Star Trek and History (4 page)

As William Blake Tyrrell asserts, the white man's confrontation with the Indian represents the heart of the Western saga. In Kirk's galaxy, other warrior races such as the Klingons and Romulans embody the frontier's savage element. The Klingons are most often stereotyped as ruthless and uncivilized people in the original series, but the later versions of
Star Trek
reveal the civilized code that shaped their culture.

In rare moments, alien races show the nobility that white Americans so want to bestow on savages. While they attack and oppress the weak, their actions are often guided by a code. The Romulans, for example, show more nobility and less savagery than some other alien tribes encountered by the
Enterprise
, but they remain inscrutable and powerful foes. In “Balance of Terror,” Kirk finds several Earth outposts destroyed in the borderlands of the Romulan Neutral Zones, and he enters a battle of wits with a Romulan commander, whose cloaked ship emulates the Indian's mythic ability to disappear into the landscape. One of Kirk's goals is to catch the Romulans in Federation space as evidence that they have violated a treaty and have victimized poorly protected and poorly manned Federation bases along the frontier. In the end, Kirk wins, and rather than leave evidence of this encounter, the Romulan leader fully displays his alien nature by destroying his ship and everyone aboard. Over the course of his other missions, Kirk interacts with a wide variety of aliens who represent “the other” lurking in the darkness just out of sight. Some he befriends, but despite the Federation's own commitment to peace, there are races, such as the Romulans, with whom lasting peace is impossible.

Other humanoid races are not the only challenges that threaten the Federation's space pioneers. In Westerns, the villain is frequently a corrupt rancher, a vicious outlaw, or an enraged Indian chief; however, the kind of domination that Kirk often struggles to defeat is that which propels his faithful mount—technology. The first rule of the Western adventurer is self-sufficiency, and if all Kirk needed was a pack and a horse, technology would not be cast so often as a villain. However, by accepting technology as an essential partner in human endeavors, twenty-third-century man has embraced a high level of dependency, and in plotlines shaped by twentieth-century anxiety about mechanization, that reliance on technology can be dangerous. Kirk repeatedly faces a computer or an android or a weapon that develops a mind of its own and turns against human interests. He faces this sort of enemy in several TV episodes, including “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” “The Doomsday Machine,” “The Changeling,” “Return of the Archons,” “For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky,” “I, Mudd,” and “The Apple,” as well as in
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
, and
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
Like the typical Western villain, these machines possess single-mindedness and lack depth. Because they do not possess Kirk's creativity and his ability to reason outside the box, the machines suffer from obvious weaknesses that he can exploit. As he faces a technological enemy, the tension builds toward a showdown in which human intuition and imagination manage to conquer the clockwork precision of a machine mind.

Another often repeated theme is the incompetence of bureaucrats “back home,” who do not understand the frontier. Like a cavalry officer receiving orders from a Washington-based official who has never been out West, Kirk rankles at interference from those who do not comprehend the realities of daily living on the fringes of civilization. These hapless city slickers range from Ambassador Robert Fox in “A Taste of Armageddon” to Commodore George Stocker in “The Deadly Years” to Nilz Baris in “The Trouble with Tribbles.” Living on the edge as he does, Kirk must assert his independence from bureaucrats and out-of-control technology. Kirk's occasional rebellion against the Federation and Starfleet officials also reflects an element in the real history of America's West, where dependence on federal spending nurtured strong antigovernment feeling among its independent people, who resented the fact that Washington's largesse (granting homestead and mining rights, railroad subsidies, and other resources) made them dependent.
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Kirk's contemptuous neglect of orders reaches its apex in
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
, when he directly violates orders by stealing the
Enterprise.
“The word is ‘no,'” he tells his crew. “I am therefore going anyway.” It is not surprising that Kirk takes his biggest career risk on the glimmer of a hope that he might revive his lost friend Spock, without whom he is not whole.

