Not a Metaphor for Anything Political

[mrissa]

Of course I have political opinions. And of course I have a response to all this. But it isn't the only thing in my life, not even the only thing in my life yesterday and today. The stuff below the cut-tag has nothing to do with election coverage, but rather with tapes of a fictional show several years old.

So. timprov and I (and occasionally markgritter and Ceej, but it's T's and my thing) have been watching old episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. His mom has them all on tape sequentially, so we can just watch the next one whenever we feel like it and not worry about juggling what I'm supposed to know already and what hasn't happened yet in the show's timeline. It is emphatically not a great show. It is entertaining, either to watch or to yell at, from time to time.

Right. So. We watched an episode of DS9 when I was feeling cruddy this weekend that just pointed out what's wrong with TV, to me. I called it "Bajoran Girlfriend-Swapping Holiday" (or "Everybody **** Dax!", but that's not a unique episode identifier). The premise was that Lwaxanna Troi (YARG!) showed up with a disease that made most people in the station unbearably attracted to each other in some combination other than their established relationships. This was later explained as being based on latent, subconscious attractions.

Here's what happened: the only marrige was entirely unaffected. The married couple is entirely monogamous on both a conscious and a subconscious level. This annoyed me the least: it fits with the characterization of these two, and I think it's clear that some married people are attracted to people other than their spouse and some are not. But the fact that there was only one married couple made this feel a good deal more like How Marriage Is than I would have preferred. This is particularly the case because no one who was affected by this virus seemed to be attracted to more than one person subconsciously.

Ditto power stuff: the Commander is entirely unaffected by anyone female beneath him in the chain of command (which is most of the female characters, barring the loathsome Mrs. Troi). We are freed from dealing with any impropriety whatsoever, as the Commander is more machine than man now, twisted and -- oops, sorry, wrong character. Anyway. Not attracted to anybody. This incidentally frees the writers from dealing with a plausible "black man attracted to white woman" relationship, since the Commander's son Jake is 16 and not taken seriously in his attraction to an older female character. (Characters are also only attracted to people roughly their own age. Oh, naturally.)

The rest of the characters kissed and pawed each other in some combinations but were interrupted at crucial moments, before they could do anything that would have to be dealt with between their characters later in the series. Not a single major character had actual sex (by any definition I could think of, even by implication) with anyone else. Despite being so overwhelmed with hormones that their best judgment was impaired. They were hormonal enough to fall all over each other in non-standards combinations, but not enough to...remove any clothing? At all? Some of these people are known to be non-virgins in previous episodes. It seems to me extremely unlikely that they don't know what to do.

Nobody on the entire station, apparently, has any subconscious homosexual leanings. None. Nobody could be any straighter if you drew them with rulers. I believe that evidence suggests that there is a genetic component to sexuality (not that it is all genetics, mind you), and I might find it believable if an alien species didn't have that gene pop up. Maybe. (I'd especially find it believable if it was then presented as the difference between us and them rather than a way we ought to be. If it was more, lookee, them funny aliens aren't queer like us humans. Hoo-ee, are we queer. Queeeeeeerity queer queer queer. Race fulla pervs, we are. If you can think of it, some of us have tried it backwards. It's the glory of our species.) (Ahem. Anyway.) So...yeah. I'm a straight girl. I'm not someone who believes that everybody is bi somewhere deep down. But I certainly believe that lots of people have leanings that way at least as much as they do towards random Trill hos.

