles were wrapping up work on “Abbey Road,” they shot the album cover:
Matt Kittle sat through the entirety of the Assembly committee hearing on the proposed Foxconn incentive package so you didn’t have to:
We’re ready.
That was the unified message of dozens of public and private-sector officials – from Kenosha to Wausau – in testimony Thursday before the Assembly committee leading legislation on a $3 billion state incentives package for the “once-in-a-century” Foxconn Technology Group economic development proposal.
“Ladies and gentlemen, close this deal. Make it happen,” urged Tom Christensen, administrator of the Racine County village of Caledonia, which could directly benefit from Foxconn’s plan to build a $10 billion liquid crystal display manufacturing campus in southeast Wisconsin.
Waves of supporters testified before the Assembly Committee on Jobs and the Economy during an all-day hearing that spanned deep into Thursday night.
There were critics to be sure, including the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters and a “cannabis activist” who urged the committee to ditch Foxconn and subsidize the pot industry instead.
But the vast majority of those who testified laid out myriad reasons why they believe Foxconn would transform Wisconsin’s economy and why the state must act quickly to make it happen.
“The time to worry about Foxconn leaving is now,” said Tom Still, president of the Wisconsin Technology Council. “If this process takes too long, now is when they will leave. They will not leave after they’ve invested $10 billion.”
Still has forgotten more about business in this state than most people know, including most of the people whose comments you are about to read.
The economic impact figures command attention.
Secretary of Administration Scott Neitzel testified about the 10,000 construction workers who would be employed over the next four years, with an estimated $5.7 billion spent on construction over the period and an annual $1.4 billion spent in the supply chain. Neitzel also talked about the intangible human factors – personal connections formed during the negotiation process – that helped make the deal possible.
Tim Sheehy, president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, noted the estimated $15 billion in payroll over 15 years that Foxconn could bring to Wisconsin.
“I think that’s a pretty good return on investment,” Sheehy told committee members, noting the $1.5 billion the state would offer in job creation-based tax credits.
Wisconsin’s higher education community testified to what has been described as the “brain gain” the Foxconn project would foster.
“Foxconn would help keep these highly educated graduates in Wisconsin,” University of Wisconsin System President Ray Cross testified.
Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou and Gov. Scott Walker have said Wisconsin universities and tech schools and the “talent pipeline” they create are a strong selling point for Foxconn’s decision to build its first high-tech manufacturing plant in North America.
While gushing at the potential, higher ed leaders took the opportunity to remind lawmakers that colleges and tech schools are going to require more money to create the programs and facilities needed to turn out the engineers and skilled technicians necessary to feed a massive workforce.
Asked if the university system would need more funding in this budget, Cross said now’s the time to make investments that will pay off in a few years.
“It takes us a while to turn a big aircraft carrier,” he said of the UW System.
Local government officials in Kenosha and Racine counties were unified in their support for an unprecedented economic development project expected to be located in their backyard. But they, too, urged the state to come up with the funding they’ll need to get Foxconn off the ground.
Kenosha County and city officials said the local governments involved should be included in any “clawback” provisions to recoup costs should the deal go bad. And they asked for changes to the tax incremental finance laws to include public buildings, such as fire and police stations. Foxconn isn’t merely building a plant; it’s constructing a city unto itself, to be situated on some 20 million square feet and populated by thousands of employees.
The bill puts state taxpayers on the hook for local development costs under a “Moral Obligation Pledge.” The Legislature would, if called upon to do so, pay up to 40 percent of the principal and interest of a local government’s obligations.
The deal, as written, would include $1.5 billion in tax credits, in return for creating 13,000 jobs. Payroll tax credits would be distributed on full-time jobs paying between $30,000 and $100,000 per year. Another $1.35 billion in tax credits would help ease the company’s capital costs. And $150 million in sales and use tax credits could be drawn on purchases of building materials, supplies and equipment used in the construction of the complex.
Neitzel and others who helped craft the incentives package assert it’s a “pay-as-you-grow” proposal, meaning Foxconn wouldn’t be able to collect on the tax benefits until they invest in capital – human and structural.
But critics insist there are better things Wisconsin could spend $3 billion on.
Robert Kraig, executive director of the left-wing Citizen Action Wisconsin, asserts that health care, education, or clean energy would create significantly more jobs than Foxconn’s development plan. Of course, no other Fortune 500 company (Foxconn is #27) offered to transform Wisconsin’s economy.
Kraig, in his usual bombastic way, hammered the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., the agency charged with administering much of the economic development package. WEDC does indeed have a troubled past, particularly in tracking incentives and holding wayward firms accountable. Kraig said putting WEDC in charge of the incentives package is a “scandal waiting to happen.”
Citizens Action is a big advocate of expanded welfare benefits and other liberal causes.
“We often hear that we don’t have the resources to invest in health care and higher education, but when a multi-national company comes knocking we find $3 billion for them,” Kraig said.
Proponents of the bill say that kind of thinking is disingenuous at best. The return on investment, they say, is even more significant than the billions of dollars Foxconn would bring to Wisconsin.
