I've been doing a re-watch of Star Trek: Enterprise of late; in the mornings, I like to play background noise that tells me a story I basically already know and thus don't have to particularly watch. Since it'd been a while, I started using Enterprise some time back, and it's fine. It provides a sort of timer for my morning routine, and the background noise.
One of the things that keeps hitting me in the brain is its 9/11-infused xenophobia, and its supposedly-"throwback" sexism. (IYKYK: sexism like that never went away; it only seemed, to some, to be briefly out of fashion.) The much-discussed theme song is full of grievance and white man wannabe-oppression. "Oh, they're not going to hold me back this time, no they're not gonna change my mind." Given that a major theme from the start, in ENT, is how the Vulcans held humanity back from galactic exploration, and the way Vulcans are portrayed generally as cold jerks and emotional rapists/victims, it's pretty hard not to hear those lyrics and understand it as "The pointy-ears were mean to us and we're gonna 'rise above' them."
It all sounds pretty grievance-supremacist to me. "Mommy (and the culture as a whole) told me I was *special*, and I've got Christo-fascist faith of the heart. I'll show those aliens, who in every other series are seen as complex, and allies--they're really just meanies, keeping me from flying my daddy's warp drive and taking over the universe! Man, I wanna be oppressed so bad!"
...
So, this morning, seeing a photo of a sign for DeathSantis' freshly glitch-launched "campaign"...
... I mean, of course. It's practically a lyric out of that theme song. No one's going to bend or break me, darn Vulcans, coming over the border and--oh, wait...
