Snow in Tennessee: Memory, Family, Place, and Winter

 

It is supposed to snow in Tennessee tonight—well, specifically in West Tennessee, where I am from. My family is from Gibson County. My parents met at Milan High School. My mom’s family is originally from New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but she grew up in LaGrange, Illinois before moving to Milan in middle school. My dad’s family has much deeper roots in the county, dating back to a little after the Civil War.

 In particular, my grandmom traces her roots to Gibson County, but not Milan, per se. Her family bought land behind Double Springs Church off the Gibson Highway on Smith-Scott Road. Smith-Scott Road is a little cut-off road the skims a creek that feeds the north fork of the Forked Deer River. I am familiar with the land because I spent my weekends in high school working it, after a fashion anyway.

 My grandmom’s family, the Johnsons, bought a stretch of land about a quarter-mile long on the road. It stretched back about a half mile or so to a little ditch that fed into the nearby river. The Forked Deer in this part of the county is more a trickle than a solid stream. Just north of this ancestral land is less river than river bottom, a familiar landscape to locals from West Tennessee. It’s the type of dark, shifting landscape I wouldn’t spend a night in, unless I was snipe hunting. I hear bottom land is good hunting ground for snipe.

 My grandmom grew up out on this land until she was a teenager when one day, an older boy from a nearby school was out for a drive with his buddy in their fancy car. It was the mid-1950s. He was from Milan, though his family was from Maury County and had moved around a bit before settling in Milan for his high school years. He and his buddy took the cut-off on Smith-Scott Road. He drove by this house out there off the road and saw this pretty girl in the yard. He stopped and talked to her. The rest is family history.

 Mind you, I didn’t know this story until many years later. I first heard it from my granddad when my grandmom (the pretty girl in the story) was fighting breast cancer at the hospital in Jackson. She pulled through, but it was rough for a while there. So, one day, my granddad just got to telling stories. In 2014, when he died, we went through old photo to make a montage to play at his funeral. Sure enough, we found a photo of him and this priceless old car pulled up in a driveway that looked distantly recognizable. It was not their first meeting, but they were both so young, so set on the future. A good story can benefit from some token of material truth. I held in my hands a memory. For a moment there, no one had died. For a moment.  

 It is a great family story, no doubt, but hardly alone in the pantheon of old family legends. My dad recalls meeting his great-grandfather, Henry Snowden Johnson, out there on that land. My great-grandparents—Minnie and Hubert—lived out there in one house. Just up the road, Hubert’s sister Maggie lived with her husband, Shorty. Hubert died before I was born; M’maw (Minnie) moved in with my grandparents, who lived in Milan but on the edge of town going out towards the old home. M’maw died when I was in 2^nd grade. I was always just fascinated by her when I was a kid. She was always there, like some memory of a world lost in the quiet hours of progress we call American life.

 Maggie and Shorty lived until I was in high school, though I did not know them well, except through stories. I will say here only that Shorty was eccentric. He apparently had a scar in a rather awkward location, and he insisted on showing it to folks. He and Maggie had no children, and when they died, the family decided to sell off their land.

 The old land had been cut up long before their passing. By the time I became familiar with it, there were three houses. A man named Millard and his wife had bought M’maw and Hubert’s old house. The lot separating that house from Maggie and Shorty’s had been purchased by a man who put a mobile home on it. Millard’s land still stretched back to the ditch at the back of the property. This other man had just bought enough for a lot right on the road. Maggie and Shorty’s old house also retained its property line back to the original ditch, effectively half the original land (the other half being Millard’s). 

 The land was flat as could be for the first 600 yards or so. A peninsula of trees had grown up from the ditch and formed a dividing line between the two sister-properties. At the back of the land, it sloped away to lowland, a semi-bottom that was prone to flooding in Spring.

 I worked summers out on this land. It was purchased by a friend of the family, Lee Adams, who also ran the insurance agency and tax business where my grandmom worked. Lee’s wife had died many years earlier. Their home had burned down before her death, and since her death, Lee had lived in a mobile home out by Atwood near the Carroll County line, but he decided to buy Maggie and Shorty’s old property, clean it out, and tear down the old house to put his mobile home there instead. It was a quiet piece of land, with a wonderful view of sunset out its front porch. The field to the west sloped upward to Highway 186 off in the distance, and you could watch the occasional headlights in the evenings what seemed many lonely miles away.

 Lee paid me to come over on Sundays to clear brush and tear out wood from the house he could resell or reuse. We worked in Summer mostly, on days so hot they’d boil Christmas. Still, among the many lessons Lee taught me was the importance of wearing long sleeves and jeans anyway. First, just to keep the dust and brush off me. Second, to block the sun. I’d come home having sweat through my clothes, but it was actually surprisingly cool to stayed covered. I never had sunburn or felt that oppressive heat of UV rays frying my skin. He paid me $20 a day—I felt rich! He also bought lunch, though he’d send me to get it. I’d drive into Milan to get burgers from Wendy’s or Burger King. I’d bring them back out to his property, and we’d eat them in the yard under a shade tree. Then, unrushed by time or commitments, we’d both catnap in the shade for a while. I never knew how long. Just til we’d wake up and go back to work til supper.

 I was not familiar with the land in winter, except to swing out and visit. Winter in West Tennessee is hardly cold compared to my current life in Wisconsin, but it seemed cold at the time, you might say. Also, it’s just too wet in winter to do much work clearing brush or driving out into the fallow fields to haul leftover bundles of hay. Nonetheless, I felt a familiarity with the land, with the place. If a hallmark of Southern identity is our unique sense of place, then that old family property is the totem of my familiar southern identity.

 Then I went off the college, then off to grad school. We had family get-togethers out at Lee’s, but his health eventually began to fail. He died one April. I was in Oxford, Mississippi, reading for my comprehensive exams. My dad called to tell me. He had forgotten how much time I’d spent with Lee, so he off-handedly said he just wanted me to know, even though I wasn’t close to Lee or anything. I corrected him, of course, and he didn’t mean to undermine my memories. I spent my weekends at Lee’s after my brother had moved off to college; these were also the last years of my parents’ marriage. They were those flighty years when so much was changing and we all drifted into our adulthoods and separate independences. It only makes sense that we all had different memories of that time.