The ties that bind Kirk and Spock to one another resemble the close partnership between the frontier scout Natty Bumppo and his Indian friend, Chingachgook, in James Fenimore Cooper's
Leatherstocking Tales
.
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Like Natty Bumppo, Kirk faces danger in a frontier laden with unknowns, and in his friendship with Spock he is most capable of exercising his individuality and expressing his emotions. Like Bumppo, Kirk must also retain his killer instinct, but at times, he covets Spock's ability to eschew emotion and follow logic, just as Bumppo admires Chingachgook's stoicism and seeks to replicate it within himself.
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Representing within themselves two different cultures, both heroic pairs function effectively as they blaze new trails together, and their “otherness” reinforces their ability to thrive. Their closeness allows each to profit from the mysteries of the other's world and to gain access to that realm without losing touch with his own individuality. Although each would claim close ties to civilization, Kirk and Spock have forsaken the possibility of leading settled lives on their home planets, in a manner that mirrors the lifestyle of Cooper's characters. Following in the path trodden by the backwoodsman and his Indian ally, Kirk and Spock heed a call of the wild that feeds their explorer spirits.

Like the homesteaders who toiled for years trying to eke out a decent living, Kirk is prepared to work hard and take risks in order to maintain the kind of life he wants. More than once, he rejects the idea of an easily obtained utopia. In “This Side of Paradise,” people much like the Western settlers leave Earth to establish an agricultural colony on Omicron Ceti III, but they abandon their goals when they are given the opportunity to enjoy an artificial utopia. Once they discover alien spores that infiltrate their bodies and bring a sense of happiness and belonging, their ambition and desire to work hard dissolve. After the entire
Enterprise
crew mutinies in order to share in this Shangri-La and only Kirk remains unaffected, he finds a way to disrupt the effect of the spores. “Maybe we weren't meant for paradise,” he says. “Maybe we were meant to fight our way through, struggle, claw our way up, scratch for every inch of the way. Maybe we can't stroll to the music of the lute. We must march to the sound of the drums.” He also argues that “man stagnates if he has no ambition, no desire to be more than he is.”

The typical Western hero adapts by becoming more like the frontier, absorbing some of its savagery and turning from a civilized man into a lone wolf, capable of surviving in this new environment. Part of Kirk's mission is to learn—and he does. Like Shane and other Western heroes, he is not afraid to engage in physical combat against a single opponent; however, he devotes a great deal of energy to his sometimes unsuccessful struggle to remain loyal to the high ideals of his culture. Nevertheless, one of the key arguments of
Star Trek
is that men in the future will evolve beyond beings that operate on instinct. They will struggle to apply reason to their actions, but unlike Spock, real men always will feel the magnetic pull of those impulses, sometimes surrendering to them and sometimes overcoming them with the help of intellect. With his killer instinct intact, Kirk struggles with the temptation to engage in conflict whenever he meets adversity. Spock's insights sometimes help him find the course he is seeking. As he tells the Eminiar in “A Taste of Armageddon,” “We're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it. We can admit that we're killers, but we're not going to kill
today.
That's all it takes.”

In spite of his many similarities to Western heroes, it would be wrong to ignore the obvious differences. The biggest distinction between James T. Kirk and the traditional Western hero is that Kirk is not alone. He reflects the American ideal of individualism, but he is not a lone gunman facing off against his enemy at high noon. Instead, he both leads and represents his colleagues on the
Enterprise
, and to a degree, he epitomizes the people of Earth. He and Spock may sometimes function as two men isolated from all others, but at the end of the day they are responsible for more than four hundred men and women and billions more on Earth. Kirk relies on members of the crew to strengthen his moral compass and to bolster his strategic planning. Another key element separating Kirk from the Western hero is his close ties to civilization: Western heroes often represent instinct as opposed to culture, but like many other science fiction adventurers, Captain Kirk is promoting a more advanced culture that embodies higher ideals.
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Furthermore, the search for material wealth often fuels Western settlement, and that drive is entirely foreign to Kirk.

The lofty ideals of the United Federation of Planets and Starfleet are not powered by monetary motives; nevertheless, there is at least a whiff of Manifest Destiny in Kirk and in the missions assigned to him. Whether acting under orders or not, Kirk sometimes tries to force his way into other races' territories and to mandate contact. For instance, he ignores a warning buoy in “The Corbomite Maneuver” and invades First Federation space. In “Spectre of the Gun,” he receives a clear message that the Melkotians want no contact with humans, and yet, he proceeds into orbit around their planet. In “A Taste of Armageddon,” under orders from Ambassador Fox, Kirk seeks to force contact with the inhabitants of Eminiar VII. Like the white Americans who continued moving deeper and deeper into Indian territories in violation of treaties, Kirk sometimes sees only his own goals—not how they affect the peoples who happen to be in his way.

