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Authors: Geraldine Brooks
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“Here’s another Star Trek: ‘Plato’s Step Children,’ a study of power induced depravity. The power is psychokinesis (direct action of mind over matter). Its wielders are arrogant sadists who force visitors to inflict indignities on themselves.… First rate.” (This episode contained TV’s first ever interracial kiss, when the aliens forced Kirk and Uhura to smooch for their amusement.) In return, I filled Joannie in on the plots of episodes from the first season of the series, which had aired before she started watching the show.
When NBC threatened to cancel the program after only seventy-nine episodes, we were among the fans who deluged the network with protest letters. Joannie sent thirty-six. By then, she was signing off her letters not only with the Vulcan salutation, but actually writing it in Vulcan: Lash doro V’Succa .
In retrospect, it’s easy to see why this program absorbed us, as it did so many others. At thirteen, we were beginning to wake up to the world, only to find it a tragic and perilous place. Girls in my class were seeing their older brothers go reluctantly to Vietnam. The help that Menzies had sent in order to ingratiate himself with Kennedy had burgeoned from a few trainers into a full-scale troop commitment, including conscription. Australia now had CIA spy satellite bases in the Outback that wouldmake us a target in a nuclear war. Life seemed precarious, even in faraway Sydney. To Joannie, the chill of the Cold War was icy.
“Last night around eleven fifteen P.M . the whole sky lit up all over pale orange for a few seconds and then there came the loudest thunderclap I’ve ever heard,” Joannie wrote. It was an oil refinery explosion, “but at the moment it happened I was sure that a Bomb had fallen. It was really scary because I was so sure of it that I was almost wondering to myself, ‘How much longer am I going to be alive?’ We could see the flames from our second floor.… Afterwards I realized that had it been a bomb I wouldn’t have been alive, because the ones they have today are so powerful to destroy everything far beyond twenty miles from New York, which is appx. where we are.”
In “Star Trek’s” optimistic scenario, we had survived the twentieth century. The Cold War was over, because the Russian, Pavel Checkov—“Keptin! Keptin! The Klingon ship is wery close!”—was part of the Enterprise crew. Race didn’t matter, because a black woman was communications officer. Humanity’s face in the twenty-third century was a reassuringly benign one.
But Joannie and I had to live in 1968, and as the year drew to a close it was the day-to-day reality of our own times, rather than the weekly escapism of “Star Trek,” that began to occupy our correspondence.
Joannie sent me a poster: “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” I pinned it up over my desk and sent her an Australian Vietnam Moratorium button, a red badge with white Vs radiating from the center that had become the popular symbol of opposition to the war. I wrote passionately of my antiwar beliefs, and questioned her about her politics.
“Yes,” she wrote back, “I am a Eugene J. McCarthy supporter.I was very disappointed that McCarthy wasn’t nominated. Such a horrible choice—Nixon and Humphrey! America is deteriorating.” Since this was also my father’s view, I had no doubt it was correct.
My father had turned his back on America with the same finality with which he had ended his singing career. He viewed the country of his birth the way a parent views a child who has grown up to be a disappointment. Through his eyes, I saw the California of his childhood as a golden place, full of promise. But materialism and overdevelopment had ruined it. In Sydney, he saw the unspoiled Los Angeles of his youth. He despised the Darwinistic individualism of the United States. His views were a much more comfortable fit with the cooperative, collectivist spirit of the Aussies he’d
When NBC threatened to cancel the program after only seventy-nine episodes, we were among the fans who deluged the network with protest letters. Joannie sent thirty-six. By then, she was signing off her letters not only with the Vulcan salutation, but actually writing it in Vulcan: Lash doro V’Succa .
In retrospect, it’s easy to see why this program absorbed us, as it did so many others. At thirteen, we were beginning to wake up to the world, only to find it a tragic and perilous place. Girls in my class were seeing their older brothers go reluctantly to Vietnam. The help that Menzies had sent in order to ingratiate himself with Kennedy had burgeoned from a few trainers into a full-scale troop commitment, including conscription. Australia now had CIA spy satellite bases in the Outback that wouldmake us a target in a nuclear war. Life seemed precarious, even in faraway Sydney. To Joannie, the chill of the Cold War was icy.
“Last night around eleven fifteen P.M . the whole sky lit up all over pale orange for a few seconds and then there came the loudest thunderclap I’ve ever heard,” Joannie wrote. It was an oil refinery explosion, “but at the moment it happened I was sure that a Bomb had fallen. It was really scary because I was so sure of it that I was almost wondering to myself, ‘How much longer am I going to be alive?’ We could see the flames from our second floor.… Afterwards I realized that had it been a bomb I wouldn’t have been alive, because the ones they have today are so powerful to destroy everything far beyond twenty miles from New York, which is appx. where we are.”
In “Star Trek’s” optimistic scenario, we had survived the twentieth century. The Cold War was over, because the Russian, Pavel Checkov—“Keptin! Keptin! The Klingon ship is wery close!”—was part of the Enterprise crew. Race didn’t matter, because a black woman was communications officer. Humanity’s face in the twenty-third century was a reassuringly benign one.
But Joannie and I had to live in 1968, and as the year drew to a close it was the day-to-day reality of our own times, rather than the weekly escapism of “Star Trek,” that began to occupy our correspondence.
Joannie sent me a poster: “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” I pinned it up over my desk and sent her an Australian Vietnam Moratorium button, a red badge with white Vs radiating from the center that had become the popular symbol of opposition to the war. I wrote passionately of my antiwar beliefs, and questioned her about her politics.
“Yes,” she wrote back, “I am a Eugene J. McCarthy supporter.I was very disappointed that McCarthy wasn’t nominated. Such a horrible choice—Nixon and Humphrey! America is deteriorating.” Since this was also my father’s view, I had no doubt it was correct.
My father had turned his back on America with the same finality with which he had ended his singing career. He viewed the country of his birth the way a parent views a child who has grown up to be a disappointment. Through his eyes, I saw the California of his childhood as a golden place, full of promise. But materialism and overdevelopment had ruined it. In Sydney, he saw the unspoiled Los Angeles of his youth. He despised the Darwinistic individualism of the United States. His views were a much more comfortable fit with the cooperative, collectivist spirit of the Aussies he’d
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