 Sitting in my armchair in Oxford that night, hours after my dad had called, I just started crying. Not sad tears—I knew Lee was not well and had said my goodbyes long before his final illness. I was perfectly nonplussed except I couldn’t stop weeping like streaming hiccups. It was a bodily experience, a heaving of tears that came on like spasms. I did nothing to stop crying. I was reading for my comps and kept thinking about William James’ commentary on feelings and emotions—that we don’t cry because we are sad, we are sad because we are crying; we don’t laugh because something is funny, it is funny because we are laughing.

 Or, to paraphrase Faulkner, the body feels before the mind acknowledges. Knowing happens later; feeling comes first.

 The displacement of self that happened when I moved to Wisconsin was significant, and while I recognized it would be a hard shift in perception, I was not prepared for how long I would feel unmoored. I arrived in Wisconsin the year after the 2013/2014 polar vortex. That cold was so powerful it had frozen Lake Superior—which was still partially frozen in August, when I arrived. The lakes control a lot of the weather this far above the Gulf, and the different quality of air and temperature from Mississippi when I left one day to when I arrived here the next was mortifying. I was wearing sweatpants my first summer here; we had frost by the second week of the semester in September. Our windchill dipped to -20 by mid-November before our winter turned into a brown landscape with meager snow and what locals swore were mild conditions.

 Friends in Mineral Point, where I first lived, did enjoy taunting me about life in a deepfreeze like the previous winter. I was told to be wary of blinking in that kind of cold—my eyes would freeze shut! My students told me stories about getting frostbite walking between buildings on campus. I ordered a parka from Cabela’s rated as good down to -30. I never wore it a single time outside, but I buried myself in it when it arrived just to get a sense of what a real winter coat felt like. In Mississippi, I only owned a light jacket and a handful of sweaters. Who even needed more?

 I have grown more accustomed to the burdensome cold here. When we had our last polar vortex, two years ago, and the university shut down due to the dangerous conditions, I found out my house here in Platteville is well-insulated and sealed. The only difficulty was taking my dog out to go to the bathroom, though, because evolution is real and she had benefited from it, by -30 as an air temperature, she was quite content to pee and poop on the porch as soon as I opened the door.

 That polar vortex came with snow, literally, in that prior to it, we had relatively little snowfall followed by thaws to clear the ground. Then a snowstorm announced the arrival of that incarnation of the ninth circle, but the overall amount of snow on the ground never rose to astronomical heights. I’ve been through some decent snowstorms since moving here, though none have reached the level of being formally called a blizzard. I’ve experienced some cold that has given me a new understanding of cold as a physical condition. Cold here is not a linear progression from warm to not warm. It has dimension. At any given moment, the felt experience of cold can be so encompassing that you can’t feel “colder,” but you can ride along the contours of that cold into new worlds of insidious profundity. It is like stepping into what you thought was a puddle that turns out to be a chasm. You are wet regardless of how deep you fall, but in this case, you look up and are troubled to see the surface suddenly and so unexpectedly so very far away.

 This year, we finally have the two-fer. It is cold, endlessly, insidiously cold. We’ve also had steady snowfall since the end of December without a significant thaw, so our world is smothered in snowdrifts and outlined in canyons shoveled off sidewalks. I could hide from cars behind the mounds of snow bordering my sidewalk the way soldiers in deep trenches in World War I could stand up without worrying their heads would be blown off. Not that I’d notice if my head got blown off. It is far too cold to notice such superficial things.

 So, when I think about that fact that it is snowing in Tennessee tonight—let’s just say my thimble of sympathy is plum full. I have no room to offer more to anyone. Mind you, this southern snow is supposed to be significant. Some forecasts put the possible accumulation, on top of ice, at over ten inches. For a place that can get less than ten inches of snow in a full five-year period, to get all that at once is not to be trifled with. And no one owns a shovel, and no city hires plow drivers. The one mound of salt in any given county is maybe somewhere near the interstate or major highway and probably can’t do more than clear a mile or two of a few main roads. It will be hell for a few days, before it melts off, and the temperatures return to the 50s. My god, my god, why have you abandoned your blessed South! [insert eyeroll here].

 Sadly, I am confessing here that the thrill and fear of snow—the sense that it is unique, beautiful, a wonder of the physical world—that has gone from me. When I see snow, I start counting the minutes until I have to shovel it; then I count the minutes until the plow driver buries the end of my driveway in it again. It is insufferable. I hate the snow. It is pretty for maybe five minutes. Then it is heavy, cold, gray, and needless. Yet it falls and falls some more just the same.

 But an old family story comes back to me sometimes. I heard it from my grandmom, and both myself and my aunt Trish have submitted versions of it to teachers in response to different writing assignments in our lives. It involves M’maw, and while I don’t know what house she lived in as a young girl well over a century ago as I write this story into the night here in Wisconsin, I always associate it with that little stretch of Smith-Scott Road where my grandmom grew up, where my granddad passed by one day on a drive with a friend in the country, and where I worked away my Sundays in summers now more than 20 years ago.

 Snow is not uncommon in Tennessee; it just isn’t ubiquitous nor long-lasting. Any good winter will see a snow or two that shuts down schools and businesses. One ought wisely to heed the warnings on the news to get milk and eggs in the house—being the rural south, no one flat says to grab the whiskey, but I assume these instructions are implied, if your local blue laws don’t forbid it. Snow on the ground in Tennessee will be gone in a day or two. It might be a couple inches. It is often wet and heavy, and it usually falls on a layer of ice.

 But it is snow! That magical power that falls from heaven above upon the place beneath, maybe a bit like mercy, or, if nothing else, like a kind of muted elegance that softens the brown and jagged edges of the world.

 My grandmom says that her mother had a tradition when she was herself a young girl. When it would snow, she and her siblings would pull off their shoes and socks. They’d go outside. Then, barefoot, they’d run around the house in the snow. Then they’d come inside and warm their feet by the stove.

 I did this myself once when we had a snow in Oxford, Mississippi, and I lived in a small cottage on the northwest side of town. It will wake you up and get you moving, of that there can be no doubt. It is as delightful as laying down in the snow to make an angel, as ridiculous as thinking it matters that for a day or two you’ll just have to stay home and can’t do all those regular, busy things that usually structure our lives.