All this bugged me because this plot was not forced upon the writers. They chose this plot. And then they chose to rob it of any actual power. Nobody has to deeply regret anything. Nobody has to reconsider relationships they'd previously rejected on a subconscious level (or the ones they'd previously accepted on a conscious level). The viewer gets to watch combinations of characters kiiiiissing and behave like 10-year-old girls: "Oooooh, they're kiiiiiissing! Oh, they're so cute!" And then it's all over with, no messy emotional stuff, no consent or power issues, no identity issues, everybody just fine. They're not going to show ST:DS9: The Porno, and I wouldn't watch it if they did. But this is a show that's previously made abundantly clear by suggestion that some of the characters are having sex, and it's in a franchise that's infamous for the Ripping Of Shirts. (Well, maybe only Shatner's shirt, but that, if anything, should count double for the infamy portion of the scoring.) It could have worked, sort of. But they don't want to think about the difficult parts of sex, just the parts that make 10-year-old girls sigh dreamily.

I think that a big chunk of the real problem is not that they can't show sex on television but that they have trouble dealing with larger plot arcs, especially on an emotional/character-development level. Larger plot arc: we have discovered and are opposed to The Dominion. Pretty simple. Larger plot arc: Julian Liiiikes Dax (Not Reciprocated). Again, not what one would call complex, though I think the actor handles it well. Larger plot arc: Jake grows up, to the Commander's dismay. Hard to get much sitcom-simpler than that. But if you're going to go sitcom-simple, for heaven's sake go with it. Do not come up with plots that cannot be reasonably developed in an hour-long show and then do them inadequately. Do what you're doing well, rather than something else poorly.

I've said before that I didn't watch Farscape because it would have required more energy than I had to make sure I watched it every week, and it had major ongoing plot (or at least gave that impression). I more or less gave up on Monk, which I actively enjoy and whose ongoing plot points were subtle and sort of beside the main point of each episode, because I...forgot. Because if I was going to schedule my week, "Watch TV from 9-10 Friday night" was the absolute last thing to go on the schedule, and usually it got left out.

I may end up getting the DVDs of Farscape and Monk eventually, if I decide I'll watch them occasionally enough to be worth the money. I'm much more ready to watch something if I can wander away and do something else for, oh, say, 6 months. timprov picked DS9 to watch together partly because it has some good moments he enjoyed the first time around, but also because it's readily available with almost no effort on our part. It's a good choice. It entertains both of us, and it's something we can do even when he's feeling most royally cruddy. (Or, as this weekend, when I am.) In case you didn't get it, I like picking apart what bothers me about things like this. There's a fine line between "show I can enjoy picking apart" and "show I get too mad at," but DS9 manages to stay on the former side of the line so far.

Still. Bajoran Girlfriend-Swapping Season. What were they thinking?


Anyway, anyway. I'm going to say this in my other journal in just a minute, too: I appreciate that your journal or weblog is a place to vent, and I don't want to stop you from expressing what you're thinking or feeling about yesterday's election. But I would also really like to hear what else is going on in your life. What are you doing? Reading? Watching? Listening to? Eating? Planning? Looking forward to? What is interesting to you right now besides this specific election? If you're moaning, "Nothing!", please reconsider. Take a walk. Take some deep breaths. Deal with basic things. As matociquala puts it, slop the pigs.

I know: what does it smell like where you are? No election-related metaphors. No metaphors at all. Inhale air and tell me what it smells like. It's probably a strange thing to ask of you, but it's what I'd really like. Tell me what you smell. You can tell me what you think, too, that'd be fine, but start with what you smell. It will make me happy, and it's a good thing to make a Mrissa happy. Trust me on this one, I know best.

Here it smells of humid paper and fresh ink and fallen leaves and unwashed Mris and oatmeal pancakes. Soon it will smell of washed Mris and saffron and tomatoes as well. Now it's your turn.

Comments

[fiddledragon]

Smells like a cube farm :) can't even smell odd smells from the microwave. Then again, I'm munching on M&M's - (chocolate therapy combined with retail therapy (well, fabric/pattern shopping anyway) makes for good therapy)

[jenett]

It smells like books, and a little like dust and computers. And a little like chocolate pudding (lunch's dessert.)

I liked the way it smelled outside today. Frost and crispness and a hint of leaf-fires from somewhere.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Here it smells like leaves and sunshine and a sweet warm-earth smell that's almost like spring. Inside, it smells like grapes and orange cleaner and fresh-washed hair.

