Shatner's World: We Just Live in It

William Shatner reflects on life.

In a departure from its usual high-brow showcases of classical music, opera and plays, this past Sunday the New Jersey Performing Arts Center hosted Canadian actor William Shatner in a one-man show befitting his infamous humility titled, Shatner’s World: We Just Live in It. 

As admitted long-time Star Trek fans, my husband, Stephen, and I couldn’t resist attending this gathering of gray-haired geekdom. (I also must confess to a sneaking admiration for Shatner’s more recent character, Denny Crane, from Boston Legal.)

When I was a teenager, in the late 1960s, my friends and I were glued to the television every Wednesday night when the original Star Trek television show was aired. We thrilled to watching Captain James T. Kirk, his first officer, Mr. Spock, and their trusty crew careening through the galaxy, sparring or smooching with aliens and attempting but usually failing to follow the prime directive of noninterference with indigenous cultures. This often resulted in the ship’s doctor, Bones, announcing, “He’s dead, Jim.” as red-shirted ship’s crew collapsed around them. And who could resist that well-oiled chest peeking out of Kirk's oft-ripped Federation uniform.

But this performance was not an homage to Star Trek as much as a celebration of its famed over-acting star, William Shatner. At a spry 81 years old, he was remarkably witty, philosophical and engrossing to watch as he strode across the stage talking, and occasionally screaming, for emphasis.

Shatner backed by his projected crew.

Shatner began with a chronological sharing of his life and career, which was funny, touching and thought-provoking. We learned such cocktail party trivia as the last words of Steve Jobs, which were “Wow, wow, wow.” but with no certainty as to if his dying statement was an expression of wonderment or trepidation. We reviewed his career from stage to television to screen and heard many amusing anecdotes related to each. We shared his love of horses, which brought him and his latest wife (number four, I think) together. They’ve been married for 13 years, so it would seem he has finally found some peace in his personal life.

At the end of the performance, he offers a projected collage of scenes from throughout his long life and makes the point—obviously important to him—that no one should ever expect him to save the world or look upon him as an authority figure. “I’m only an entertainer,” he reminds his audience. Indeed, that’s true. And as his fan-base slowly filed out of the auditorium there was a satisfied consensus that he was correct. William Shatner is an entertainer—and a very accomplished one at that.

Rant, Rant, Clap, Clap

In the 1960s "original" Star Trek—moral compass of Baby Boomers everywhere—Captain Kirk and his swashbuckling crew railed against a society that had one class of people living in the clouds and another class mining under ground with no hope of a better life. Feisty landing parties destroyed computers that ruled entire societies, because people were meant to determine their own destinies. Federation officers talked their way out of enslavement and generally spread an obnoxiously American dogma of freedom for all. Thus, my unrealistic expectations were set.

Today, there are two classes of people in the U.S. One class lives in the clouds of tax dodges, trust funds and leisure while an underclass is working harder and earning less and less without much hope of anything better. Computers have graciously stepped in to make our lives "easier" but at the price of enslaving us to cubicles and to 24/7 smartphones. Those CPUs have even supplanted meddling mothers as intermediaries to socializing. Every day, it seems like more and more things in the world are falling under the tight control of forces that are motivated by power and profit rather than freedom for all.

Where is Captain Kirk when we need him?

Genetics: the Devil's playground?

I do not like Monsanto meddling with the genetics of my food, but the company is doing so anyway, with most corn and soy products sold in this country now being of genetically modified origin. Alfalfa is next and can salmon be far behind? Their maniacal scientists mix the genes of miscellaneous plants and/or animals with our food, in an FDA-approved reenactment of the Island of Dr. Moreau (I’m talking the 1977 version with Burt Lancaster, not the 1996 remake).

Dr. Paul Moreau: How does a cell become enslaved to a form, to a destiny it can never change? Can we change that destiny?
Andrew Braddock: Should we?

Good question, Braddock (aka, Michael York). Apparently, the answer is yes if you can make billions of dollars doing it.

Maria, from Metropolis. I know just how she feels.

I want renewable energy for my house and car, but they are too expensive for the average person to afford. Instead, I can only watch how wonderful they are on Green Channel television where millionaires like Ed Begley are doing state-of-the-art things to their homes that most of us couldn’t afford without knocking over a bank. Hey, Ed, stop panting over the technology for a moment and see if you can’t invent a way for the rest of us to get affordable access to it.

It would be nice to work freelance without horrendous health insurance costs and self-employment taxes. Unless you have a partner who is working full-time for a company that supplies discounted health insurance, it is challenging to afford working on your own. It is as if our healthcare system and government are conspiring to make sure we have no choice but enslavement to a lumbering corporate entity out of the 1926 movie classic, Metropolis.