Another facet of Manifest Destiny can be seen in “Arena” and “The Devil in the Dark.” In “Arena,” when Kirk finds the Federation colony at Cestus III has been destroyed, he immediately attacks the reptilian Gorn species and pursues them. Spock tries to end the chase, but Kirk will not stop. He asks Spock, “How can you explain a massacre like that?” Later, he learns that Cestus III was a part of the Gorn's sphere of influence and that the Federation colonists were, in fact, the invaders. In “The Devil in the Dark,” Kirk orders his men to kill the shaggy, silicon-based life-form called a Horta, which is interfering with mining operations that are important to the Federation. Here, as in the exploitation of the Indians and the taking of their lands by the U.S. government, the ends justify the means. If it is necessary to kill an alien creature that appears to be one of a kind, Kirk is willing to do that to return the mine to a normal work schedule. Eventually, he finds that the miners have been destroying the creature's eggs, and as he does in “Arena,” he makes the choice to save the alien's life.

Like many of the people who settled the American West, Kirk has an ambivalent relationship with death and extinction. He combines a wistful respect for life with a reckless haste. In “The Man Trap,” he makes little attempt to reach a peaceful agreement with the last-surviving member of a salt-craving race. His emphasis is placed entirely on saving his crew and killing the creature, but after Dr. Leonard McCoy kills the creature to save Kirk's life, a contemplative Kirk tells Spock that he is “thinking about the buffalo,” which once covered the plains of North America in huge herds. The people who brought about the extinction of the buffalo missed them when they were gone, but apparently they could not stop themselves from carrying out the almost total destruction of the species. By eradicating the buffalo, these men were destroying a way of life for those plains Indians who had not already fallen prey to white people's diseases or to their bullets. Kirk's acknowledgment of his own role in contributing to the extinction of a species represents the civilized man's regrets that he must exterminate others to preserve his own kind, while also demoting the alien in “Man Trap” to the status of grass-grazing quadrupeds. Interestingly, in all three of these episodes, Kirk's foe was a creature extremely alien to him, rather than a somewhat different humanoid.

Kirk is more open to correcting his errors than the nineteenth-century settlers and oppotunists who spread across the western United States like a plague on the Indians. Nevertheless, many episodes are driven by his biased assumptions. That the ends justify the means for Kirk is best spelled out in “A Private Little War,” the Vietnam allegory in which Kirk fuels an arms race among primitive people because the evil Klingons are arming the other side, as Bruce Franklin discusses in another chapter in this volume. The same message becomes clear in “The Enterprise Incident,” when Kirk flagrantly steals a Romulan cloaking device. In the West, this rationale provided the justification for cavalry men and vigilantes to commit atrocities against Indian villages that they saw as potential threats to white settlers. In
Star Trek
, the Federation's fears and its needs obviously outweigh every other consideration—the same could be said for white settlers' interests on the frontier.

In some ways, Kirk is similar to one real-life Western adventurer. His charisma and sometimes foolhardy daring are reminiscent of George Armstrong Custer, who, like Kirk, apparently never considered the likelihood of a no-win scenario. Custer met his Kobayashi Maru at the Little Bighorn, while the much-luckier Kirk survives many close calls by rewriting the rules of conduct. Part of the public fascination with Custer springs from his long-burnished image as a heroic figure—an image with a foundation almost as fictitious as James T. Kirk's. After a period of revisionism in which Custer was labeled as a reckless bumbler, historians now seem to be swinging back toward a more even-handed evaluation in which Custer is seen as neither an egomaniacal warrior nor a heroic officer. He remains a fascinating leader, and both Custer and Kirk resonate with legendary heroism. Just as Sparta's Leonidas faced an overwhelming horde of “barbarians” at Thermopylae, Custer confronted an overwhelming force of angry Indians. Kirk, too, steps into the breach more than once to defend and promote the United Federation of Planets against an apparently superior enemy.