Tyree's Tuppence

by Tyree Campbell

Look, I know it's a television show, okay?  The characters are fictitious, and portrayed by actors who are paid to perform the portrayals.  I understand that, all right?  I mean, it's not like that movie Galaxy Quest, where the actors morph into the characters they portray.  This is "real life."  They're actors.  It's a smegging television show.  

It's not real!

And I happen to love watching Patrick Stewart in anything.  His non-Star-Trek credits include Dune, Lifeforce, Jeffrey, Masterminds, Safe House, X-Men and X2, and I've probably missed a few others.  He did a great solo of Dickens' A Christmas Carol.  I have his CD Peter And The Wolf.  I love his work, okay?

So why am I so bitterly disappointed?  Because he out-Shatnered Shatner.

You wouldn't think that a difficult task, outdoing a corseted method actor who never met a line he couldn't emote.  I mean, casting for the Original Series must have been done by coin flip.  Heads, Shatner.  Tails, thick plank.  So when Shatner up and allowed as how the Trekkies ought to "get a life" and stop dressing up as Klingons, Orion slave girls, and Tribbles, a few tears were shed, but by and large nobody paid him any more mind then than the acting community does now.

But Patrick Stewart... 

I mean, the guy can flat-out act!  He could have played Gandalf.  Or Henry V.  And when he speaks, people listen.

Smeg!

For those of you who weren't listening, here's what Patrick Stewart said on the British Broadcasting Corporation's Web site:  "I would like to see us get this place [Earth] right first before we have the arrogance to put significantly flawed civilizations out onto other planets - even though they may be utterly uninhabited."

He also told the Beeb, "As I get older, my unease at the time and the money that has to be spent on projects putting human beings back on the moon, and onto another planet, is so enormous.  And it would take up so many resources, which I personally feel should be directed at our own planet."

Sigh.

Okay, Stewart is entitled to his opinion and his "personal feelings."  And he's had his say.  Now it's my turn.  Pay attention, Pat.

Once more, with feeling.

This is not a perfect Universe...and neither are the other 14,640 Universes.  It was not meant to be perfect.  It was meant to be.  That's it.  The Universe is.  And smeg happens allatime.  The Universe is "significantly flawed."  Galaxies collide, as we see in the Hubble telescope, and die, killing all civilizations therein, if any [unless--are you reading this, Pat?--they have developed space travel and are able to escape, tah-daaah!].  Supernovas atomize stars, and send cascades of gamma rays to alter or kill all living things on nearby planets.  [When stars go supernova, "nearby" is defined as within, say, 100 light-years].  Planets get struck by debris...see Meteor Crater in Arizona.  Baseball has the Infield Fly Rule.  Smeg happens.

In fact, it now appears possible that some massive object smote the Earth back when it was starting to cool, and split off a chunk that later became the Moon.  This same massive object may also have whonked Uranus so that its axis of rotation is sideways, and may have bumped Pluto from a lunar orbit around Uranus a couple billion miles out to where it is now, careening wildly at erotic angles to the plane of the Solar System.  Smeg happens.  The Universe is not perfect.  Nothing is perfect....except maybe a sunset, or a starlit beach.

And humanity is not perfect, nor will it ever be.  Whether you espouse the notion of Divine Creation, or hold to the common sense of Evolution, humanity was never intended to be perfect.  Humanity was simply meant to be.  We do what we do.  And some of the things we do, to ourselves and to our planet, are catastrophic...especially uncontrolled reproduction, which is the single ultimate cause of all this planet's problems.  You want to feed the hungry, Pat?  You want to put a freeze on global warming?  You want to stop squandering resources?  These are fine human desires, true.  Here's how you do it:  put a lid on population, get it reduced to a sensible level worldwide, and all these other problems will eventually go away.  Honest.

Let's examine that bit about "feed the hungry."  A few decades ago the UN was moved by photographs of starving children in Africa, and, logically enough, decided to send food there, and never mind that the population in, say, the Sudan and Mali had stretched the local food supply beyond the breaking point [which, doh!, is why they were starving in the first place].  So what happened?  Better fed, the population continued to expand at a prodigious rate, and completely smegged the local food supply.  And a drought struck, because smeg happens.  The UN's solution?  Send more food...only there wasn't much food to send.  The only common factor throughout those decades is the photographs of starving children.  They're still there, only more so.

You want more?  The population of Nigeria, a country roughly the size of Texas and Colorado combined, has a population approaching 200,000,000.  I mean why?  That's absurd, obscene, and unconscionable.  Nigeria couldn't come close to feeding itself two decades ago, and now, thanks to infusions of food from the rest of the world, it is even further away from being able to feed itself.  And that's just one country, folks.

You want more?

Please, no more...

We do what we do. 

Well...given unbridled population expansion--which at the 1980 growth rate, according to Isaac Asimov, who loved to calculate such things, would convert the entire mass of the Earth to human flesh in about fifty millennia--the world's hungry cannot be fed, because each hungry man and woman create a dozen hungry children.  One might note, callously, that feeding the world's hungry is a waste of resources beyond even that which Patrick Stewart decried in his Beeb remarks.

Sigh.  Again.

That's not to say we shouldn't help one another.  As individuals, of course, we do it on a smaller scale.  For twenty four cents a day you can "adopt" a hungry child in Guatemala or Honduras or Bangladesh, and write to him or her, and watch her or him grow up...maybe.  You can join the Sierra Club or Operation Greenpeace to support the environment.  You can say hi to your neighbor tomorrow morning.  You can, as Asimov proposed, push for a national holiday similar to Mother's Day and Father's Day, called Childless Day, in honor of those couples who saw fit not to waste any more resources on an unnecessarily burgeoning population.  Etc, etc, etc.  And let's face it, folks, the survival of the species is no longer an issue here, population-wise.

And while we are helping one another, let us ever remember where we, as a species, however flawed, belong:  The Stars.  That is the gift of Star Trek and Babylon 5 and Methuselah's Children and Between The Strokes Of Night--such is the stuff of our dreams and our destiny, fed and nurtured by Patrick Stewart's portrayed character, no matter what Patrick Stewart the actor thinks.

So let's get our butts out there.

Else why bother to look up?

Tyree Campbell

Managine Editor

Sam's Dot Publishing

Past Tuppence:
December 2003
September 2003
June 2003
March 2003
December 2002
October 2002
August 2002
June 2002
April 2002
February 2002
December 2001
October 2001
August 2001

Read more from Tyree Campbell in any of the following:

Wondrous Web Worlds Vol. 3

Sex and the Single Alien
An anthology

Nyx
A novel by Tyree Campbell

Wondrous Web Worlds Vol. 2