Marcin Wichary, CC BY 2.0via Wikimedia Commons
In January 1995, the creators of Star Trek gave viewers a glimpse of America in 2024. It was a visionary moment.
These days, in early September 2024, the Gabriel Bell Uprising is taking place in San Francisco, California. Desperate, unemployed, mentally disabled, sick and poor people, useless to neoliberal capitalism, are locked up by an over-controlling government in so-called sanctuaries, camps actually, where they are at each other’s throats. Until they take up arms and take hostages.
Gabriel Bell is the brave man who will end the riots and rescue the hostages in a few days, around September 4th or 5th. Well, he should. But he is killed when the crew of the Defiant accidentally crashes in 21st century San Francisco, due to an incident involving chromatin particles, which I believe is Quark’s fault.
Fiction meets reality
Captain Benjamin Sisko and Doctor Julian Bashir materialize in San Francisco on August 30, 2024 and are taken to a sancturary from the police. The next day they get into an argument; Gabriel Bell is shot and it falls to Sisko to lead the uprising, otherwise Earth’s history will change, and not for the better. Because Bell managed to end the camp policy.
Meanwhile, Jadzia Dax is picked up by a friendly IT guru and, thanks to her superior computer skills from the 24th century, acquires an almost real identity in order to then save her friends on the next move.
We are talking, of course, about Star Trek, the series Deep Space Nine more precisely. In the two-part episode called “Past Tense,” fiction meets reality today. Trekkies have long awaited the date. And the science fiction drama, written almost 30 years ago, hits a very current nerve in America.
There is the controlling government, of course, the electronic IDs, the iris scanners, the money on the card, the chips without which people do not exist. The chic quarters of the rich, who want for nothing and do not know how the lower third lives. And the ghetto-like camps in dilapidated old buildings, where the unemployed only get the bare necessities to live on and are at each other’s throats for more, and where the National Guard will soon be moving in to shoot everything down.
The idea came to authors Ira Steven Behr and Robert Hewitt Wolfe in real 20th century California, especially in Los Angeles, a rough city plagued by homelessness and gang violence, where then-mayor Richard Joseph Riordan actually wanted to put homeless people behind barbed wire.
How could they let him get so bad?
“The ghosts of Star Trek are real,” writes the trade journal Gizmodo current. It is astonishing how close the authors of that time came to their future, our present: misery, climate crisis, broken promises, stark differences between rich and poor, a brutal police force.
In San Francisco, there are homeless tents on every street, with young IT professionals in suits slaloming between them, ignoring the misery. In LA, around the train station, it looks similar, although not quite as bad.
Governor Gawin Newsom, a left-wing Democratic politician who is primarily interested in his own career, gave orders to clear out the semi-legal tent camps shortly before the Democratic Party convention in August. Homeless people are now being fined.
We already have unscrupulous politicians. Just this selfless IT guru from Deep Space Ninewho despite the law to the contrary opens his internet channels so that the poor and unemployed have a voice, does not actually exist. No, that is not Musk. Nor is the sugar bot.
The Democrats want to take care of the forgotten underclass so that they don’t vote for Donald Trump. That’s what they promise. It’s unclear which government is in charge in “Past Tense,” in California or nationwide, and somehow it doesn’t matter. Here, in real America, everyone is pinning their hopes on Kamala. Will she really improve things, or is that just election campaign rhetoric? Because she’s got it.
“How could they [Anm.: die Menschen im 21. Jahrhundert] let him get so bad?” Julian asks Bashir at the end of the episode, and the incomparable Sisko says, “I wish I could answer that.”
Another sad piece of news: James Darren died yesterday. He played Vic Fontaine, the singing hologram in Quarks. He was 88 years old. Anyone who doesn’t feel old yet is floating freely in space and time.
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