 I have not had the chance to try this here, in Wisconsin, at a home I own as I lean into the middle years of my life. It is entirely too cold and the snow too overwhelming to try this now. I don’t think it is just my age and reason speaking against the inner child of my nature when I say that it would probably be dangerous on a night when the temperature is a cool -8 and the snow a deep three feet as drifts, so cold it is solid except in treacherous places where I’d likely slip and could regret my recklessness. I don’t think I can live up to the old family legend tonight.

 Yet my thoughts drift like snow drifts, wandering south to a place that has long since slipped out of the life of my family and even our associations. Lee’s family sold the land off, as happens to land in our economy. I can drive by it when I’m home, but rarely do. Instead, I find myself often driving over to the cemetery at Double Springs where many folks in my family are buried—ones I never met, like Henry Snowden and Hubert—and ones I hold dear forever—M’maw, my granddad.

 Life is such a funny paradox of accumulation. As you accumulate years and possessions, you accumulate loss of things material and things ephemeral, which, in their turn, compound into memories deep, rich, and thick.  

 On the one hand, for any southern boy, any time he wants it, it can be that time and that place again. Or something like that I think a writer wrote once.

 More honestly, you can’t go home again, as some other Southern writer declared.

 I offer no such wisdom here. Just memory, cold feet, a longing for the ineffable, and the recklessness of young people who grew up and passed on.

 E. B. White once wrote an essay about geese and their daily dramas at his farm in Maine. He turned their seemingly small, ritual tribulations into metaphors to declare of the wrongs we all feel we suffer: “I don’t know anything sadder than a summer’s day.”

Well, I don’t suppose he ever spent a cold winter’s evening in a small house in Wisconsin, staring out frosty windows, thinking of home. 

Obituary: The Republican Party, March 20, 1854 -- February 13, 2021

 

While I prefer to devote this blog to LGBTQ+ issues, sometimes a moment in American civic life occurs that needs to be acknowledge. Today, a political party died; it is survived by its long-time rival, the Democratic Party, which is older and which has undergone many of its own changes and troubled history. Nonetheless, it still lives, even as its "big tent" appeal signals its continued evolution, possibly into multiple parties. Let us hope they will be able to survive as valuable contributors to our national life. Meanwhile, a body politic is dead, but long live our body politic.

The Republican Party was born on March 20, 1854 in a little schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin. It inaugurated its existence as a birth brought on by a sense that the factionalism most dominant in American life had lost its way and no longer represented the promise embedded in the United States Constitution, ratified in 1787 and enacted in 1789. A fundamental tenant of the party was individualism and the relation of the individual to liberty. Namely, inaugural members of the party understood that the original sin of slavery undermined the foundational premise of "America" first because it allowed the inheritance of property and accumulated wealth that create an unequal playing field for franchised Americans and second because slavery created a system wherein one could not, by default, use the work of their own hands to advance in an (idealized) meritocracy. The party was abolitionist at its inception.

 Its first president would ascend to office in 1860. Abraham Lincoln was, at least in his presidential campaign, relatively conservative, promising to maintain "union" at a time of increasing factionalism that hinted towards secession. He did not like slavery but he did not advocate for its immediate abolition as part of his political agenda until late 1862. He did not get elected by a majority--his election was due to a fatal split in the opposition party, the more established "Democratic" party. His second electoral win was also without a majority of "American" voters due to many states in the union being at war at the time. He is often cited as our greatest president, and he famously spoke of "a new birth of freedom" and the goal of having a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" in perpetuity, even as he spoke these words on a field of battle being consecrated as a graveyard for soldiers who died in the Civil War.

 His assassination led to a Democrat taking office, his Vice President. Andrew Johnson would resist policies to help freed slaves in the South and was impeached for it, the first president to be impeached in our nation's history. After Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant won the presidency as a Republican, the party of Lincoln.

 Grant's tenure in office was marked by historic levels of corruption, and few historians praise Grant as a great president, though he did make significant strides towards "Reconstruction" in the South that did aid freed blacks--at least relative to the violence and political opposition trying to re-institute a race-based class system.

 The end of Grant's second term marked the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of "Reconciliation," a period of "forgive and forget" that led to what most historians claim is our current situation, wherein the South lost the war but won the peace. The next 50 years of American life has been called "the nadir of the African American experience" as a result of the horrors implemented as federal policy to disenfranchise and re-dehumanize black life. Notably, other "Republicans" from the party of Lincoln fought native people into submission in the West; few presidents from this era from either party are laudable and none are terribly well-known with one Republican exception.

 Teddy Roosevelt won the presidency as a Republican at the turn of the century. He also led US expansion in our first significant attempt to be an imperial power like the nation-states in Europe. He is often credited with having a singular vision that did, once again "relatively," suggest a better promise for America. He certainly embodied a particular American ethos that focused on land management. He did a great deal to establish public lands (previously native lands), which put him at odds with the great robber barons of the time.

 The next 20 years, as racial horror expanded to a national phenomena in race riots across the country, segregation as a federal policy upheld by the Supreme Court, and women agitated for universal suffrage, the most significant Republican president oversaw the calamity of the Great Depression, only to lose his re-election campaign to another Roosevelt, Franklin D., who, notably, affiliated with the Democratic party and implemented the "big government" program called the "New Deal."

 Republicans in particular hated this policy as antithetical not so much to the individual, but to the interests of large corporations and private industry, increasingly the constituency of the party. However, as Roosevelt's policies began to benefit black Americans, a paradigm shift unfolded in American life.

 Over the years after Roosevelt's death, advocacy for civil rights swelled into a national movement. Roosevelt's big tent ideas for the Democratic party made it the more welcome party for black voters, thus disaffecting many white voters who harbored old, deeply embedded racist beliefs.

 In the Republican party, another general ascended to the presidency, Dwight Eisenhower, who mostly ascribed to Republican ideas of smaller government and local control until two key moments forced him to embrace a federal policy for better American life. First, after Brown v. Board of Education, a governor in Arkansas challenged federal supremacy on matters of constitutional law. Ike responded by deploying US army troops to escort 9 black high schoolers to school in one of the more significant post-Civil War actions of federal law. Whatever his personal opinions, Ike used his authority in the executive branch to implement a ruling from the judicial branch.

