The
original Star Trek series occasionally went, more or less boldly, into politics--perhaps most notably in the “The Omega Glory”
episode which first aired on March 1, 1968. In this episode, Kirk finds himself
on a strange planet caught in the middle of a war between a tribe of Asiatic village
dwellers called the “Khoms,” and a group of wild nomads called the “Yangs.” (“Yankees”
and “Communists,” get it). The Yangs are mostly barbarians, but they do evidence a (surprisingly familiar) past culture in their use of talismanic “worship words” such as “Freedom,” “Liberty,”
and “Justice for All.”
The greatest of all Yang worship words—known as the "E plebnista"—can only be spoken by a chief. In the dramatic climax (which does not explain why the Yangs speak English and carry around American flags), Kirk resolves the great conflict by recognizing that E plebnista is actually a corruption of “We the People” and giving the Yangs a good dose of high school civics.
The greatest of all Yang worship words—known as the "E plebnista"—can only be spoken by a chief. In the dramatic climax (which does not explain why the Yangs speak English and carry around American flags), Kirk resolves the great conflict by recognizing that E plebnista is actually a corruption of “We the People” and giving the Yangs a good dose of high school civics.
Gene
Roddenberry’s here point is worth remembering: when the Constitution is made
the subject of adoration, and when its key passages are converted into
acontextualized proof texts, we end up with a ridiculous form of ancestor
worship instead of a participatory democracy. We ignore the flesh-and-blood Founders by
converting them into two-dimensional deities and their ideas about
self-government into a prescriptive list of commandments. “We the people”
becomes “E plebnista.”
For me, a sign that somebody has gone well down the E plebnista road to is the tendency to talk about the government as a “them” and the
American people as an “us.” This is common on both sides of the political
spectrum these days, depending on whose ox happens to be getting gored.
If we can learn only one single lesson from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the lives
of the Founding Fathers, it is that the government is an “us” not a “them.” But
since we don’t always agree with each other, the “us” that is the government
will sometimes act in ways we, as individuals, do not support. That’s how
participatory democracy works in a large republic. When we insist on speaking
of the government as something other than ourselves, we invalidate the right of
people who disagree with us to take part in the democratic process.
We miss the point badly when we try to guess what Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton would have thought about the individual mandate or the top capital gains tax rate. That is “E plabnista” thinking, or lookin to the Constitution as a religious text designed to provide us with a list of commandments to run our lives by. But the whole point of “We the people” is that we are, well, the people. The Framers gave us a process that we can use to create the kind of society that we want to live in; they never meant to give us “worship words” to keep in a box.
We miss the point badly when we try to guess what Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton would have thought about the individual mandate or the top capital gains tax rate. That is “E plabnista” thinking, or lookin to the Constitution as a religious text designed to provide us with a list of commandments to run our lives by. But the whole point of “We the people” is that we are, well, the people. The Framers gave us a process that we can use to create the kind of society that we want to live in; they never meant to give us “worship words” to keep in a box.
