Two responses RE: Questions about episode of Star Trek: "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield"

From: 
Roger Almendarez [[email protected]] 
	
Hey there H-Filmers,

While I agree with Mr. Schaffer's comments about the dangers of pre-judging
a text (e.g., reading it so that it confirms rather than rejects our
preconceptions), I disagree with the claim of arbitrariness when looking
for traces of real world events within a text. I subscribe to the belief
that all texts are discursive objects that are products of their given
historical moment. As such, they are subject to the same kinds of encodings
and social forces that not only allow for their creation of meaning but
also affect the very foundations upon which they are constructed. While I
think there is valid concern with reading a text in isolation, I think
exploring this episode's origins in terms of its production, its location
within the Star Trek canon, and among its historical moment can give great
insight into, if nothing else, the ways in which those historical events
generally affected art and media communications. Does this mean that we
should give uncritical credence to "confirming the picture one already
has?" Definitely not. But, I like to think that all of our thoughts stem
from pre-verbal places, which often result in great and reasonable
insights. That being said, I totally support any and all work on Star Trek.

Live long and prosper,
Roger
--
From:
Michael Fitzgerald [[email protected]] 

But Bow, what about bringing Lokai back to Cheron to stand trial for
atrocities? That doesn't fit with the narrative about it being blacks and
whites. H. Bruce Franklin in Star Trek and History (ed. Nancy Reagin)
includes it in a trilogy of episode he asserts is clearly about Vietnam. 

-----Original Message-----

From: A. Bowdoin Van Riper [[email protected]]

Star Trek, when it set out to *consciously* make a political point, rarely
did so with great subtlety.  I'd be extremely wary, therefore, of reading an
episode involving mirror-image half-black-half-white characters as anything
other than an allegory about race.

Spock's observation that Bele and Lokai are "belong to the same race" almost
certainly uses "race" as a synonym for "species" (as in "the human race")
and so -- in conjunction with his point that their physical differences are
"minor" -- is probably meant to echo anthropologist Ashley Montague's
influential early-60s reading of "racial differences" as purely-cultural
constructions with no biological reality.

If Bele is (allegorically) "white" and Lokai (allegorically) "black," and
the relationship between their groups reflects the history of race relations
in the United States then Bele's charges against Lokai could be read as a
reflection of persistent white anxieties about black resentment breeding
violent insurrection and (if successful) mass murder.  Those fears -- fueled
by the radicalization of Malcolm X, Watts and other "race riots," and the
rise of the Black Panthers -- bubbled up, around 1970, in white novelists'
visions of armed black uprisings: Fletcher Knebel's "Trespass," and Edwin
Corley's "Siege, for example.  Allen Drury, in the later volumes of the
series he began in "Advise and Consent," has armed black militants making
common cause with the firebrand leader of a newly independent African
country . . . shades of Lokai seeking "foreign" recognition.

It's still possible, I think, to read Kirk as JFK in "Let That Be Your Last
Battlefield" . . . but if he is, he's mediating between George Wallace and
Malcolm X, or the Dixiecrats and the Black Panthers, not (say) Leonid
Brezhnev and Alexander Dubcek.

Best regards,

Bow


Dr. A. Bowdoin Van Riper
Independent Scholar
Series Editor, "Science Fiction Television" (Scarecrow Press)
[email protected] http://independent.academia.edu/ABowdoinVanRiper














 
 	 
	 
 	 	 	 

 --