“We could go from flyover to destination state pretty quickly because of this,” Still, of the technology council said.
Here’s the thing Kraig and other critics fail to grasp. There is no money available for tax incentives of any sort if Foxconn isn’t coming here. The only reason those tax incentives are worth doing is if Foxconn comes to this state. No Foxconn, no Foxconn tax incentives, and therefore no, at minimum, $170 million of annual payroll, for beginners.
Opponents testified that they fear the process is moving too fast. The Assembly introduced the bill Tuesday, scheduled a hearing two days later, and the Jobs and Economy Committee could vote on whether to move the bill along by early next week. There are, however, several more steps in the legislative process, not the least of which is action from the traditionally more deliberative Senate.
Mark Hogan, secretary and CEO of WEDC, said it’s important to secure passage by the end of September in order to meet Foxconn’s aggressive construction and production schedule.
“Foxconn is ready to go,” he said. “They would like to be hiring for some operations without even having construction in place.”
Environmentalists spoke in opposition to the bill’s provisions exempting some regulatory requirements from the project. The project loosens permit requirements involving wetlands and environmental impact statements, although the Department of Natural Resources testified that the bill only streamlines the regulatory process and limits duplication. The federal environmental requirements would be as rigorous as always, according to state agents.
But Jennifer Giegerich, of the Wisconsin League of Conservation voters, testified that her organization is concerned about the removal of wetlands, even though Foxconn would be required to replace 2 acres of wetlands for every acre it disrupts.
“We want to make sure our economy is as healthy as our air and our streams,” Giegerich said.
Madison resident Tammy Wood voiced a number of misgivings about the bill. Principally, Wood told the committee the state should be investing in a higher calling.
She said Wisconsin should put its money on pot, not Foxconn. Wood, vice chairwoman of the Progressive Caucus of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, pointed to places like Colorado and the booming legal marijuana market.
“The cannabis industry is set to employ more people by 2020 than manufacturing,” Wood said, adding that many of the jobs are so easy kindergarten kids could work in the cannabis industry – although she says she doesn’t believe in child labor.
“I know you’re passionate, but if we could stick to the bill and not the cannabis industry,” state Rep. Adam Neylon (R-Pewaukee), chairman of the Jobs and Economy Committee, urged Wood.
Reefer madness aside, supporters of the incentives package insist the time is now to positively affect Wisconsin’s economic future for generations to come.
The Foxconn deal “will provide significant dividends to the state of Wisconsin for years to come,” Neitzel said.
Even those who are supporters of legalization or at least decriminalization should turn a highly skeptical eye on promises of waves of legal marijuana money. There is, you may note, no Democratic legislative leader, let alone Republican legislator, willing to take on the cause of legal pot.
As I wrote last week, a few Democrats, but not very many, have not engaged in knee-jerk condemnation. Another has sort of modified his stance, as James Wigderson reports:
Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, a possible candidate for governor, is walking the tightrope on the Foxconn development. On the one hand, Soglin is making it clear he’s opposed to the deal by calling it “over the top.”
“I’m fearful if that becomes the standard for job creation in Wisconsin, the whole state will suffer,” Soglin said according to the Wisconsin State Journal. Soglin said an incentive package of $600 million to $1.2 billion would be “more in line with national standards.”
On Facebook, Soglin has been more vocal against the deal, posting seven articles opposed to the Foxconn deal with misleading information. Our favorite is the one that says in a quote highlighted by Soglin, “This isn’t even cost-effective socialism.” Like Soglin’s favorite country, Cuba?
Commenting on one article, Soglin wrote:
Imagine 100’s of millions of dollars going to public schools, the UW, infrastructure like high speed internet. Imagine all the people with all the great jobs in a great state. Not tax cuts for the rich; and ordinary people left to pay for this. We are about to see what a rigged economy does to all the people when more is given away than is created.
In his next Facebook post, Soglin tapped his inner John Lennon:
Imagine all the people with access to great public schools, great colleges and universities, high speed internet, great roads and transit, great healthy food, great health care, great jobs….imagine all the people….
Imagine if we were spared that awful song.
Imagine Madison without state government and the UW System. Imagine Soglin actually having to work to bring in business, if Comrade Soglin would even lower himself to do that.
But now Soglin also has to deal with the possibility that Foxconn is looking to build facilities in Madison or Fitchburg. He would like Foxconn to consider the recently-closed Oscar Meyer plant as a possible location. However, Soglin said, “we are not at all interested in participating in a race to the bottom in regards to competing with financial incentives that are not viable for this community.”
What Soglin is not addressing is that Foxconn would not even be looking in the Madison area for a location if it wasn’t for the state’s offer of nearly $3 billion in incentives for Foxconn to locate a $10 billion facility in southeastern Wisconsin. Soglin is acting like the two developments are separate when in reality its all a part of one huge economic development.
