How Battleship Potemkin Fracked Battlestar Galactica’s Ass…
Some things were meant for the Internet, and some things simply weren’t. Just because you can access all points in time and space simultaneously at all times forever and ever, it doesn’t mean that everything that appears on it is, per se, cool. Like a tribble turd in a photon tube, like Glen Matlock in the Sex Pistols, like cholera on the Mayflower, some stuff should simply never have come along for the ride.
Let me put it another way: the Internet and the World Wide Web were invented by geeks (boffins; but boffin DNA carries a binary geek/nerd ribbon, only in addition they have brain cells so they can actually achieve stuff…) so to be fair shouldn’t it only carry data that passes the geek aesthetic bar? When geek power got it together for the new frontier, that pioneering urge to connect communities, it was, let’s admit it, developed with the holy grail of establishing some future putative Sliders chat-room; it certainly wasn’t fueled by a need to provide grannies with access to commemorative pillow cases from all fifty states, or sports fans to cross-reference all-time batting averages, or allow anyone to actually buy advance tickets to go see tribute bands (these should always be bought on the door, and only whilst utterly hammered on happy hour beers and smarting from your first tattoo: as in, not pre-meditated. For further proof check out the difference in penalties for the respective convictions for accidental and pre-meditated murder…).
Basically, all these “World Wide” interlopers should bugger off back to their CB radios and book groups and carrier pigeons, because the Internet is still pure science-fiction even as it exists in the real world today (imagine if Jules Verne got to ride in an actual submarine: “Please step through the Nautilus airlock Mr. Verne and we will guide you to your seat. That slight buzzing in your ears is just a pressure acclimation. Nothing to worry about. Not something you anticipated, admittedly, but you got just about everything else right, and nobody’s perfect. Now, would you like the shrimp cocktail or the seared mahi mahi?”) and it should therefore uniformly bloody look like science-fiction…
I mean, the whole shebang was only started because of that ultimate geek wet dream: the first real space ship, Sputnik, launched by the Soviets in 1958 (which I happen to know now - having helped reconstruct it in 1996 - was actually only about three feet in diameter, with a couple of rabbit ear aerials soldered on. What a disappointment that was; I had always imagined this giant sphere hurtling through the heavens, casting a giant shadow on the white picket fences of America as ad salesman cowered into their martinis.).
So the Yankee boffins – in between dressing up in silver foil suits and forming secret society clubs to watch Science Fiction Theatre in the privacy of Alamogordo bungalows; in part because they enjoyed it but also because this was a way to stick two fingers up at the Soviet boffins, whose recreation time consisted solely of arm-wrestling the flight test chimpanzees for tobacco rations – came up with the Advanced Research Projects Agency, a group dedicated to furthering American technological interests, that in turn came up with a dozen other acronym organizations, all aimed at regaining the scientific upper hand from these feisty gulag-dwellers by networking country-wide radar systems. Factor in some guy from Bern whose name nobody knows, and now you got the fundamentals of the World Wide Web by the late eighties; just in time for…everything.
Little did these pioneers - who thought an “analogue” was the coolest car a guy could drive - know that five decades later they would be able to buy the entire run of Lost In Space on DVD for less than the cost of one six minute reel from Irving Klaw’s Teasarama. All those Star Trek boxed sets, those vintage Major Matt Mason play kits, those wookie duvets, disgorged like a rain of shiny asteroids on the barren Mars-like surface of our pre-Internet culture. We should all, in retrospect, kneel and worship at the feet of Sputnik, like crazed mutants at the doomsday bomb: because it has delivered us. Delivered us from all that external world stuff that buzzes against your ear drum like a gnat.
Delivered us from current events and facts, factoids (*), from famine and war and AIDS and Putin and Dubya and Mugabe and drive-bys and ice field erosion and all that nasty stuff that is so friggin’ complex and, well… depressing.So now we are free, liberated: dipping through the ice rings of Saturn with the crew of Fireball XL5; dimension-warping with Doctor Who; helping Roy Thinnes elude The Invaders. Jumping from one TV show to the next in a passive viewer version of the slingshot effect that will carry us on their showrunner momentums out beyond the farthest elliptical rim of giving-a-shit-about anything real.
