When I have had enough, enough of the antics of the current occupant of the Oval Office, enough of the cowardice of his Republican enablers, and enough of the media’s hunger for Democratic disagreements that can then be labeled “disarray,” I walk away. It isn’t hard. Turn off the news, shut down the computer and put away the connected gadgets, and find some harmless form of escape.
For me, that has meant taking full advantage of the binging opportunity that is presented on streaming television services like Netflix and Amazon Prime. I think it is this commercial-free immersive experience that has turned me away from current broadcast, and even cable, television series.
Recently, I have been on an immersive voyage to the final frontier, stopping for the past several weeks on Deep Space Nine, an outpost of the Star Trek universe. Deep Space Nine (DS9) is the third television series in the Star Trek franchise, coming after The Next Generation (TNG) and before Voyager.
I was happily enjoying the goings on of the humans, Bajorans, Trills, Ferengis, Cardassians, and Klingons as the space station protected the stable wormhole that connected the Alpha Quadrant to the Gamma Quadrant, when I was stunned by an episode that seemed to have nothing to do with the Star Trek universe set 400 years in the future, but so much to do with today.
For those unfamiliar with this series entry in the franchise, DS9 is a space station in the Alpha Quadrant. The Federation, of which Earth is a member, in partnership with the Bajoran people, is running the station which sits next to and protects a stable wormhole that connects to a system thousands of light-years away in the Gamma Quadrant. Captain Benjamin Sisko (played by Avery Brooks), of Starfleet, is in charge of the station, assisted by his first officer Major Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor) of the Bajoran Militia.
In addition to docking facilities and housing, DS9 boasts a promenade lined with shops, multiple restaurants, and a bar and casino run by a Ferengi named Quark (Armin Shimerman) with help from his brother and nephew. Overseeing the security for the station is a changeling, Odo (Rene Auberjonois).
The cast also includes Michael Dorn, who reprises his role as the Klingon, Worf, from The Next Generation, and joined DS9 in its fourth season. And Colm Meaney, also a TNG alumni, plays Miles O’Brien, chief engineer of the station.
In “Far Beyond the Stars,” Benjamin Sisko learns that an old friend has died as his ship was lost in the ongoing war against the Gamma Quadrant Dominion. The captain is weary of losing friends and colleagues to what appears to be a never-ending war that the Federation is statistically destined to lose. As he is contemplating a future without Starfleet, he catches a glimpse of a man outside his office dressed in 1950s business attire. He crosses the threshold of a cabin after what looks like a 1950s baseball player enters it, and steps into New York City, circa 1953.
In this world he is Benny Russell, a struggling science fiction writer for Incredible Tales, a monthly magazine not unlike Galaxy or Amazing Tales. Almost the entire cast of DS9 appears as characters in Sisko’s vision, sans make-up. Miles O’Brien is now a writer similar to Isaac Asimov, obsessed with robots. Dr. Bashir (Alexander Siddig) is also a writer, married to Major Kira who writes under the name KC Eaton, since it is believed that the public would never buy science fiction written by a woman. In fact, many women science fiction writers used the same ploy to sell their work. (Come to think of it, as late as the mid-’70s, in order to get a job in the insurance industry that required the ability to write a coherent sentence, I had to write an article using my initials instead of my first name, for the same reason.)
But in the Star Trek universe, gender, skin color, alien status—none of that matters. For we have advanced to the point that Martin Luther King Jr. could only dream about, where what a man or woman is is more important than what he or she looks like. The fact that DS9 had an African American playing the lead, which was almost unheard of when the series premiered in January 1993, was one of the reasons we started watching it. I wanted to see what would come of it, but in a universe of people with skin that is blue or ears that are larger than one’s head, the fact that a person had black skin or even dotted skin was unremarkable. He commanded the space station because he was the commander.
In 1953 however, he was a Negro. And when the publisher of the magazine he wrote for wanted to do a photo shoot to show their readers what the writers looked like, both Benny Russell and Kay Eaton are excluded. In the words of liberal writer Herbert Rossoff (Quark):
"If the world's not ready for a woman writer – imagine what would happen if it learned about a Negro with a typewriter – run for the hills! It's the end of civilization!"
To which Benny responds:
“What about James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Zora Neal Hurston, Langston Hughes? Ever heard of Native Son?”
But his editor, Douglas Pabst (Rene Auberjonois) is adamant.
“That's literature for liberals and intellectuals. The average reader isn't going to spend his hard-earned cash on stories written by Negroes.”
As the story unfolds, the writers are given their choice of illustrations to write about for the next month’s magazine. One of the sketches depicts a space station reminiscent of DS9, and is selected by Benny Russell for his story. As he is leaving the office that evening, he drops the sketch, which is then picked up by two apparently corrupt police officers (an enemy Cardassian and Founder) who give him a hard time, assuming that he is a janitor of the building, even though he is dressed in a business suit. They let him go after warning him that “Next time you won't be so lucky.”