What Soglin should say, if he’s really opposed to the bill currently being considered by the legislature, that he’s opposed to Foxconn locating anything in his city. Soglin would rather have a shuttered Oscar Meyer plant as a monument to his opposition to capitalism than any Foxconn offices or factory in his city. Because that’s the real message of his opposition to the Foxconn deal. Ironically, Soglin may get the economic development he claims he wants despite his best efforts and the efforts of the Madison Democrats in the legislature to oppose it.
At the ribbon cutting ceremony, Soglin can thank Governor Scott Walker.
Soglin also won’t tell you about Madison’s experience with Democrats’ favorite non-governmental employer, Epic Systems of Verona. Epic Systems started in Madison, grew substantially, then moved to Verona because of Soglin’s refusal to “race to the bottom in regards to competing with financial incentives that are not viable for this community.” It could be said that Madison’s loss is Verona’s gain, except that a substantial number of Epic’s employees still live in Madison while using (and not paying for) Verona’s government services.
As it is, Madison (and Milwaukee) talker Vicki McKenna adds:
This isn’t serious. First, he wasn’t actually contacted by Foxconn or anyone else. A site selector sent out letters saying “hey, if you have undeveloped parcels of land, let us know….” So what does Soglin do? He stunts a presser about Oscar Mayer (the company left on his watch, he was caught with his pants down, never even realizing they were thinking of leaving), and wants to capture a little bit of the Foxconn enthusiasm that Walker is generating–bcause he thinks he can beat Walker in the next gov’s race.
If he were actually serious, he wouldn’t be holding a press conference. He would get a team of good Econ-Dev people to work with WEDC and really try to make the Oscar Mayer property attractive. Saying “we may consider TIF, but we’re not going to give it away” is the tell that all of this is bullsh*t. No one wants that property. You just may HAVE to give it away. As for TIF, if you don’t say “of COURSE we’ll bring some TIF proposals to the table”, then forget about even being on the list at all, let alone the short list.
Which brought this response about the Oscar Meyer facility:
Heinz moved it to a new plant because it was inefficient for them, so please Foxconn fix this? Hilarious.
Then there’s this …
… which prompted this Facebook question:
Ummmmm. If “average wages” (stated to be $53k annually) won’t pay the bills, how will $15/hr ($31.2k per annum)?
Various conservative websites have been excerpting (to put it mildly) CNN contributor Fareed Zakaria and his new book, Why Trump Won.
Specifically, this excerpt:
The Trump vote is in large part an act of class rebellion, a working class revolt against know-it-all elites who run the country. These voters will stick with Donald Trump even as he flails, rather than vindicate the elite, urban view of him.
Here is what Zakaria wrote on CNN.com:
The real question of the 2016 presidential election isn’t so much why did Donald Trump win, as why did he even get close?
After all, Trump was a totally unconventional candidate who broke all the rules and did things that would have destroyed anyone else running for president. So why did he break through?
Here’s the answer: America is now divided along four lines, each one reinforcing the others. Call them the four Cs.
The first is capitalism. There was a time when the American economy moved in tandem with its middle class. As the economy grew, so did middle class employment and wages. But over the last few decades that link has been broken. The economy has been humming along, but it now enriches mostly those with education, training, and capital. The other Americans have been left behind.
The second divide is about culture. In recent decades, we’ve seen large scale immigration; African-Americans and Hispanics rising to a more central place in society; and gays being accorded equal rights. All of this has meant new cultures and narratives have received national attention. And it’s worried a segment of the older, white population, which fears that the national culture they grew up with is fading. One comprehensive study found that after party loyalty, the second strongest predictor of a Trump voter was “fears of cultural displacement.”
The third divide in America today is about class. The Trump vote is in large part an act of class rebellion, a working class revolt against know-it-all elites who run the country. These voters will stick with Donald Trump even as he flails, rather than vindicate the elite, urban view of him.
The final C in this story is communication. We have gone from an America where people watched three networks that provided a uniform view of the world to one where everyone can pick their own channel, message, and now even their own facts.
All these forces have been at work for decades, but in recent years, the Republican Party has been better able to exploit them and identify with those Americans who feel frustrated, anxious, angry — even desperate about the direction that the country is headed in. Donald Trump capitalized on these trends even more thoroughly, speaking openly to people’s economic anxieties, cultural fears, and class rebellion. He promised simple solutions, mostly aimed at others — Mexicans, Muslims, Chinese people and, of course, the elites and the media.
It worked. He won. Whether his solutions are even enacted is another matter. But the real victory will come for this country when someone looks at these deep forces that are dividing it and tries to construct a politics that will bridge them. Rather than accept that America must remain a country split between two tribes — each uncomprehending of the other, both bitter and hostile — he or she would speak in a language that unites them.
Some might argue that this program today in 1955 started the rock and roll era:
I have a hard time believing the Beatles needed any help getting to number one, including today in 1965:
That was in Britain. On this side of the Atlantic, today’s number one pop song:
Released today in 1967:
Today in 1965, the Beatles sought “Help” in purchasing an album:
Two years later, Beatles manager Brian Epstein tried to help quell the worldwide furor over John Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus” comment:
“The quote which John Lennon made to a London columnist has been quoted and misrepresented entirely out of context of the article, which was in fact highly complimentary to Lennon as a person. … Lennon didn’t mean to boast about the Beatles’ fame. He meant to point out that the Beatles’ effect appeared to be a more immediate one upon, certainly, the younger generation. John is deeply concerned and regrets that people with certain religious beliefs should have been offended.”