Soon it will smell of baking and blood orange tea and sewing machine oil.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Ooh, sewing machine oil, good one, Leah. I can almost smell that myself now.

[sraun]

Smells like cube farm with overtones of peppermint and pseudo-Mexican cooking. I'm at work, have an open tin of red Altoids on my desk, and just finished a Steak Fajita Lean Pocket for lunch. ;-)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Dust, most likely.

Star Trek in all its franchises is deeply deeply heteronormative. Also several other kinds of normative. As for example, note the cunning use of aliens to finesse racial and sexual diversity. The black guy on the bridge of the Enterprise (ST:TOS? Is a woman. The black guy on the bridge of the Enterprise (ST:TNG)? Is a Klingon. The black guy on the bridge of Voyager? Is a Vulcan. The woman on the bridge of the Enterprise (ST:E)? Is a Vulcan. There's always ONE alien, and except for in the original series, that alien is also being played by a minority. The original series and Voyager do also have Asian-Americans on the bridge, to give credit where it's due.

But the doctors? Are men. Even when they have to be holographs, they're men.

Voyager has a female captain, but her role reduces always and nauseatingly to den mother. And her bridge crew is male. The only woman on the bridge of the Enterprise (TNG) is the useless and insipid Troi. Whom I loathe, and who is so clearly a token gesture that it's embarrassing.

Moreover, the aliens are always moving toward assimilation with human society. Conflictedly, sometimes. But, hell, they're in Starfleet, of course they're assimilating.

DS9--not to argue with any of your excellent points--is the only Star Trek franchise that has ever seriously tried to push the envelope. The black guy is the commander. His second in command is a woman. Now, mind you, we still don't have any human females in positions of power, and clearly we had to drop Asian-Americans from the mix lest we get too excited and have to lie down in a dark room for a while. (And the doctor is still male.) But it's a step in the right direction. And the non-human races on DS9 are refreshingly uninterested in assimilating into the Federation. The Ferengi are mostly played for laughs, but their point of view remains, well, Ferengi.

Ahem.

As you can tell, I've thought about this issue probably too much. I'll shut up now.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I love you. That is all.

Here, it smells like tea and unwashed mastiff, and like I should probably do yesterday's dishes soon.

I think I should light a candle. *g*

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

Outside it smells like a cool early autumn: The air is crisp with just a slight tinge of woodsmoke, mingled with wet grass, drying leaves, and the trees and rich soil of the mountaintop on the edge of campus. A depressed morning became a happy one once I stepped outside and smelled the world around me.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Dr. Crusher: female.

It's funny that you should point out the doctors, because when I was a kid and assessing what they had "fixed" (which was the only way I could think of it) on ST:NG, Crusher and Troi clearly had "girly jobs" in my brain. Tasha Yar was the security officer. That was the cool part. And I stopped watching before they killed her. Doctor, though, doctor was one of the things women could "always" do in my child-brain, not something that was ever an issue. (I confess a bit of resentment towards the bio majors in my Women in Science group in college. They were 60% of the major! What did they need a group for?)

DS9 has Keiko as an Asian-American character. Though she isn't one of the very main ones, I like her character for various reasons, in part because at this point in the series, they're no longer resolving the two-body problem by having her do make-work. It's putting stress on her and Miles's marriage to be separated, but they're doing the balancing act of his career, her career, and their relationship, not just assuming that one of the three is the automatic important bit.

(I'm still snrking over lyingn down in a dark room for awhile.)