 In his own party, he also faced a formidable foe from the birthplace of Republicanism, Wisconsin. Ike's original ambivalence towards Joseph McCarthy's HUAC witchhunts finally, at long last, turned to a rejection of McCarthy's extremism when McCarthy began to hunt for witches in the US army.

 In both matters, Ike embodied basic principles of US polity and character. If we assume no president from any party is above some level of corruption and political casuistry, at least sometimes, despite their human failings, they nonetheless get it right.

 The next Republican leader, Barry Goldwater, picked up McCarthy's mantle--though his attempt to win the presidency with that mantle in 1964 led to one of the greatest electoral routs in US History. A southerner, LBJ, won in a true landslide.

 However, when LBJ declined to run again in 1968, at a critical cultural moment in US life after the more visible advances of the Civil Rights movement (and the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.) and in the pitch of the Vietnam War, Ike's vice president won the election, placing another Republican in office, Richard Nixon, the first of two Republican presidents from California.

 Famously, Nixon employed his "Southern Strategy" to win disaffected whites to the Republican party. He was, himself, barely below the level of surface racism, and his strategy had the effect of creating a party teeming with the rancor of white supremacy regardless of whatever else it stood for, good or bad.

 When Nixon broke the law to win re-election, he was caught. At first, he used his executive powers to fire and otherwise sabotage the processes of accountability given to our government as part of its self-regulatory checks and balances. However, when irrefutable evidence emerged of his guilt, members of his own party met with him and told him to resign--thus saving him from impeachment. His vice president-turned-president pardoned him, thus saving him from prison. Nothing has saved Nixon from infamy. As time as progressed, the damage he did to his party has become more apparent.

 The next Republican president spent outrageously on national defense while cutting all the domestic programs he could--he also raised taxes, though that part of his legacy is often overlooked. Reagan embraced "trickle-down economics" (a study published this year, just last month, once again debunked this economic policy as just more casuistry encouraged by the wealthy fueling political corruption). Reagan was a Republican in the mold of Goldwater; and while he was immensely popular among white voters, his domestic policies were deeply damaging to the middle class generally and black Americans specifically. He also got caught illegally funding a foreign war and only by the prevalence of his party in Congress did he escape serious consequences. His successor, riding Reagan's popularity, won a term in office. When he promised "no new taxes," he set himself up for failure. After George H. W. Bush raised taxes, his only strategy to win back angry Republicans was to embrace a virulent strain of the Southern Strategy masterminded by notorious racist Lee Atwater, who might well have invented the concept of the racist dog-whistle in American political life (he was recorded admitting as much). H. W. Bush still lost.

 The Republican party during the Clinton years became increasingly marked by a single-minded determination to destroy government. Led by Newt Gingrich, it embraced an absolute rejection of taxation as well as fomented more racist tropes to paint "government programs" as code for "helping blacks." For the first time in US history, a major political party used the basic budget process in Congress to shut down the government. Republicans also impeached President Clinton for lying under oath when, while being asked about the fake Whitewater scandal in deposition, Republican lawyers asked him about his sexual relationship with a white house intern.

 Clinton's vice president won the popular vote in 2000, but due to a Supreme Court decision to discount votes in select counties in Florida, George W. Bush was declared the winner. He also won in 2004. Under this Bush, America began two wars, the second despite condemnation by the United Nations and based on bluntly false evidence of non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction. As I write this, 20 years later, the United States is still formally engaged in both wars. Economic disparity rose to alarming levels. Anti-LGBTQ animus was used to pull voters to Republicanism in one key-swing state, Ohio, thus handing Bush his second term. At the end of that term, he oversaw the 2008 financial collapse.

 When a black Democrat won the presidency in 2008, the final death knell of the increasingly anti-American opposition party began to sound. That president, Barack Obama, made the fatal flaw of believing bipartisanship was the answer. He did not understand that the opposition party to which he was extending a hand was at this point hopelessly crippled by its own self-interests, racism, and disdain for basic tenants of American life being extended to anyone not white, rich, heterosexual, and male (and only to women who knew their place in that miasma).

 On multiple occasions during Obama's two terms, Republicans threatened to or outright did shut down the US government. They adopted a practice of absolute rejection and exploded senate procedures by using the filibuster to weaponize their minority status. They finally broke all convention and tradition by refusing to even have a hearing for a Supreme Court nominee in an act of such bad faith that future historians will likely place it as the irreversible moment of the party's demise.

 After Obama's second term, Republicans elected a fascist strongman with no experience or qualifications. He won the presidency due to a fluke in our antiquated electoral college system even as he lost the popular vote. He openly courted foreign assistance for his election. He embraced blatant corruption so extreme it seemed unbelievable in its day-to-day repetition and regularity. His own campaign chairs were found guilty of numerous federal crimes. He was impeached twice and acquitted twice by members of his own party who put their loyalty to him, a single man who pulled himself up by inheriting millions and repeatedly breaking the law, rather than to their party, much less their country.

 They also overlooked his increasingly violent embrace of white supremacy--his making dog-whistle racism the violent scream of his party, in direct contrast to the birth of his party in Ripon in 1854.

 Just after 4 pm, on Saturday, February 13, 2021, the highest-ranking elected official from this party said he had voted to acquit Trump because he didn't think he had jurisdiction. He then said Trump was at fault. It was a moment similar to the fall Julia Kristeva defines as the abject, and only relevant to the world of the cadaver, in this case of a body politic that one cannot look at nor touch without facing the abyss. The death was the party to which that elected official had previously claimed to belong, though whatever he thought that party was, it is no longer a core belief nor even vague political leaning. The party of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Ike, Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, both Bushes, and the minority leader who wanted it both ways is dead. There can be no revival except to conjure it as a ghost. 

 And so died the long-standing Republican Party, second of the two major parties in American civic life. It was 166.