First, a non-rock anniversary: Today is the 95th anniversary of the first broadcasted baseball game, on KDKA in Pittsburgh: Harold Arlen described Pittsburgh’s 8–0 win over Philadelphia.
Speaking of Philadelphia … today in 1957, ABC-TV picked up WFIL-TV’s “American Bandstand” …
… though ABC interrupted it in the middle for “The Mickey Mouse Club.”
Today in 1966, the Beatles recorded “Yellow Submarine” …
… and “Eleanor Rigby” …
… while also releasing their “Revolver” album.
First, from the way left, A.M. Gittlitz:
In the postwar period, however, scientists inspired by Cosmism launched Sputnik. The satellite’s faint blinking in the night sky signaled an era of immense human potential to escape all limitations natural and political, with the equal probability of destroying everything in a matter of hours.
Feeding on this tension, science fiction and futurism entered their “golden age” by the 1950s and ’60s, both predicting the bright future that would replace the Cold War. Technological advances would automate society; the necessity of work would fade away. Industrial wealth would be distributed as a universal basic income, and an age of leisure and vitality would follow. Humans would continue to voyage into space, creating off-Earth colonies and perhaps making new, extraterrestrial friends in the process. In a rare 1966 collaboration across the Iron Curtain, the astronomer Carl Sagan co-wrote “Intelligent Life in the Universe” with Iosif Shklovosky. This work of astrobiological optimism proposed that humans attempt to contact their galactic neighbors.
Interest in alien life was not just the domain of scientists and fiction writers. U.F.O. flaps worldwide captured pop cultural attention, and many believed that flying saucers were here to warn us, or even save us, from the danger of nuclear weapons. In the midst of the worldwide worker and student uprisings in 1968, the Argentine Trotskyist leader known as J. Posadas wrote an essay proposing solidarity between the working class and the alien visitors. He argued that their technological advancement indicated they would be socialists and could deliver us the technology to free Earth from the grip of Yankee imperialism and the bureaucratic workers’ states.
Such views were less fringe and more influential than you might think. Beginning in 1966, the plot of “Star Trek” closely followed Posadas’s propositions. After a nuclear third world war (which Posadas also believed would lead to socialist revolution), Vulcan aliens visit Earth, welcoming them into a galactic federation and delivering replicator technology that would abolish scarcity. Humans soon unify as a species, formally abolishing money and all hierarchies of race, gender and class.
“A lot has changed in the past 300 years,” Captain Picard explains to a cryogenically unfrozen businessman from the 20th century in an episode of a later “Star Trek” franchise, “The Next Generation.” “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.”
For all its continued popularity, such optimism was unusual in the genre. The new wave of sci-fi in the late ’60s, typified by J. G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick in the United States and by the Strugatsky brothers and Stanislaw Lem in the East, presented narratives that undercut this theme of humans’ saving themselves through their own rationality.
The grand proposals of the ’60s futurists also faded away, as the Fordist period of postwar economic growth abruptly about-faced. Instead of automation and guaranteed income, workers got austerity and deregulation. The Marxist theorist Franco Berardi described this period as one in which an inherent optimism for the future, implied by socialism and progressivism, faded into the “no future” nihilism of neoliberalism and Thatcherite economics, which insisted that “there is no alternative.”
The fall of the Soviet Union cemented this “end of history,” in Francis Fukuyama’s phrase, and signaled a return to late-capitalist dystopian narratives of the future, like that of “The Time Machine.” Two of the most popular sci-fi films of the ’90s were “Terminator 2” and “The Matrix,” which both showcased a world in which capital had triumphed and its machinery would not liberate mankind, but govern it. The recent success of “The Road,” “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “The Walking Dead” similarly predict violent futures where only small underground resistance movements struggle to keep the dying flame of humanity alight.
Released the same year as “Star Trek: First Contact” — and grossing three times as much — “Independence Day” told a story directly opposed to Posadism, in which those who gather to greet the aliens and protest military engagement with them are the first to be incinerated by the extraterrestrials’ directed-energy weapons. (In Wells’s 1897 vision of alien invasion, “The War of the Worlds,” the white flag-waving welcoming party of humans is similarly dispatched.)
The grotesque work of 1970s white supremacist speculative fiction, “The Camp of the Saints” by Jean Raspail — recently referenced by the White House strategist Steve Bannon — has a similar story line. A fleet of refugee ships appears off the coast of France, asking for safe harbor, but it soon becomes apparent that the ship is a Trojan horse. Its admission triggers an invasion of Europe and the United States.
The recent rise of right-wing populism indicates a widening crack in the neoliberal consensus of ideological centrism. From this breach, past visions of the future are once again pouring out. Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg feel empowered to propose science fiction premises, like space colonization and post-scarcity economics, as solutions to actual social problems. Absent, however, are the mass social movements of the 20th century calling for the democratization of social wealth and politics. While rapid changes in the social order that are the dream of Silicon Valley’s disruptors are acquiring an aura of inevitability, a world absent of intense poverty and bigoted hostility feels unimaginable.