Hmmm. Do the Cardassians count as not interested in assimilating? I mean, they clearly aren't interested in assimilating, but they're sort of villain characters...but then again sort of not. Some of the soft touches on the Cardassians are pretty transparent ("Let us now have a sympathetic moment!"), but the writers were at least making some effort to have any sympathetic moments in the first place.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

It doesn't smell like much of anything here, which is odd because the burrito I had for lunch is in the trash behind me. (Or was until 30 seconds ago when someone came in to empty the trash.) I think my new office must have very good ventilation. Also, the fact that they generally empty the trash just after I finish lunch may help. (I put my hand to my face to make sure my nose stil works, and then it smells like hand - a trace of sweat and a soupcon of the burrito.).

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

You're right. I was forgetting Crusher. Who, at least, isn't quite as useless as Troi.

This is what I get from launching a rant with nothing but memory to back me up.

I wasn't forgetting Keiko, but I do find her useless and annoying--and I was talking specifically about the major cast of characters we're supposed to watch and sympathize with (or whatever it is you're supposed to do with Star Trek characters) on a week-to-week basis.

Seven of Nine (who is actually my favorite character on ST:V) is so blatantly an appeal to that mythical 18-35 male viewer that I never quite know what to do with her. She's one of the places where Voyager frustrated me most, because they'd start to do something really interesting with her, and then get scared and back off.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

I smell pizza grease. To the point where I keep rubbing my nose, because there must be some pizza grease on it. Which there wasn't, until I started rubbing my nose, and getting grease from my hands on my nose.

Rinse, repeat.

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

From my cathedral office, it smells a bit sour and musty (old building, damp day, hard to keep clean). But I have a lavendar ribbon-thingie in my pencil-holder (i.e. a stalk of lavendar stems woven together with very thin royal blue ribbon) that my mum-in-law gave me a while back, and I just poured myself a cup of rather nutmeggy chai. And the sexton just hauled away the monster TV (needed for a presentation) that was next to my desk, so suddenly the room feels larger.

[retrobabble.livejournal.com]

It smells faintly smoky (thanks to a comfy fire in my fireplace), with faint trails of paper, lavender (from bowls set around my home), and a spicy/citrus perfume.

I'm only wearing the last one. I think. *g*

[songwind.livejournal.com]

It smells faintly like pizza, with a whiff of ozone.

ladysea is behind me playing World of Warcraft, and the baby can't decide if he is too pathetic to be put down, or too hyper to be picked up.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Smells like nothing at all. Which is probably paper and dust. (Sitting in my room, which was aired out quite a bit yesterday evening; and I've been sitting here for hours, so I'm completely acclimated to whatever is in the air.)

Yesterday afternoon I could smell the cashews being fried up in the kitchen, but I can't *still* smell them down here. Well, and other things, then.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

Here it smells faintly of Starbucks peppermint mocha (I had my first peppermint mocha of the season this morning! I love the first few weeks of Starbucks Christmas drinks - I order nothing but peppermint mochas and gingerbread lattes until I am thoroughly sick of them, and then they go away for most of the year, and by the time they come back they are novel and yummy again.) and something that I swear is chalk dust, though I can't think where it's coming from.

[seagrit.livejournal.com]

If I roll to the right side of my cube, I can smell the wooden carving of a dancer that I got as a gift from our Indonesian student programmer. Oddly enough, it smells kind of minty, and a little burnt. Burnt mint? I don't know. Mostly I can't smell much, with my stuffed up nose. It did smell like microwave popcorn earlier today.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

And soon the house will smell like baking bread, which is one of the best smells in the known universe.

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

There's Geordi LaForge, who is Black *and* Human, whom I seem to recall seeing on the bridge of the Enterprise on TNG on occasion, but he was relegated to the engine room a fair amount of the time, and he was visually handicapped, which isn't the same as making him an Alien, but did serve to deflect attention from his race, I suppose.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Again with the going off half-cocked on my part. Mea culpa, and you can tell it's been a really long time since I watched TNG.

Geordi fits the pattern, though, because he's two minority groups in one.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I shouldn't brag like this, but unwashed Mrissas smell better than unwashed mastiffs.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hee. Um. Perhaps a different course of action is indicated?

