I don’t do a lot of hard news analysis here at Fanboy Rampage, much to Brian’s chagrin.  Oh sure, I’ll cover Stan on CNN, or Grant Morrison’s talk at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London but last week at the store, Brian was all, “Hey, when are you going to have a Fanboy that looks at the possible repercussions of travel restrictions imposed by Libya on Egypt?”

“Uh, is there a way to make of fun of Kevin Smith while doing it?”

“Dude.  People don’t just read Onomatopoeia for the laughs; they read it for the information.  For a lot of people, we’re their hotline to the world.  It’s great if we can make somebody laugh, but if we can help somebody learn, all the better.  You know, the sound of laughter fades, but the silence of wisdom reverberates always.”  He paused, and then gazed meaningfully across the room.  “That’s from Module G1, Steading of the Hill Giant Chief.”

“You’re playing D&D again?”

Hibbs nodded.  “Me and Ben.”

“He’s not even four months old, is he?”

Brian rolled his eyes.  “It’s not like he’s the DM, for crying out loud.  Anyway, my point is that we have a responsibility to report on the world as we see it.  You know, as a way of informing the populace, and shoving our opinion down their throats, and stuff.”

“But we do that every month!”

“Yes, but we should do it on a larger scale.”  Hibbs stroked his beard.  “After all, my plan is to have Onomatopoeia be as well-read and circulated as The New York Times.  It’ll help pay for Ben’s college.”

“I don’t know, Bri…”

“Look, Jeff.  It’s simple.  Just look at world events, or contemporary American history, and pontificate on it.  How hard is that?”

I shook my head, read some comix, and then went home.  I picked up some newspapers, read Google news, looked on the blogosphere for people’s takes on current world events.  And finally, after days and days of studying current events, I think I’ve come to understand a matter that is of grave national importance:  I know how to make Star Trek good again.

Now, my theory may come off as a little controversial to some, and may in fact rile a few people and/or put me under investigation by government authorities but hear me out.  This theory came only after hard and judicious study of the facts, a couple of quick Google searches, and a very productive nap, and I think it deserves careful attention and scrutiny.

In order for Star Trek to become good again, someone has to shoot the President.

I think it’s pretty much common knowledge that James T. Kirk is a thinly veiled analogue of John F. Kennedy.  Like Kennedy, Kirk was a New Deal kind of fellow, particularly when that New Deal involved doing it with strange broads in unusual places while officially on duty.  Like Kirk, Kennedy commanded a craft and crew, had several tense showdowns against an enemy empire (over the “neutral zone” of Cuba) and had vocal mannerisms people are still making fun of today.  It took a couple of years between Kennedy’s assassination and the launching of Star Trek (but the assassination was late ’63, the filming of The Cage, ST’s original pilot, was early 1965, little more than a year apart) but much of the series’ liberal and multiethnic flavor came from the progressive ideals associated with Kennedy.  Kirk’s odd mixture of progressive idealism and staunch military heroism and self-sacrifice can best be understood through the looking glass of JFK.  (For bonus points, those of you familiar with Camelot can have fun trying to figure out who each of the other characters might be.  Is Spock Robert McNamara?  Is Bones LBJ?  And who’s Bobby Kennedy?  Chekhov? Sulu?)

Well, parlor games are all fine and good, you say, but that does nothing to explain the success of Next Gen, does it?

In fact, Next Gen comes on air in 1987, in part because of the continuing success of the Star Trek movies, the first genuine success being Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan in 1982; barely one year after John Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan.  (According to my theory, the reason why the first Star Trek movie barely made back its money was that neither of the assassination attempts on President Gerald Ford in 1975 were successful.  If they had managed to at least wing him, Star Trek: The Motion Picture would have been a huge success.  Likewise, Francisco Durran’s firing of shots at the White House in 1994—if he had managed to graze President Clinton, Star Trek: Voyager would have been largely more successful).  The ongoing success of Picard and crew was obviously largely due to terrific writing and acting, but President Reagan being shot and recovering to serve two terms also had a lot to do with it.

Now, some good questions right around now might be:  Um, Jeff, are you insane?  Do you believe this?  And the answer is two-fold.  On the one hand, I don’t believe anyone should ever shoot the President, ever.  Let’s be utterly clear on that.  But do I believe that there might be a link between how popular Star Trek can get and the martyrdom of our leaders?  Well, maybe.

How, after all, are Americans—a generally peaceful bunch who believe in democracy and elected leaders—able to thrill, week in and week out, to the recurring adventures of a militaristic organization run by a promoted leader who is able to jail and punish those who dissent from his every command?  It can really only happen, I think, when our own leaders step outside the usual diagram of public service, and become something more than charismatic bureaucrats.  A President who has been shot, whether or not he survives, carries with him greater power in the collective memory (Kennedy and Lincoln were shot and killed, but look at both Roosevelts, who survived their assassination attempts) and can allow Americans to believe again in an archetype most of us are either too cynical or too cautious to embrace:  the natural leader.  After the attempted assassination on a President, we want to believe in leaders incapable of being destroyed, leaders that take wise counsel and yet can control every person and situation that comes their way on their own.  We want to believe, in short, in the captains of Star Trek.  They are our idealized Presidents, our humanized Commanders-in-Chief.

There’s actually another variation on my theory, by the way, one that’s a little less likely to get me forcibly strip-searched the next time I walk through an airport.  In this variation, the success of Star Trek is tied directly to how aggressively a President pursues a space program.  After all, Kennedy raced the Russians to the moon, and Reagan aggressively promoted his “Star Wars” program as a way to protect us against the bombs of kill-crazy Russkies.  In this scenario, President Bush, in announcing his intention to get a space colony on the moon by 2020, and manned expeditions to Mars after that, has already lit the fuse that may lead to a hugely popular (and hopefully suck-free) Star Trek.  And as pundits begin the process of spinning this announcement as being a Space Race with the Chinese, as opposed a way to throw huge bushelfuls of money at corporations our Vice-President used to head, that fuse may burn brighter and faster, giving us a Star Trek we don’t want to throw cheese doodles at by the end of the decade.

Now, some might say the cost of making Star Trek popular again, whether by trying to bust a cap in the ass of a world leader or guaranteeing massive amounts of debt to future generations while doing nothing to help people who need it (or maybe the trick is to do both?), is a little high, and I would agree with that, particularly when some say all you’ve got to do is get rid of that lousy soft-rock theme song, stop playing Vulcan Grab-Ass every other week (for God’s sake, if there’s one thing Vulcans are not designed for, it’s Grab-Ass!), get that Quantum Leap guy off his prescription painkillers, and create aliens who are a little bit more like old-school Klingons and less like badly complexioned Huggy Bears.  But after watching the diminishing returns of the Star Trek franchise (even with series like Deep Space Nine that, by many accounts, was the best Trek series ever once it got kicking), I have to wonder.  Making actual science fiction popular with the masses might require much more effort and sacrifice than any of us may have imagined.