Shortly after World War II, [H.G] Wells became so convinced of humanity’s doom, without a world revolution, that he revised the last chapter of “A Short History of the World” to include the extinction of mankind. Today we are left with a similar fatalism, allowing the eliminiationist suggestions of the far right to argue, in effect, for a walling-off of the world along lines of class, nationality and race, even if this might condemn millions to death.
If humanity in the 21st century is to be rescued from its tailspin descent into the abyss, we must recall the choice offered by the alien visitor from the 1951 sci-fi film classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”
“Join us and live in peace,” Klaatu said, “or pursue your present course and face obliteration.”
I think of it as science fiction’s useful paraphrasing of Rosa Luxemburg’s revolutionary ultimatum: “socialism or barbarism.”
The last sentence reminds me of the UW–Madison journalism class where I had to sit through a lecture about Luxemburg. That’s an hour of my life I’ll never get back.
Be that as it may, I suppose it might never occur to a writer “who specializes in counterculture and radical politics” that socialism understood as everybody sharing everything preceded Karl Marx, to include various Greek philosophers and the 12 Apostles. (By choice, not government edict, in the case of the Apostles.) It is always tiresome to hear or read those who believe the world revolves around them.
I doubt creator Gene Roddenberry was a socialist. He was, however, a progressive, and progressives believe mankind can be improved with the right people in power. That utopian view has been proven false in the 100 years or so since the Progressive Era, to everyone but progressives.
I blogged an opposing view from the Claremont Institute, from which I excerpt:
Roddenberry and his colleagues were World War II veterans, whose country was now fighting the Cold War against a Communist aggressor they regarded with horror. They considered the Western democracies the only force holding back worldwide totalitarian dictatorship. The best expression of their spirit was John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, with its proud promise to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
This could have been declaimed by Captain James T. Kirk (played by William Shatner), of the starship U.S.S. Enterprise, who, as literature professor Paul Cantor observes in his essay “Shakespeare in the Original Klingon,” is “a Cold Warrior very much on the model of JFK.” In episodes like “The Omega Glory,” in which Kirk rapturously quotes the preamble to the Constitution, or “Friday’s Child,” where he struggles to outwit the Klingons (stand-ins for the Soviet menace) in negotiations over the resources of a planet modeled on Middle Eastern petroleum states, Kirk stands fixedly, even obstinately, for the principles of universal freedom and against collectivism, ignorance, and passivity. In “Errand of Mercy,” the episode that first introduces the show’s most infamous villains, he cannot comprehend why the placid Organians are willing to let themselves be enslaved by the Klingon Empire. Their pacifism disgusts him. Kirk loves peace, but he recognizes that peace without freedom is not truly peace.
This was not just a political point; it rested on a deeper philosophical commitment. In Star Trek’s humanist vision, totalitarianism was only one manifestation of the dehumanizing forces that deprive mankind (and aliens) of the opportunities and challenges in which their existence finds meaning. In “Return of the Archons,” for example, Kirk and company infiltrate a theocratic world monitored and dominated by the god Landru. The natives are placid, but theirs is the mindless placidity of cattle. In the past, one explains, “there was war. Convulsions. The world was destroying itself. Landru…took us back, back to a simple time.” The people now live in ignorant, stagnant bliss. Landru has removed conflict by depriving them of responsibility, and with it their right to govern themselves. When Kirk discovers that Landru is actually an ancient computer left behind by an extinct race, he challenges it to justify its enslavement of the people. “The good,” it answers, is “harmonious continuation…peace, tranquility.” Kirk retorts: “What have you done to do justice to the full potential of every individual? Without freedom of choice, there is no creativity. Without creativity, there is no life.” He persuades Landru that coddling the people has stifled the souls it purported to defend, and the god-machine self-destructs.
This theme is made more explicit in “The Apple,” perhaps the quintessential episode of the original Star Trek. Here Kirk unashamedly violates the “Prime Directive”—the rule forbidding starship captains from interfering with the cultures they contact—by ordering the Enterprise to destroy Vaal, another computer tyrant ruling over an idyllic planet. Like Landru, Vaal is an omniscient totalitarian, and he demands sacrifices. The natives, known only as “people of Vaal,” have no culture, no freedom, no science—they do not even know how to farm—and no children, as Vaal has forbidden sex along with all other individualistic impulses. This sets Kirk’s teeth on edge. There are objective goods and evils, and slavery is evil because it deprives life forms of their right to self-government and self-development.
What differentiates “The Apple” from “Archons” is Spock’s reaction. In the earlier episode, he joined Kirk in condemning Landru; now the half human/half Vulcan is reluctant to interfere with what he calls “a splendid example of reciprocity.” When chief medical officer Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy (DeForest Kelley) protests, Spock accuses him of “applying human standards to non-human cultures.” To this cool relativism, McCoy replies, “There are certain absolutes, Mr. Spock, and one of them is the right of humanoids to a free and unchained environment, the right to have conditions which permit growth.”
