The Star Trek franchise was born in an era very different from the early 21st century. It was the dawn of the space age, and while President Kennedy was giving the speech that would launch the Apollo Project, a television writer-producer in Los Angeles named Gene Roddenberry was working out an idea for a science fiction series that he called Star Trek. The two projects went forward at the same time, independently but concurrently, and both of them drew on the same idealistic vision.
It's hard for us in 2008 to remember what it was like living in those days. Even the baby boomers among us who lived through that time have to make a conscious effort to remember how it felt. Alongside the tensions of the Cold War and the ever-present threat of nuclear armageddon, highlighted by the harrowing Cuban Missile Crisis, there was also a sense of extraordinary wonder and optimism as the decades-old dream of space travel was actually being realized, suddenly, startlingly.
Certainly there was fear, but the temptation to give in to that fear and turn away from the traditional American ideal of liberty had been resisted, and the 1960s saw the flowering (literally) of a new age of personal expression. Star Trek drew on that feeling of expanding possibilities, and made it explicit through the metaphor of space exploration. Every American who felt that the restrictions of the past had given way to new possibilities could see his own beliefs made manifest in the starship Enterprise's mission to explore strange new worlds and seek out new forms of life and new civilizations.
Star Trek was a product of its times, just as exercises in paranoia such as Lost and 24 are the product of our time. That, as much as anything else, explains why the Star Trek franchise has fallen on hard times. A work of fiction born out of the age of JFK is going to find itself out of sync in the age of GWB, an age of paranoia, lawlessness, fearmongering, warmongering, and torture.
The age of GWB is coming to a close, however, and a new age is on the horizon. When John F. Kennedy's brother and daughter endorsed Barack Obama, they were letting America know that a new age of hope was coming, an age akin to that of JFK's own. We who still find inspiration in Gene Roddenberry's vision of tomorrow know a kindred spirit when we see one, and that's why we have gathered together beneath the banner of Barack Obama.
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