In fairness, many geeks, already breathing heavily and needing their robitussin shot (“It almost sounds like robot”), will cite Battlestar Galactica (the reboot) as contemporary evidence of the engaged nature of sci-fi fans with real world issues. I fully acknowledge (I wear the burka of geekdom myself, as the series embarks this very weekend on its final series…) that this estimable drama of realpolitick has introduced large number of people to the dramatic tensions of suicide bombing, political expediency and the relationship between military and civic wings of society, in its incredibly well-written/acted/directed metaphors for an American society in fearful psychological retreat. The greatest writers of our time have talked eloquently about metaphor, after all: how science fiction allows us to understand the world by dint of its ability to give us social proxies that can yield insuperable truths into the human condition. And thereby move us.
But let’s take a bet. Let’s not even take a cheap shot (my favorite drink) and assume that most Battlestar Galactica fans can actually find Palestine on a world map, or Babylon Five fans (because they’re so much more sophisticated than all those Desperate Housewives viewers who are held leaden to the earth by shit like gravity… or people with PBS access…).
How many Battlestar fans do you think – nodding soberly as they ponder the weighty issues of executing alien collaborators – have really been so moved by the metaphorical journeys of Starbuck and Apollo that they have volunteered, in the real world, their services to something greater than their own good? Stood in a picket line for artistic rights like series creator Ronald D.Moore during the recent WGA strike (admittedly, a process absent from the specter of imminent vaporization…)? Moved out of their comfort zone to sit in a shopping mall and register people to vote? Joined Habitat for Humanity and constructed a basic four-wall structure where dispossessed families can sleep and crap in private? Joined Sea Shepherd and saved some real whales that Kirk and Scotty haven’t yet managed to teleport into the future when they return in Star TrexXXXVV!!!: Whales: MIA?
No. Sci-fi geeks know (because they get all the real dope first-hand from their boffin brothers before it’s passed on to the government spin doctors) that there’s no point to it all, and that the future’s fucked. Which is why they live in the past. Re-runs and commemorative figurines. Conventions and anniversaries. Franchise reboots and digital remixes. Aging actresses signing autographs and maintaining their dignity with smiles so full of sang froid that they make the planet Freon seem like a tropical paradise.
Geeks flock - like Hitchcockian crows to a climbing frame - to these nostalgia sideshows: to ComiCon and EnigmaCon and ScifiCon and WankerCon, building up carbon footprints of air and rail and taxi so they can be first in line to buy a limited edition Admiral Adama action figure. They are sadder than fake rogaine. Not because they like escapist fare: but because most of them, the vast unwashed majority, use it as a way to opt out of the real world full time.
Let me ask you this: when the Capricans finally make it, as the Battlestar punches through the atmosphere of the Thirteenth Planet, Earth, and they finally, truly, lay claim to their colonial home – having battled through phalanxes of Cylons and innumerable conflict –what kind of planet will they inherit from the geeks? When the raptors make landfall all they’ll find is landfill: memorabilia just starting on its biodegradable half-lives, mountains of boxed DVDs and some Lorne Greene autographed head shots.
Not a planet powered by advanced solar energy. Or a viable alternative to bio-fuels. Or volunteer inner-city workforces. Or a Tibet freed by international outcry. Or even a better Fox news channel. And if you think that’s putting an unfair onus on your shoulders, geeks, then that’s fine; yes, the rest of the world should give a hand; except that the rest of the world doesn’t say it cares. It doesn’t read about utopias, or of planet-forming, or that we live in a connected cosmos. They’re too busy riding their trail bikes on dirt mounds and getting some fun in before their grand kids keel over when the ozone layer collapses. At least they’re honest. So stop pretending like you all live in an ersatz Federation future CG landscape California where shuttles arc gracefully over clean seas and it’s all been already sorted out. Because you haven’t saved shit yet with your bubble pack Borg packaging and X-Files half.com detritus.
So here’s what I say to the sci-fi geeks, who invented the Internet and understand metaphor so well:
We’re all going for planetfall, to be sure; but let’s be clear that we have neither spacesuit nor heat shields, just a PayPal account and a high baud rate. When we land it will be face-first up to our necks: a new race of interplanetary ostriches face down in the moondust, blinded by laser beams, resistant to tractor beams; Easter Island statues with our arses swaying imperceptibly in the vacuum.
(*) Factoid: a word longer than its derivative – two, count ‘em two, syllables! – but less specific, if not downright inaccurate because something is either a fact or it isn’t: the greatest crime against language since Senator John McCain tried to speak without use of autocue or his pills (though, personally, I think Baltar is working his wires, know what I mean?).