Kirk agrees with McCoy. Spock—who in later episodes invokes the Vulcan slogan celebrating “infinite diversity in infinite combinations”—is comfortable observing Vaal’s servants nonjudgmentally, like specimens behind glass. But Kirk believes there must be deeper, universal principles underlying and limiting diversity, to prevent its degeneration into relativism and nihilism.
This is an insight Kirk shares with Abraham Lincoln, who—as we learn in a later episode—is Kirk’s personal hero. When in 1858 Stephen Douglas claimed to be so committed to democracy that he did not care whether American states and territories adopted pro- or anti-slavery constitutions, Lincoln parodied his relativism as meaning “that if one man would enslave another, no third man should object.” Instead, Lincoln insisted, the basis of legitimate democracy was the principle of equality articulated in the Declaration of Independence. Without that frame firmly in place, democracy could claim no moral superiority to tyranny. Spock, by regarding this as a merely “human standard,” and defending Vaal’s suzerainty as “a system which seems to work,” falls into the same relativistic trap as Douglas. By contrast, as Paul Cantor notes, Kirk believes “that all rational beings are created equal,” and extends the Declaration’s proposition “literally throughout the universe.” Kirk orders the Enterprise to destroy Vaal. “You’ll learn to care for yourselves,” he tells the people. “You’ll learn to build for yourselves, think for yourselves, work for yourselves, and what you create is yours. That’s what we call freedom.”
Spock’s hesitation here is an early glimmer of the relativism that would eventually engulf the Star Trek universe. Roddenberry’s generation emerged from World War II committed to a liberalism that believed in prosperity, technological progress, and the universal humanity they hoped the United Nations would champion. In the Kennedy years, this technocratic liberalism sought to apply science, the welfare state, and secular culture to raise the standard of living and foster individual happiness worldwide. Then came the rise of the New Left—a movement that saw the alleged evils of society as the consequence not merely of capitalism but of technology and reason itself. Civilization was not the perfection of nature or even a protection against nature, but an alienation from nature. Throw off its shackles, and man could reunite with the universe; unfairness would fall away, and peaceful coexistence would reign. “Peaceful coexistence” was especially crucial. The war in Vietnam and other crises helped foster a debunking culture that saw American principles of justice as a sham, as cynical rationalizations for American greed, racism, and imperialism. The older generation of liberals—and their literary proxies, including Captain Kirk—hardly knew what to make of it, or of the “turn on, tune in, drop out” escapism that often accompanied it.
The original Star Trek savagely parodied such Age of Aquarius romanticism in the episode “The Way to Eden,” in which theEnterprise encounters a group of space-age hippies searching for a legendary planet where all will be equal, without technology or modernity, living off the land. Almost all of Kirk’s crew regard these star-children as deluded, and their longing for prelapsarian harmony does turn out to be a deadly illusion: the Eden planet they find is literally poison—all the trees and even the grass are full of an acid that kills them almost the instant they arrive. Kirk is hardly surprised. All Edens, in his eyes, are illusions, and all illusions are dangerous.
Spock is more indulgent. “There are many who are uncomfortable with what we have created,” he tells the captain, “the planned communities, the programming, the sterilized, artfully balanced atmospheres.” Spock insists he does not share their views, yet he secretly admires them, and devotes his considerable scientific skills to helping locate their paradise planet. Later he tells one of the few survivors of the acid, “It is my sincere wish that you do not give up your search for Eden. I have no doubt but that you will find it, or make it yourselves.” The skeptical, spirited Kirk could never utter such words.
Kirk, it turns out, has personal reasons for his skepticism. In “The Conscience of the King,” we learn that he is something of a Holocaust survivor himself. When he was young, he and his parents barely escaped death at the hands of the dictator Kodos the Executioner, who slaughtered half the population of the colony on Tarsus IV. Having eluded capture, Kodos lived 20 years under an assumed name, making a living as a Shakespearean actor, until one of Kirk’s fellow survivors tracks him down. Now Kirk must decide whether the actor is really the killer.
Aired in 1966, this episode is a commentary on the pursuit of Nazi war criminals, and it typifies the original Star Trek’s moral outlook. During the show’s three seasons, over 20 former Nazis were tried for their roles in the Holocaust, including five who only two weeks after this episode aired were convicted for working at the Sobibór extermination camp. Intellectuals like Hannah Arendt were preoccupied with the moral and jurisprudential questions of Nazi-hunting. “Conscience” puts these dilemmas into an ambitiously Shakespearean frame.
Like Hamlet, Kirk faces a crisis of certainty. “Logic is not enough,” he says, echoing Hamlet’s “What a rogue and peasant slave am I” soliloquy. “I’ve got to feel my way—make absolutely sure.” Yet one thing Kirk is already sure about is justice. Hamlet may curse the fact that he was ever born to set things right, but he knows it is his duty. Likewise Kirk. When McCoy asks him what good it will do to punish Kodos after a lapse of two decades—“Do you play god, carry his head through the corridors in triumph? That won’t bring back the dead”—Kirk answers, “No. But they may rest easier.”
