Being Inappropriate

In recent months, I’ve noted a little more heat than usual from people who seem to think they’ve caught me “being political.” My push back is this: Define politics. Define “political.” What is or isn’t political? Name things. Be specific. If you were to say you don’t like my politics, what parts of me do you imagine you have in mind when you speak of my politics? What parts of yourself are your politics? It’s as if they’ve been trained to avoid such questions like the plague. Their faces go blank. It’s a sight to behold. It’s as if “politics” can and must be deployed as a word with which to fend off dawning moral realizations and to perhaps villainize others as extreme or unprofessional, but it must also never be defined. To define it is to risk getting tagged as “political.” To get successfully tagged as having gotten political when you weren’t supposed to get political is to get pegged as being (or having been) inappropriate. When that happens, you might be out of a job. Or not.

I get into all of this and more in the video at the bottom of this post. I return to Aw Shucks Fascism and related matters in an effort to cast light, for those outside of Tennessee, on the subject of our eye-rubbingly corrupt, Republican elected officials. I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican, but I say “Republican” this time around, because in Tennessee they’re the ones debasing themselves by doing the bidding of a white supremacist terror clown ordering the killing of American citizens while moving between D.C. and Florida and sometimes golfing. They’re being inappropriate. May they each and all repent and be made whole.

What does the Star Fleet Technical Manual have to do with any of this? Let me explain. There’s a living tradition among us called Star Trek. Like Star Wars and Christianity, its witness is sometimes mixed up with marketing and ad revenue and bad faith operatives, but it’s a river of living water to millions. I procured the volume pictured above as a child in the eighties. I’ve been reluctant to part with it, because it marks my own desire to immerse myself within that river by…maybe penning a Star Trek novel or pitching an idea for an episode. If you click the link to the Wikipedia entry you’ll see that, while it started as a beloved document among fans of Star Trek, it eventually got canonized as the author’s insights were incorporated into the films.

In any case, I got to thinking about Star Trek when Stacey Abrams traveled to Nashville to try to persuade Republicans in our state legislature to refrain from morally debasing themselves (and disgracing their families): “This is not democracy. This is cowardice.” You can read her remarks here.

In addition to being an artisan of moral seriousness for our time, Abrams also plays the President of United Earth in Star Trek. Behold

Witness knows no division. I am not suggesting that the United Federation of the Planets was officially represented in a Senate Judiciary Committee in Nashville last week. But I’m insisting beloved community was and will be again. Many within my state and federal governments are being catastrophically inappropriate and alarmingly unsafe people, a threat to themselves and others, hot messes all. But they are everlastingly outnumbered. Empire has a shelf life. It’s inappropriate. Bigotry is doomed.

Here’s me saying a lot of this and more to a camera on my computer and whoever’s listening.

Thoughts?

Editor’s Note: Please note that the art featured up top (via the New York Review of Books) is the work of Didier Viodé. He can be reached via this website.