Star Trek: Picard--Thoughts on Trans Futures and the Anxieties They Produce

 CBS released the latest addition to the Star Trek universe in Spring 2020, a ten-episode limited series to run concurrently with their other ST property, Discovery, which is now in season 3. I’m writing this post under the assumption that possible readers are at least somewhat familiar with the broader contours of the Star Trek universe, even as its new multi-verse approach complicates much of the basic, linear chronologies of the original series, the first ten films, and the Next Generation. Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise all fit into the original canon with more-or-less ease, though the introduction of a time war in Enterprise inaugurated an approach to the franchise that began to incorporate non-linear temporalities that challenge the confines of filmic narrative. Then the “new” films and their short-lived fame literally blew up the original chronology by destroying both Romulus (due to a supernova in the future) and Vulcan (due to a Romulan ship traveling backwards in time to the past), both after The Undiscovered Country was premised around the demise of the Klingon Empire. In short, it sucks to be from alien world in Star Trek; or, more specifically, it sucks to be an alien.

 The new universal stage of Star Trek should, in theory, be completely alternative. The destruction of Vulcan occurred before what would be the timeline for the original series. The destruction of Romulus (which occurred first, in the future) provides a narrative closure after the events of Voyager and the Next Gen films. Thus, Discovery, which is ostensibly set in the pre-original series days before Vulcan has gone the way of Alderaan, has become an exploration of alternate dimensions of space/time wherein a ship can appear instantly in any place in the galaxy (Captain Janeway is jealous) and Michael can be an archangel figure literally creating her own story by darting through time from the future to control the present in an omnipotent fashion that starts to beggar belief after a while. I believe in season 3 they are now stuck in the distant future, or maybe it’s all just a holodeck simulation—much as we are all maybe a simulation and our reality is itself a fantasy that boils down to a cat in a box with a jar of radioactive isotopes connected to a hammer hovering over a glass vial of poison. I’ve read about season 3, but I gave up watching midway through season 2 when it just seemed like the show had no future.

 Enter Picard, the COVID installment. This new series focuses on the titular Jean-Luc (JL) in what should be the pleasant days of his retirement, but with a rather significant catch. The series takes place on the original timeline (sans Spock, who is now stuck forever in that alternative timeline because of that whole red matter thing). It is 20 years after the events of the final installment of the Next Gen movie franchise, Nemesis; a bit longer since the events of Insurrection, a film that began with Data going off the ranch due to his programming being compromised and also involves bad guys who use wretchedly bad plastic-surgery to hide their true identities (they literally reconstruct the skin of their faces like the campiest over-done joke about facelifts in the history of film—the joke: too many facelifts and you look kinda inhuman; the moral: too many facelifts and you aren’t human anymore; the deeper implication: plastic surgery is superficial and can’t change the bad soul within). In Nemesis, plastic surgery has gotten even more complex—the Romulans have even made a fake JL, but his unnatural construction doesn’t make for a happy life. Sadly, the concept of species-changing reconstructive surgery is retro-fitted into Discovery with that whole white Klingon turned dark-skinned human thing in season 1—apparently, the best spy is the one who can hide in the actual skin of their enemies, but the better spy is the one who might even forget their origins because of the trauma of transition to their insidious skin-show. From a trans perspective, to frame surgically constructed identity as sneaky and artificial is to imply that one is born, say, Klingon, and always will be Klingon, as Voq so amply demonstrates. Ash Tyler may look human, but remind him of his origins, and even in painfully acquired Terran drag, he is and always will be Klingon (he already stood out anyway—again, he was the white Klingon, and—who’d have guessed it—their future leader). There is no trans identity; there is just the mask of the inherent identity that cannot change.  

 Picard is also set after the explosion of the Romulan Star, from whence has derived the very name of the Romulan Star Empire. Now Romulans are space refugees. JL had played a significant role in helping them resettle and even has two house-servant Romulans who owe him fealty in a feudalist kind of way at his French vineyard. However, approximately 14 years prior to the start of the series, advances in synthetic/android technology seemed to have led to a coup by the androids on Mars, where they were helping terraform the planet for Romulan settlement. These androids lowered the planetary shields, which led to the destruction of the colony and the loss of 90,000-odd lives.

 JL, mourning Data’s death after the events of Nemesis, wants both to continue helping Romulans and continue promoting the development of artificial intelligence to re-achieve the advanced lifeform construction that manifested as Data. As we are reminded throughout the series, Data’s complexity was unique in a time when AI was otherwise nowhere near sophisticated enough to achieve Data’s level of humanity (notably, in First Contact, a significant part of the plot revolves around the Borg grafting actual skin onto Data’s arm to tempt him to betray his human companions—and I could write an entirely separate blog about how the Borg also signify anxieties over post-humanism and artificiality; in fact, they play a significant role as such in Picard).

 After the attack on Mars, JL challenges the Federation’s decisions to scale back resettlement of Romulans and questions the wisdom of banning additional development of AI. He resigns in protest; his resignation is accepted. And que the new series, all these years later. We first re-encounter JL having tea with Data and play chess, a dream sequence in which JL stalls the inevitable outcome (Data wins) because he doesn’t want the game to end—an apt metaphor for JL’s character. He just wants to get out into space again—but the future is a bit like an undiscovered country, and JL turns out to have a tumor in his brain, a residual growth related to his previous Borg implants. He is actually dying from one of the few conditions which the advances of science in his sci-fi world cannot save him, or so it seems. Little does JL know that Data’s “daughter” is on earth and in need of his assistance. But the show begins in just a dream, and on waking to the real world, JL codes as an old man in search of an adventure and still mourning his lost friend from the exile of his vineyard. Only once in the series is there a reference to his artificial heart, which seems to cause no anxiety for anyone. Alas, perhaps humans don’t need a real heart, just a real body. Wholly artificial bodies are bad!  

 So, Romulans, AI, Jean-Luc, and memories of that perfect robot Data—and was he a robot, or did he achieve something more? Or are “robots” just machines; can a robot as a robot be a life form? And what is life, exactly? Or humanity? versus what is artificial? Life itself, or just intelligence?

 In the sutured storylines animating this new incarnation of the original Star Trek universe, I doubt it was the intention of the producers to construct a narrative of trans futurity and its attendant anxieties—though that Michael Chabon helped develop the story certainly offers credibility to queer readings of it—but nonetheless, especially the first half of the series is saturated with rhetoric of transphobia and trans affirmation. Whether or not Picard ever settles the tensions that arise between them is up for debate, no doubt, but one can’t deny the show wouldn’t make meaning without embedding this discourse in its otherwise Sci-Fi frame.

