Death Star vs Enterprise

It’s in no way a coincidence that the two biggest scifi mythoi of the 20th century both feature a mythic representation of the same aircraft carrier.

The Death Star is the nuclear powered American super-carrier CVN-65 that served in the Vietnam war, launching over 13,000 missions in the war that inspired George Lucas to base the Rebel Alliance on the Viet Cong.

And the starship Enterprise was directly named after the CVN-65 Enterprise. Roddenberry intially named the starship Yorktown after a WW2 carrier, but changed it to Enterprise because the carrier’s nuclear engines inspired the starship’s warp engines.

Humans use myth to parse reality. So it’s no exaggaeration to say that American scifi is American culture attempting to process its identity crisis.

On one hand ‘Murica is the evil Empire.

If you don’t believe that go to the War Remants Museum in Ho Chi Minh city and watch American tourists shocked faces after they’ve seen floor after floor of evidence of the atrocities commited by their Empire.

Or read about the endless CIA coups worldwide which put the Imperial Security Bureau in Andor to shame.

But the reason I can’t nod and agree with the anti-Imperialists who condemn America as just another Empire is because it was once something more.

America was the power that defeated fascism. Even if it was majorly reponsible for its creation and the communists did most of the fighting. America picked up the tab.

America did rebuld its wartime opponents, founded the UN, and built a world order that somehow avoided nuclear war…for now.

Yes. America is the Empire. But America is also the Federation.

And for many decades these two mythic dreams struggled for the American psyche.

But I fear in recent years that the Empire has won. America has stopped even pretending to be the Federation, its super-carriers are now the plaything of its spoilt toddler Emperor.

Which is a bad outcome for everyone. America’s real power was the belief that, on a good day, it might show up as the Federation. With that gone its just another sh*thole post-Imperial relic.

And without any order the world is careening highspeed into world war.

Can we reconstruct a real Federation? Or are we all doomed to live under warring wannabe Empires until they blow us all up?