For Shakespeare, justice is less about the good prospering and the bad suffering than about a harmony between the world of facts in which we live and the world of words we inhabit as beings endowed with speech. When the two fall out of sync—when Claudius’s crime knocks time “out of joint”—the result is only a perverse and temporary illusion. And Kirk is, again, not impressed by illusions. “Who are you to [judge]?” demands Kodos’s daughter. Kirk’s devastating reply: “Who do I have to be?” …
By 1987, when the new Enterprise was being launched on the new series Star Trek: The Next Generation, the liberal landscape had changed. The show premiered a year after feminist philosopher of science Sandra Harding referred to Newton’s Principia as a “rape manual,” and a year before Jesse Jackson led Stanford student protesters chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!” The Kennedy-esque anti-Communist in the White House was now Ronald Reagan, a former Democrat and union leader who thought the party had left him.
Next Generation’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) was more committed to coexistence and non-intervention than to universal liberty and anti-totalitarianism. Following Spock’s lead, Picard would elevate the Prime Directive into a morally obtuse dogma and would seek ways to evade the responsibility of moral judgment. Time and again, the show featured false equivalency on a grand scale, coupled with the hands-off attitude that the Kirk of “The Apple” had dismissed as complicity with evil. …
What accounts for this incoherent foreign policy? Nothing less than Picard’s commitment to non-commitment. He represents a new, non-judgmental liberalism far shallower than that embraced in Roddenberry’s era. Where Kirk pursues justice, Picard avoids conflict. Just as Kirk’s devotion to universal principles goes deeper than politics, so does Picard’s sentimentalism. When it comes to the universe of real suffering, real need, and a real search for truth, he is content not to decide, not to take responsibility, and not to know.
The Claremont piece is much better than the New York Times piece, not merely because I agree with the Claremont point of view more than the Times’ point of view. Kirk is an idealist, as is The Original Series, but he is not naïve. Kirk also has much more moral fortitude than Picard, as seen in episodes of each series. In TOS’ “A Taste of Armageddon,” Kirk brings about the end of a computer-run war between two planets by destroying the computers that conduct the war:
I’ve given you back the horrors of war. The Vendikans now assume that you’ve broken your agreement and that you’re preparing to wage real war with real weapons. They’ll want do the same. Only the next attack they launch will do a lot more than count up numbers in a computer. They’ll destroy cities, devastate your planet. You of course will want to retaliate. If I were you, I’d start making bombs. Yes, Councilman, you have a real war on your hands. You can either wage it with real weapons, or you might consider an alternative. Put an end to it. Make peace.
The conflict in The Next Generation episode “The Hunted” is between a planet’s leadership and its war veterans, at the end of the last act Picard is asked to intervene, but answers:
In your own words, this is not our affair. We cannot interfere in the natural course of your society’s development. And I’d say it’s going to develop significantly in the next few minutes.
What kind of answer is that? We don’t care if you blow yourselves up in the next few minutes; that’s your problem. (Reportedly a different ending was shelved due to cost considerations, but a better ending could have been set entirely on the Enterprise bridge, with Worf reporting explosions on the planet’s surface. That would stick a knife in the heart of that Enterprise’s moral preening.) There are other examples (“Syubiosis” and “Pen Pals,” to name two) where Picard’s first impulse is to leave the primitives be, even if that means they die. That’s like washing your hands of what you’ve heard taking place in Nazi Germany to Jews in World War II.
Today in 1957, the Everly Brothers performed on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Shew …
… performing a song about a couple who falls asleep on a date, making others assume that they spent the night together when they didn’t. The song was banned in some markets.
Today in 1958, Billboard magazine combined its five charts measuring record sales, jukebox plays and radio airplay to the Hot 100. And the first Hot 100 number one was …
Today in 1967, a 16-year-old girl stowed away on the Monkees’ flight from Minneapolis to St. Louis. The girl’s father accused the Monkees of transporting a minor across state lines, presumably for immoral purposes.
Today in 1970, Beach Boy Dennis Wilson married his second wife.
Possibly connected: Jim Morrison of the Doors was arrested for public drunkenness after being found passed out on the front steps of a house.
The National Center for Policy Analysis:
In February 2007, the day after his panicky global warming film “An Inconvenient Truth” won an Academy Award for best documentary, a shocking report based on public records revealed that Al Gore’s Nashville home consumed 20 times more electricity than the average American household.
Facing scrutiny for his extreme electricity consumption, the former vice president pledged to renovate his home to become greener and more energy-efficient. The extensive and expensive overhaul of Gore’s house included installing solar panels and geothermal heating.
In order to determine the effectiveness of the environmentally-friendly remodel and learn whether the self-appointed spokesman of the environmental movement has amended his energy-devouring ways, the National Center for Public Policy Research obtained Gore’s electricity usage information through public records requests and conversations with the Nashville Electric Service (NES).