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

Geordi fits the pattern, though, because he's two minority groups in one.

Definitely. And I remember a ton of episodes dealing with his eyes and his visor, and never one dealing with his race.

[pameladean]

Immediately beneath my nose it smells of dreadful, dreadful high-sodium high-bad-fat foods unpermitted to Pamelas -- orange crunchy cheesy things and lime-flavored corn chips, the latter slightly stale. I minimized my grabs at them last night because I had a doctor's appointment today, but I am eating them now. Gnarrrrr. Further away, a really fine spicy crispy dry-leaf scent is coming in the open window of my office. Overlying all that are the smells of dust, paper, honey-calendula hand cream, somewhat overused wheat-based cat litter, and shirt-recently-laundered (this is mostly the Chlorox-2 smell, since the detergent is unscented).

Pamela

[mmerriam.livejournal.com]

it smells of marinara and meatballs in the kitchen. In the living room the dominant smell is the subtle aroma of the cat in my lap. she has a delicate smell, not unpleasant I might add. Outside it sells like fall slowly decompossing into winter.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, naturally. Because race "doesn't matter" in the world of the future, except that it still mostly exists, and except that characters often have "racial" decor/hobbies. I can see why Keiko would do bonsai, I guess (she's a botanist), but did Sisko have to have African tribal masks? Couldn't he be into, I don't know, rosmaling? Tibetan Buddhist art? Peruvian weavings? Something that isn't all "black dudes like black stuff"?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Amen. Right up there with gingerbread.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Is it unreasonable for me to be delighted at a Pamela going "Gnarrrrr"?

"Unscented" detergent is its own smell. In your case not an unpleasant one.

[jry.livejournal.com]

More cube farm here which smells like beige dust. There's a hint of ranch dressing and chicken soup. A little while ago there was a distinct whiff of natural gas, but that seems to have passed. (Sorry.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The only woman on the bridge of the Enterprise (TNG) is the useless and insipid Troi. Whom I loathe, and who is so clearly a token gesture that it's embarrassing.

Okay, so I was thinking about this. And I got to thinking, "Why does the Next Gen Enterprise need a counselor when no one else gets one? DS9 is in a much more volatile and unusual situation, and they get by without some Betazed bint sharing their feeeeeelings. So what's up with Enterprise in that part of time?" (timprov informs me that DS9 will get a counselor later in the series, but not until the last season.) So I went through three theories before arriving, with timprov's help, at what I think may be the right one:

1) It was a trend in StarFleet staffing that didn't last. Like open-concept schools. Or maybe like everybody undecided in college being a Comm Studies major (and before that, everybody undecided being a Psych major). But DS9 and Voyager are at about the same time and have no counselor, so that can't be it.

2) The Enterprise crew is more screwed up than any other crew, so they really, really have to have a shrink on board when they leave spacedock in order to make sure they'll make it through to another spacedock. But no, I thought; the counselor is the clearly incompetent Deanna Troi. So she wouldn't do any good.

3) Her incompetence got me thinking: maybe the Betazeds fetishize "empathy" the way the Vulcans fetishize "logic." When a Vulcan declares something illogical, usually it means "Nyah, nyah, don't wanna, you can't make me." They show no signs of actually being more logical -- just more fixated on the word. Similarly, Lwaxanna Troi, rather than having superior social skills due to her empathy, seems to have less of a sense of other people and their needs and feelings than your average person. Sure, part of that is her Betazed empath superiority complex, but if you could feel how annoyed and/or hurt it made people to treat them that way, I think there would be more unpleasant consequences. So I thought it might be a political ploy, forcing the Federation to take their obnoxious Ambassador's daughter and do something with her -- and something appropriately Betazed at that. So when she drama queens around feeling more people's pain than Bill Clinton, everybody has to bite their cheeks and look appropriately sympathetic. But Lwaxanna occasionally makes a big show of disapproving of Deanna's StarFleet career (but only when it's convenient), so the most logical explanation we came up with was....

