My daughters and I have started to watch some of the episodes from the Star Trek Voyager series on DVD.  We are not disappointed at all.  All of us are finding that the series contains well-written, thought-provoking, stories.

Here is a topic that might seem unrelated to Star Trek:  According to a recent poll, 29% of Americans still approve of the way that George Bush is doing his job.

Here’s the connection.  The mission and efficient operation of a Star Trek starship would not appear to be compatible with the principles of the Bush administration. 

For this reason, I would require that those 29% of Americans who continue to adore the president should no longer be allowed to own or view any more Star Trek shows. That would be hypocrisy.  Instead, I would offer them a new Star Trek series, yet to be written, that I Would Call Star Trek: Bring It On!  What follows is my concept for this new Star Trek series (told from the perspective of a hypothetical crew member):

I started noticing problems on the starship Voyager after the new captain took over.  He smirks a lot and pretends that he was a cowboy even though he wasn’t.  He spends most of his time chopping wood or playing sports hero in the holodeck while his lieutenants run the ship.

At first, there changes were subtle.  Before Officers Meetings, we were asked to acknowledge the existence of an invisible supernatural being.  A few months later, we were required to read extensively from the ancient holy book offered by the Officers, so much so that it took away time that we desperately needed to achieve our engineering goals.  And now the officers’ requirements directly conflict with our engineering protocol. For example, we were recently told that our calibrations of the celestial navigation equipment violated the official Star Trek Holy Book and that we should no longer consider the actual positions of stars to navigate, because this would be “playing God.” When we protested, we were accused of being anti-Federation.

Before the new changes, it was assumed that crew members were responsible adults and that they could make choices regarding their own bodies and lives.  After the Cowboy Captain took over, however, the medical officers refused to dispense any more birth control pills, declaring that it was “playing God” to try to determine when or whether to have children.  Accidentally pregnancies are now common on board, leading to much domestic stress and shortages of lodging quarters and some supplies.

Our new mission statement requires us to force every alien civilization we encounter to become more like us.  If they refuse, we soften them up with our weapons.  Such interventions have recently been given the title of “The New Prime Directive.”  We also have adopted a new policy justifying the attack of planets that don’t believe the teachings from our Holy Book. 

We also institute preemptive attacks on planets that have natural resources we covet.  We previously bargained for the use of natural resources that belonged to others, but we now simply take them.  Sometimes, we need to soften them up first with our shocking and awesome weapons..  When we capture aliens (we call them all “illegal aliens”), we torture them with water boarding and other ancient techniques to improve their attitude and truth telling.

We are putting most of our energy and time into developing new weapons, yet we are neglecting basic education for the children of our crew members.  As a result, the children on the starship have fallen way behind other civilizations in their math, science and critical thinking skills. We are also neglecting basic scientific research, resulting in very few new innovations for the past several years.  Several large areas of the starship have fallen into general disuse and smelly decay.  We have been told that our budget no longer supports developing each of the starships crew members to his or her fullest potential.

We have no energy conservation program here on the starship.  We blast around space using up our precious fuel without any thought to how we are going to replenish it.  In the mean time, we are finding that our life-support systems are increasingly polluted with byproducts generated by use of our engines.  After we complained about this pollution, we were told that the Cowboy Captain had invoked a new “Clear Skies” policy that (to our surprise) doubles the amount of pollution allowed in the ship’s atmosphere.  When our scientists unanimously issued a report condemning the new policy based on their research, their reports were censored and edited by Officers who had no scientific training.

I’d better stop writing at this point, because I am concerned that the officers are now monitoring my journals.