Freder: It was their hands that built this city of ours, Father. But where do the hands belong in your scheme?
Joh Frederson: In their proper place, the depths.

Even then, people knew that the average person was nothing more than fodder for the upper class.

Okay, lots of whining here. So what do I want, anyway?

I want Monsanto to keep their genetically soiled hands off of my food so I don’t grow an eye on the side of my neck. I want our government to build good public transportation including high-speed trains and monorails. I want cars that run on anything other than gasoline so people in the Middle East no longer have to complain about our presence there, and so I will not be subject to gas prices driven by oil speculators every time I fill my car. I want public utilities to outfit homes and businesses with solar and wind power, just as they so graciously hooked us all up to electric, gas and oil. I want the U.S. Congress to take a cut in their bloated salaries ($174,000/year as of 2011; $193,400 for minority/majority leaders; $233,500 for Speaker of the House) and from their up-to-80%-of-salary retirement pensions as a show of solidarity with what the rest of us have to endure.

That’s right. I want a Disney movie. Let’s get the Blue Fairy out here to take care of business. If she needs some backup, then the Fairy Godmother and Tinkerbell can drag their sorry butts out of their celluloid happy endings to help get this world in gear. Afghanistan, Wall Street, Congress, Monsanto and our melting globe could all use a little fairy dust just about now. Maybe… if we all... just...  clap our hands….

Alas, Mr. Roddenberry....

My Sixties generation wanted to give peace a chance—working with about the same odds, it would seem, as the Powerball lottery. Despite our distrust of The Establishment, strange grooming habits and sneering disrespect for our elders, there was a pervasive optimism that a better world would come.

Ours was a decade that witnessed the civil rights and equal rights movements, the mop-topped Beatles invasion, the Sexual Revolution, the Timothy Leary drug culture, several horrifying assassinations and Mankind taking a giant leap onto the moon. Growth and change are seldom easy.

Our futurist guru, Gene Roddenberry, led the way by showing us evidence of this better world every week on Star Trek. Huddled in front of our televisions like grunting Neanderthals around a campfire, we listened to stories of the 23rd Century where there was no racial or gender prejudice on Earth because most of it was now re-directed toward alien species. Any food you wanted could be materialized through a wall-mounted replicator, the ship’s doctor opined about how disease and mental illness had finally been cured, and Scotty was always there to beam you up.

Flash back to the 21st Century and it’s time for some impatient foot tapping. Rather than moving toward reconciliation, the country appears, more than ever, divided into uncompromising factions goaded on by an equally contentious media. The world seems to revolve around Big Oil, Wall Street bonuses and multinational corporate profits—all blithely exchanging currency while the sea level slowly rises. We could charitably look back on our optimistic youth as charmingly naïve, or simply admit that we were dribbling stupid.

More than 40 years after Captain James T. Kirk launched his five-year mission, the closest thing to a replicator is mediocre coffee machines that gurgle like disgruntled toilets. If rising cancer rates and stress-related illnesses don’t finish us off, the decaying healthcare system will. And Scotty’s job has been outsourced to a thickly accented helpdesk employee located in a Third World nation somewhere outside the Orion Nebula.

Should we consider it karmic that in our Viagra years, we are left with deflated real estate, atrophied 401Ks, bankrupted pensions and expiring unemployment benefits? Remember, we were the generation that prided itself on not being materialistic. And The Who sang about how we hoped we’d die before we got old. [NOTE: If you are over 50 and reading this, you did not accomplish that goal.]

But here we are, and we might as well make the best of things. Our present, dim financial situations would appear to provide us with some outstanding, character-building opportunities—such as basking in the comfort of a sustainable, eco-friendly cardboard box under a highway overpass or partaking in the epicurean sport of dumpster diving behind our favorite restaurants.

The Sixties generation has lived long enough to see a large chunk of the news media usurped by a billionaire from Australia, the U.S. Congress leased by lobbyists and our hopes for peace undermined by a seemingly endless number of struggles in the Middle East. We have watched the events of 9-11 ignite the match of hatred against Moslems, immigrants, unions, gays, pacifists, the French, socialism, the Dixie Chicks, Dan Rather, Darwin, Thomas Jefferson, literacy and intelligent political debate.

It makes one wonder: Is the world we inhabit today just some twisted hallucinogenic flashback or was our Sixties paranoia of The Establishment, in fact, an astonishing, collective prescience of things to come?

Only two centuries to go before the Enterprise fires up its warp drives for its five-year mission. Let’s hope we can clean this mess up before Captain Kirk arrives.