In powering his home, Gore still greatly outpaces most Americans in energy consumption. The findings were shocking:
- The past year, Gore’s home energy use averaged 19,241 kilowatt hours (kWh) every month, compared to the U.S. household average of 901 kWh per month.
- Gore guzzles more electricity in one year than the average American family uses in 21 years.
- In September of 2016, Gore’s home consumed 30,993 kWh in just one month – as much energy as a typical American family burns in 34 months.• During the last 12 months, Gore devoured 66,159 kWh of electricity just heating his pool. That is enough energy to power six average U.S. households for a year.
- From August 2016 through July 2017, Gore spent almost $22,000 on electricity bills.
- Gore paid an estimated $60,000 to install 33 solar panels. Those solar panels produce an average of 1,092 kWh per month, only 5.7% of Gore’s typical monthly energy consumption.
No matter how the numbers are viewed, Al Gore uses vastly more electricity at his home than the average American – a particularly inconvenient truth given his hypocritical calls for all Americans to reduce their home energy use.
Al Gore resides in a 10,070-square-foot Colonial-style home in the posh Belle Meade section of Nashville, the eighth-wealthiest neighborhood in America according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
The home, which was built in 1915, contains 20 rooms – including five bedrooms, eight full bathrooms and two half-baths. Gore purchased the property, including the home and the surrounding 2.09 acre lot, in 2002 for $2.3 million. …
Gore also owns at least two other homes, a pied-à-terre in San Francisco’s St. Regis Residence Club and a farm house in Carthage, Tennessee. …
Al Gore has attained a near-mythical status for his frenzied efforts to propagandize global warming. At the same time, Gore has done little to prove his commitment to the cause in his own life. While Gore encourages people throughout the world to reduce their carbon footprint and make drastic changes to cut energy consumption, Gore’s own home electricity use has hypocritically increased to more than 21 times the national average this past year with no sign of slowing down.
This is nothing new for environmentalists, who fly to Switzerland every year to proclaim that global climate change is destroying Gaia, which they worship instead of God. To paraphrase what Instapundit Glenn Harlan Reynolds has said about Gore and others of his ilk: I’ll believe global climate change is a crisis when Gore and his ilk start acting like it’s a crisis.
Unlike the vast majority of Wisconsin Democrats, the writer of Caffeinated Politics is not a partisan idiot and is willing to take on his party when it’s wrong:
The Foxconn development plan would be the largest green-field investment by a foreign-based company in our nation’s history.
With a $10 billion investment by Foxconn which will directly stimulate 13,000 jobs, with a large number of spin-off developments and jobs, means this is the powerhouse proposal Wisconsin needs. While there are always hurdles and bumps in such planning the attempts by some to sour the good news should be kept in perspective. There are always naysayers.
So I was not surprised about the negative comments which came from some members in my party. To hear some of my fellow Democrats snort over the Foxconn deal makes me wonder how hard they want to be in the majority again in this state? After all, packaging state resources into a powerful program to create jobs over a wide array of communities is the smartest thing to have emerged from our statehouse in a very long time. And my party needs to get on board this plan and provide hearty support.
The seeming lack of awareness about spending money today for a larger and smarter pay-off in employment and tax revenues tomorrow seems lost on some legislators. For too long other states were more than willing to make inroads where Wisconsin was hesitant to tread. That was a damn shame. And while I have many legitimate complaints about policy moves from Governor Walker I must say his work with this massive plan makes me smile. This is exactly how state government needs to operate in the world in which we live. …
I genuinely believe this is a plan that will not only create jobs, but lift spirits, and allow for a larger part of the state to also receive benefits from other investments. For instance, I am heartened to learn the ways UW-Madison is seeking research relationships with Foxconn. With that in mind, I would love to see this legislature also pass a meaningful venture capital bill to help seed the new ideas and small businesses that can be spun off from the Foxconn deal. I do not wish to think small anymore when it comes to where we might head economically in our state.
While I am most confident this huge incentive plan can be marshaled to completion, I also know we need to design our incentive package smartly. I am mighty concerned about the environmental impact that this business could have on our state. For instance, I am not pleased with the possible discharge of production materials into the wetlands surrounding the company. I understand the need for a company to make profits but respect to our land, air, and water must not be disregarded. There is no wiggle room for a cheap way out of making sure the environmental regulations of our state are not undermined.
With all the work and effort that Walker and his administration have already undertaken to get the state to this point with Foxconn makes me confident that true safeguards can be guaranteed in regard to environmental issues. If Walker can achieve those standards with this massive job creation, and revenue producing venture his election in 2018 is all but assured. This development proposal is that large–both to the state as a whole, and to the Governor’s political future.
There have been many reasons to take rhetorical slaps at Walker, and I have made many over the years at Caffeinated Politics. But there is a time for politics, and then as I always say, there must be a time to do the work of governing. So I must decry the tone that some have used about this deal. I get the fact that at the statehouse partisanship is king, and logic is often left at the parking garage. But after all that we have been through with employment woes, slack wages, and divisive government the time has come to take a breath, step up, and do the state’s business.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 