 The features of the series directly relevant to trans discourse—and its attendant transphobia—are as follows:

 1.) Data—the series fundamentally centers on the absent center, the aporia that is Lt. Commander Data. In the Next Gen series, Data’s journey from android to human formed a central part of the weekly/seasonal narrative, to the extent the show had overarching narratives (at the time, TV was still mostly devoted to episodic structures whereas now most mainstream shows read like chapter books). In Nemesis, Data sacrifices himself to save the Enterprise crew, and in Picard, the writers insert the theory that a single positronic neutron (or something?) from Data’s body could be used to recreate Data’s entire neural web. But that is not enough, for Data was not just an ultra-advanced feedback loop of AI learning; he was also a body that could be programmed to feel emotion but was, nonetheless, primarily inorganic—he was a thinking machine. He appears at the start and end of the series, but his legacy is the fulcrum, an actual absent center, around which the plot revolves when we learn that a scientist working to solve the problem of re-creating a being as complex as Data did, in fact, scour the cosmos for the one sub-atomic particle left over from him that could then lead to additional developments even after his death.

 To this extent, Data’s one neutron is zygotic. He cannot reproduce in a sexual fashion similar to the binary heterosexual systems of mammalian life on earth, but his “cell” can be used to create new life—and his creation is framed in the Next Gen series and in Picard as being a true quantum leap in AI evolution, the duplication of which seems impossible without his “cell.” Herein Picard nods to evolutionary biology and Freudianism. First, the spark of life that led to self-reproducing organisms in a primordial sea is the spark that has alluded all subsequent knowledge save that of Victor Frankenstein. Similarly, one Data is all the Data we get—to recreate that spark of life is otherwise impossible. Second, as Freud describes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, sex is just an “intimation of immortality” wherein a cell seeks to live even beyond its own death by reproducing its DNA in a new cell that can, in theory, produce its own new cell on to infinity—life is immortal even if any single life is not.

 Data’s quantum leap does not, however, mean he represents irreducible complexity. He had a predecessor, a “brother,” named B4. The name is not even a veiled reference. Before Data was B4, the inhuman android. Data’s perfection is that despite his imperfection, he wants to be human; B4 does not. 

 Picard plays on this blunt taxonomy. On Mars, on the day of the catastrophe when the androids rebel and destroy the colony, the series cannot show ALL the androids suddenly changing their otherwise subservient behavior into mass homicidal maniacs. Rather, the series follows one android working with “his” small group of humans. This android is vaguely like Data—yellow eyes, unnaturally greenish skin. He is the next step in AI, not a thinking machine like Data but a useful worker in a bigger system for the betterment of the galaxy. His designation is F8.

 F8 goes haywire, and suddenly reprograms the computer system to shut down the planetary shields, thus allowing a band of renegade Romulans to destroy the Martian colony—14 years late, JL tells us, the surface of Mars still burns.

 After his role in lowering the shields, F8 takes a laser mining gun and murders his human companions. Then, of course, he turns the gun on himself. Our last visual of him is from the back, as he puts the gun to his own head. He is also unlike Data in that he is bald. His number is printed on the back of his head. F8, or FATE, then kills himself. The symbolism is abundantly clear. To pursue artificial life is suicide for humanity—for all organic things. Indeed, F8, Data, B4, and all the other androids later introduced in the series are substantially superior to their organic counterparts. So, qua Terminator, what will keep them from killing us one day when they realize how awesomely more awesome they are than we could ever be? Or will we organics just sort of, you know, die out—like we do, and all.

 2.) The ban—as a result of the attack on Mars, the Federation institutes a ban on artificial life forms and on experiments to develop them, even if to create ones less given to whatever flaw led to F8’s betrayal (we later learn it was an inside job by the Romulans who hate artificial intelligence, but we aren’t there yet). On the one hand, the ban represents a direct critique of bans on stem cell research; Dana and Riker are now married with children but mourn a child they lost to a simple infection that could have been easily treated with a protocol developed in a positronic matrix, such as the ones necessary to sustain androids like Data, at least according to Star Trek lore. But that ban! Their child dies. Bans on scientific research are bad, the show seems to say.

 It also reads, if more in code, as fear of trans bodies. The entire discourse about “artificial” life is a surrogate for fear of non-human, or more properly, post-humanist, “life.” Powerful forces want to stop technology from being something that serves a “natural order” with humans—and their Romulan, Vulcan, and even Klingon counterparts—on top. But to imply fear of post-humanist science is to defer to humanism, which as a branch of philosophy is embedded with naturalizing rhetoric meant to praise the human form so long as that form is binarily gendered, heterosexist, and “natural” like all non-queer things supposedly are. Per J. Jack Halberstam, trans discourse moves away from such privileged discussions of “natural” bodies with their “natural” roles and functions; and if Halberstam embraces the label of post-humanist, there is also an extent to which heterosexist humanists deny the humanism of trans identity and thus push it into “post-humanism” as a category for inferiority, as if to say, “see, you’ve taken this too far!”

 That last note is where the anti-trans rhetoric emerges in Picard—which is not to say the writers or producers endorse anti-trans discourse so much as they create a narrative that serves as a metaphor for it, as Sci-Fi often does for so many of our societal anxieties. The ban in Picard is, quite literally, a fear of the post-human galaxy overrun with AI, artificially, non-real bodies that are not governed by the biological (read: natural) order of organic life. To call trans bodies artificial, or otherwise uncut them for not being “the real thing” (as Marjorie Garber phrases it in her seminal trans studies essay, “Spare Part”) is nothing new. Even as I write this post, the early days of the Biden administration and its open endorsement of trans rights has already led to a re-emergence of the violent, caustic anti-trans rhetoric of the latter Obama years—never silenced just unnecessary when the Trump administration was so actively undermining trans existence.

 The extent to which artificial and synthetic are used interchangeably in the series, the same critique holds. Only real, natural, and organic lives matter—those unreal, artificial, synthetic things are not to be trusted anymore. 