4) Deanna Troi is secretly the political officer. She's there to make sure Picard et al do what the Federation wants them to do (not necessarily what it says it wants them to do). She could denounce any of them at any time. Her so-called empathy must be followed. "I'm sensing that you are...sad." "Um, yes. I'm sad. Of course you're right. How empathic of you, Poli--er, Counselor."

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

4) Deanna Troi is secretly the political officer. She's there to make sure Picard et al do what the Federation wants them to do (not necessarily what it says it wants them to do). She could denounce any of them at any time. Her so-called empathy must be followed. "I'm sensing that you are...sad." "Um, yes. I'm sad. Of course you're right. How empathic of you, Poli--er, Counselor."

Oh, that's brilliant. I love it.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

rotflmao. *g*

[kelliem.livejournal.com]

4) Deanna Troi is secretly the political officer. She's there to make sure Picard et al do what the Federation wants them to do (not necessarily what it says it wants them to do). She could denounce any of them at any time.

By Jove, I think you're onto something here!

[pameladean]

No, I think it's a good idea to be delighted at the gnarrrring.

This is All Anti-Allergy detergent. It never makes my clothes alliterate, which I think is really a shame.

Pamela

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

All Anti-Allergy: Any Alliterating Addressed...er. Can't make "in-house" or "locally" alliterate. Ah well; very few of us are perfect.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

It's all better now. I'm very clean now.

[careswen.livejournal.com]

did Sisko have to have African tribal masks? ... Something that isn't all "black dudes like black stuff"?

What about the baseball thing? And later (where you're not yet), his cultural interest changes to a focus on Bajoran antiquities. Do these count?

[careswen.livejournal.com]

Why does the Next Gen Enterprise need a counselor when no one else gets one?

Memory could have me wrong, but I think Voyager might have had one when they left spacedock. The unfortunate circumstances that left them short-staffed (and therefore needing to use the maquis crew) might have been what happened to the poor counselor.

DS9 doesn't have one for a story reason: because Sisko serves a similar role. He's the father-figure, the community-builder, the puller-together. And Sisko's counselor is Jadzia.

[careswen.livejournal.com]

I forgot to add, Voyager regained a counselor in the form of Neelix.

Sorry, probably more geekiness than you required in response to what was probably a rhetorical question. It's just nice to think about something other than politics for 30 seconds.

[velleity-d.livejournal.com]

It smells like the memory of freshly-brewed green chai, laden with cardamom and cinnamon and almonds. Alas, the chai is already brewed and drunk, and any smells my office might have are not currently penetrating my Bad Sinus Day.

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

I love #4.

Regarding #3, though, as I recall, full Betazeds are telepathic. Deanna is limited to empathy because she's only half-Betazed.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, true; no black dude yet has ever liked baseball.

As for the Bajoran antiquities thing, I'm afraid it's a bit beside the point to me, because he came away from Earth with "black-dude" interests. It just feels to me like people who see my friends' Asian features and assume that they will automatically like anime or bonsai or kimono silks.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

From a professional perspective here, it is not permissible to do something for story reasons without a logical reason. This is one of the biggest sources of bad storytelling: "Why did Character X do Action Y?" "Well, I needed her to...." The author's needs are not really relevant. Make up a shortage of staffing, a Bajoran cultural objection, something internal to the story. Or have a minor counselor character; if we can recognize the guy who's always in Quark's bar, we could recognize and brush off a counselor.

I don't think Picard is any less a father-figure than Sisko (albeit a different kind of dad), and truepenny has already discussed her den-mother feelings about Janeway. Going to high school convinced me that the people labeled counselor were not the only ones people went to with their problems, but that doesn't mean that the institution didn't employ three of them. Which I wouldn't assume Star Fleet would do if they hadn't started in ST:NG.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't think apologizing for geekiness in a Star Trek discussion is really necessary.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hope you feel better soon.