He spends the night writing, and sees his fiancée the next morning at the diner where she works. She tells him that the owner is willing to sell, and that she and Benny could buy it when the owner retires. Willie Hawkins (Worf), a famous baseball player, strides in and begins flirting with Cassie, who is having none of it. When she asks him why, now that he is a famous baseball player, he still lives uptown, he explains that “They can hardly get used to me playing alongside them on the ball field ... living next to 'em—that's a whole other story.” A young friend of Benny’s, and apparent petty thief, Jimmy (played by Cirroc Lofton who also plays Jake Sisko, Ben Sisko’s son on DS9), in response to Benny’s suggestion that he get a real job says, “As what—a delivery boy or a dishwasher? No, thanks.”
And so, within a few minutes we are swept away from a future of diversity, inclusiveness, and liberal values into an era that represents everything that the Make America Great Again crowd wishes to achieve. But it gets worse.
Benny Russell is obsessed with his creation of the space station and its black captain. The other writers love his story, but the editor tells him that they will not print a story with a black protagonist.
Look, Benny, I'm a magazine editor -- not a crusader. I'm not here to change the world. I'm here to put out a magazine. That's my job. And that means I've got to answer to Mister Stone, the national distributors, the wholesalers --(holding up the story)-- and none of them are going to want to put this on the newsstand. For all we know, it could cause a race riot.
Pabst suggest that Benny put the story in a drawer for 50 years “or however long it takes the human race to become colorblind.” He offers Benny the chance to write a novella for the next issue instead.
When Benny Russell goes home that night, he writes six more Deep Space Nine stories, all with Benjamin Sisko, the “colored Captain,” in charge of the station. The editor refuses them again. It is suggested that he revise the story to make it all the dream of a current-day black man who holds a menial job. The revisions made, the magazine agrees to publish the stories at three cents a word, which is big money for a black writer in 1953.
Cassie and Benny go out dancing that night to celebrate, and upon leaving the nightclub hear gunshots. The two police officers who harassed Benny earlier have shot and killed Jimmy because he was trying to break into a car. They claim he had a weapon: the crowbar that he was using to break into the car. Furious, Benny lunges toward one of the officers while the other hits him in the back of the head. They beat him to the ground while Cassie, pushed aside, cries for them to stop.
Severely injured in the beating, it is some weeks before Benny is able to return to the office. When he does, he learns that the publisher has “pulped” the issue. He has all copies destroyed, claiming that the issue did not meet their standards. But we know, as does Benny, that the reason the issue was pulped was Benny’s story. Benny Russell breaks down at this final assault on his humanity and is carted off in an ambulance.
A couple of things struck me about this episode’s depiction of racial discrimination: it was written in 1997, broadcast in 1998, and yet felt like it was today. Seven years had passed since Rodney King was beaten to the ground by a bunch of racists in uniform when this episode aired. That beating was captured on video by a nearby resident and shocked white America.
But this was in an era before smart phones ,and while beatings of that type may have remained common in black America, white America thought we had grown past that behavior. Perhaps that is why it was suggested that Benny Russell wait 50 years to publish a story about a Negro captain. Because we thought that by 1998 we had made progress, that we had weeded out the bad cops after the Rodney King beating. And that we had taken steps since 1953 to ensure equal treatment of all Americans.
Today, it is almost impossible to view social media without seeing a video of yet another beating, shooting, or murder of a black man or woman by uniformed officers of the law. The pictures that shocked a nation in 1991 have become commonplace today. My fear is that we have become inured to such videos. In an era where the chief executive feels that there are good people amongst American Nazis, that African nations are “shitholes,” and that infants belong in cages, it is hard to retain the fresh shock and outrage. The media has normalized Donald Trump and is freely ignoring the damage that that has done to our society.
But this episode brings back all of that outrage, anger, fear, and grief because the racism is juxtaposed against a society that is so inclusive that diversity is a huge and welcome part of it. The writers manage to avoid the outright preachiness that seemed to permeate many of the earlier Star Trek series (and yes, I am looking at The Original Series), while still demonstrating the insidious nature of racism. It is not just the cops who beat Russell that are racists. There is racism in the attitude of the editor who is “not a crusader,” but simply a man trying to hold onto a job. That attitude allows the actions of the police and of the publisher to occur without reprisal. He, and so many other Americans were and are collaborators, enablers. We make it possible.
The calm acceptance that a woman could not appear in the photo of the science fiction writers or publish her work under her own name reminds us that that era was rife with sexism as well as racism. McCarthyism, the real McCarthyism, was at its peak then and posed a real threat to writers, as depicted in an exchange during the episode between a writer and the editor. And this is what the MAGA devotees want: They want a society that excludes from power all but straight white males.
I know this. I just did not expect it to be revealed so clearly in an episode of a television series written in 1997, that takes place 400 years in the future as well as 65 years in the past, and that isn’t even on the air any longer.