 3) The Tal-Shiar/Zhat Vash—the former is the secret Romulan police that everyone knows about, but that is now, quite surprisingly, carrying out missions on Earth, which is a stone too far no matter how generous a treaty with the Romulan Star Empire had been post-supernova. More grimly, the Zhat Vash is the secret police inside the secret police—Romulans are the Id in Star Trek for intrigue and secrecy compared to the id that is the Klingon’s unfettered emotions or to id that is the Vulcan’s utter logic. Each are manifestations of distinctly human projections.  Notably, this secret-secret police is specifically determined to rid the galaxy of artificial life. As JL’s Romulan friend asks, “Did you ever notice the complete absence of artificial intelligence on Romulus?” It is a good question. In the Next Gen series, Data is the emblem for a natural progression from tricorders that know everything to ship computers that make the body of the vessel a nearly living thing. Undoubtedly, that kind of wildly powerful technology is moving closer to fully autonomous AI, but before Data (B4?) such a step had not been achieved.

 On Romulus, apparently, even the intermediary steps were greatly underdeveloped for fear that one day AI would take over and all organic life would die (or be killed—at any rate, it would be superfluous). To this extent, the Zhat Vash represents the more reactionary elements of real, 21^st-century American society that actively employs anti-trans rhetoric to advance transphobia to erase trans lives.

 In Picard, members of the Zhat Vash have infiltrated the highest levels of the Federation as well as the Tal-Shiar. Whereas the Tal-Shiar would represent something like the John Birch Society, the Zhat Vash are the actual unregenerate Nazis. Both stand in for right-wing extremism in its multi-dimensional forms in our current reality. Despite being recognized by anyone with half a brain as “bad,” they nonetheless exert enormous influence on the Federation and shift it into a conservativism in direct contrast to the science-based, liberal, inclusive Federation JL once spoke for in the far reaches of the Alpha-quadrant. But let me be clear about what is being signified here—though everyone would say the Tal-Shiar is sketchy and the Zhat Vash crazy and dangerous, nonetheless, the Federation adopts their extremist policies, so long as they can keep distance from the actual group associate with it. Similarly, vast swaths of American society readily embrace right-wing bigotry, so long as its spouted by ostensibly credible sources like Senators and Congresspeople, who could never—just never, I tell you—actually be the crazies in the conspiracy cults.

4.) Elnor and the Qowat Milat—though Elnor’s character promises early in the series to play a significant role, by midway through, it seems like the writers literally don’t know where to put him, so he hides out on the “artifact,” a Borg cube in Romulan space looking for lost causes to defend with his life. He is a member of the Qowat Milat—sort of. The Qowat Milat is an order of assassin nuns from Romulan society. They employ “absolute candor” in their speech and dealings, and at times they are described as being the anti-thesis of the Zhat Vash . . . or the Tal-Shiar. This angle of the narrative remains underdeveloped. They don’t so much embrace artificial intelligence as they spurn the secrecy of their nemeses within Romulan society. And they are also nuns, which is to say that they are an all-female order. And yet, there is Elnor, the boy Qowat Milat.

 Elnor’s family dies in the Romulan supernova. JL arranges for him to be taken in by the Qowat Milat on a refugee planet until he can find a more suitable arrangement. The queer value of an all-female assassins’ sisterhood has precedent in other queer-inflected texts, though they are presented as nuns (ergo, celibate) who have no interests in raising a boy child.

 14 years earlier, JL had been visiting Elnor when the attack on Mars occurred. He promised to return to visit Elnor, who sees JL as a father-figure. JL cannot keep his promise after the attack. Thus, when we meet the now-grown Elnor, he has been raised by the Qowat Milat who, having not other options, raised him as a member of their warrior sisterhood.

 On the one hand, Evan Evagora plays Elnor certainly as a badass ninja warrior, but his build seems suggestively feminine, his voice soft and young. He can code as queer for these reasons alone, and certainly Evagora brings a sex appeal to the series for young male and female fans alike.

 On the other hand, his gender identity is unfixed. Other Romulans recognize that he is a “boy” Qowat Milat, and they regularly call him by feminine pronouns. Certainly, this designation is intended as at least partially insulting, but Elnor never seems to mind, nor flinch. He accepts that he has grown into this role wherein he is read as feminine to match his inclusion into the Qowat Milat that raised him—which also seems unperturbed that it had to bend its rules in the face of an actual global (Romulan) catastrophe. “He” needed a home. He became a sister. The series does not fill any lack in his masculinity by making him lovestruck over any female character, artificial or otherwise. In fact, his most endearing moments are with Raffi and Seven of Nine, both of whom hug him as if he is a lost little boy and they his logical mothers. 

 5.) The Borg—no revival of JL’s character could be complete without the Borg making an appearance, though if the Borg were the end-all of bad guys for a solid 25 years of Star Trek series, the recent reinventions of the original series in the new films and in Discovery have noticeably erased them in favor of other supposed threats. No doubt a few formal scholars and no small number of cultural commentators and fans have commented on the Borg as metaphors for anxieties in the 1980s and 1990s about increasing computerization and alienation in our ever-globalizing economy. Indeed, what is the difference between a device drilled into your head to make you part of the collective and a device you carry in your hand all day to track your movements and feed you news?

 The Borg also represent the fully appendaged body—thanks to nano-technology, being “Borg” is literally having your body adjusted to be a monstrous cyborg, an erasure of humanity into artificial technologies that also erase individuality. Basically, the Borg are post-human, too. The Borg, however, do not create fully autonomous AI. Rather, they integrate body with not-body, real with artificial, thus creating the most frightening monsters of all.

 Except, of course, for the de-Borged. In Picard, we encounter a Cube that has been rejected by the collective. The former Borg on the Cube are now being re-humanized, but their bodies are scarred, their memories unable to erase the trauma of assimilation. They present in the series as grotesqueries, and Romulans and humans alike see them as sub-human more than post-human. Their lives and deaths literally don’t matter—there is an actual point at which thousands are jettisoned, namelessly, into space to die. The incident happens and is barely mentioned again. In Picard, the Borg almost feels like a plot device simply to give JL and his crew a mid-season destination, except for the appearance of Seven of Nine.

 6.) Seven of Nine—one could reasonably argue that the original intention of adding Seven of Nine to the cast of Voyager was to have Jeri Ryan’s statuesque figure in tights on screen as much as possible to appeal to a certain type of Sci-Fi viewer who prefers such things. In Picard, Seven is thoughtfully repurposed. The still gorgeous Ryan plays a hardened space cowboy who also doubles as a mother figure for former Borg like herself. She is a lesbian who was previously duped by a woman who trades in Borg parts, usually by cutting them out of living Borg (Seven manipulates JL and his crew to pay revenge on said former lover, whom she vaporizes with no guilty conscience at all). At the end of the season, she is seen holding hands with Raffi, JL’s female “number one” whose backstory of alcoholism and the loss of a connection with her now grown son haunt her—both were caused by the events on Mars and Raffi’s insistence that Romulans had planned it. Raffi’s “conspiracy theories” are dismissed as crazy, but she was, of course, right. Raffi failed to understand the anti-synth element that motivated the attack—Romulans used artificial lives to cause a small catastrophe to pressure the Federation to ban additional AI development to prevent their apocalyptic belief from coming to fruition, that a synth revolution is soon to destroy all organic life in the galaxy.

 Seven continues her role from Voyager (a riff on JL’s own Borg experience) to humanize the victims of assimilation. For all their grotesque medical-freak-show appearances, former Borg are still subjects with agency and individuality that must be restored to them despite their mangled appearance.

 I’d argue that “former Borg” status is not a nod to reverse transitioning. Rather, the former Borg represent the literally hideous body, mutilated by the loss of their agency. Now they are enfreaked as inhuman but challenge viewers to see the beauty in the destabilized body. If former Borg can live and think freely, then assimilation might be trauma, but life remains, even when partially artificial.

 More pointedly, in a flashback scene, Seven has to euthanize a fellow former Borg when she arrives to late to save him from a surgery to harvest his valuable tech, that is also an integrated part of his body. Seven refers to former Borg as her family—a nod to the idea that shared experience creates family in the absence of biological relatives. These “logical” families are a cornerstone of queer community and identity, as signified by Seven’s lesbianism. Seven and the former Borg represent otherness as a mode of community along deeply queer frames of reference; their bodily otherness signals to ability/disability discourse and queer identity beyond intact bodies figured as natural that are still, by degrees, figuratively queer. That they love and empathize with each other in the aftermath of their shared trauma makes them a visible reminder of another particular community from the late 80s and 90s—the gay community that survived, not without deep emotional and physical trauma, the AIDS crisis. Both are communities seen as expendable by those in power; both find in their collective trauma the beauty not inherent in intimations of immortality but in simple, day-to-day continuance of life.

 7.) Soji/Dahj—Data’s daughters, the lynchpin of the series, are “twins” born in the dual-productive process of android creation (they are made in pairs). Both are works of art—Dr. Jurati, a troubled roboticist who once dreamed of creating autonomous synthetic life, remarks that the craftsmanship that created both was not simply a matter of utility, but that the addition of frivolous, asymmetrical features, such as moles on the face, make Soji, at least, a work of art. Jurati never met Dahj.

 Both are artificial. Neither knows it. Both are androids with actual organic matter incorporated into their matrices. They are as human as humans, and maybe even more human, too. In community, one could say they attain realness, at first because of their ignorance and possibly moreover as they learn their histories, leading Soji on a journey of self-discovery as clear as any mythos recorded by Joseph Campbell. Soji, who lives (Dahj dies in an attack of the Tal-Shiar), is the hero with a thousand faces, and her particular face is actually shared by her own twin and by a previous pair of androids, one of whom also died as a result of fear of these artificial lives.

 Soji becomes a bit of a Pinocchio, always wondering if she is a real girl. JL and others seem determined to agree she is, but not without some hesitation—JL, Riker, and Dana all seem more determined to celebrate Soji as an android despite Soji’s desire to remain “real” in her own mind. Herein lies the muddiness of the series—by midway through, the affirmation of Soji’s uniqueness overtakes the rhetoric of her sameness. It is basically like having a bunch of friends who just have to keep reminding you that it is so totally okay and awesome to be trans when you really want them to see you as just a boy or just a girl or, for that matter, just a person.

 The question in trans discourse about when one is trans and if one can arrive at a cis identity is not without precedent, but the biggest reason Picard was clearly not written with this discourse intentionally in mind is the clumsy way it never quite can resolve it effectively in the second half of the series. Perhaps there is no resolution that functions universally for all trans lives, but the series does not fail for celebrating ambiguities and possibilities. It fails because it can’t control the reverberations of its rhetoric into trans discourse. When it seems aware that it is making a bigger point, it turns to moralizing from an outsider perspective—it is, at best, showing cis people how to be supportive of your trans friends. It is not, necessarily, speaking to a trans audience.

 This is just an outline of the way in which Picard finds itself infused with a trans discourse, and even if that discourse slips away from the show by the latter episodes, it is important to acknowledge that the show is not only speaking to trans identity, but it is also indebted to the discourse that derives therefrom. Indeed, Picard dwells at length on the future of the galaxy itself as we, in our own time, contemplate computerization and automation through considerably more banal but no less relevant lenses. Good Science-fiction is always about the society that produced it and gives voice to the anxieties and tensions of its origins—what will become of us; how will our current policies play out? These questions could become the subject of political debates that diffuse them into partisanship; or, when we are lucky, they animate stories of futurity that speculate on improbabilities that suggest to us the err, or sometimes the grace, of our ways.

 In this regard, Picard may mostly be a treatise on computers and technologies, but it roots these concerns in technologies of the body and in the very nature of the human form itself. Where is the line between the artificial and the real body? Or so it seems to ask. Asked differently, it also broaches the enigmas of metaphysics: who has the right to define the nature of life? And what is natural, by the way?

 To ruminate on these questions, Picard needs a discourse from our present to ground the vagaries of the metaphysical into an experiential realm. Thus, it finds itself employing a discourse about trans identity and (post)humanism to say, however inelegantly, that there is no such thing as synthetic nor artificial life, only life and death, and that which is living should always be privileged, even when it doesn’t fit our preconceived notion of what is natural, organic, or whole.  

 I wouldn’t argue Picard is a trans narrative, but it couldn’t exist without trans narrative. That feels like that kind of statement worth putting to words.