Get a load of this fragrant pantload.
Bear with me now as I tie Trump to the image above, taken from an episode of Star Trek TNG.
No, really.
OK, so one of the greatest of all Star Trek episodes involved the theoretical malleability of space-time, and the possibility of being plunged unwittingly into an alternate reality because somehow, somebody just changed something in the past, a venerable science fiction theme revisited often within the many iterations of the Star Trek franchise (most famously in the revered original series episode titled The City on the Edge of Forever). It was called Yesterday’s Enterprise. It began with the current Starship Enterprise, NCC-1701D, cruising along on some sort of routine exploratory mission, everything going smoothly, when a sort of, well, hole appears in the fabric of space, like a wormhole yet not a wormhole, out of which enigmatic aperture pops another, older starship. Its transponder, bafflingly at first, is squawking as none other than the USS Enterprise – huh? – but wait, it’s NCC-1701C, the namesake of today’s vessel, one of a long line of ships named Enterprise, going all the way back to 19th Century Earth. Enterprise C went missing decades ago, yet now there it is, having conjured itself out of the ether.
Immediately, everything changes on the sunny bridge of Jean-Luc Picard’s command. The lights go dark, mimicking the ambience of a modern US Navy Combat Information Center. Everyone’s uniform changes. Everyone is equipped with sidearms. Worf, the Klingon security officer, has vanished, and in his place stands a woman, Tasha Yar, who used to occupy the post before she suffered a crushingly pointless death during an away mission. Everything is suddenly deadly serious, as the obviously battle-hardened crew conducts itself as if the modern Enterprise is a warship on combat patrol, loaded for bear and looking for trouble. It is. In this new reality, the Federation has been at war with the Klingon Empire for the last 20 years (and, we learn later, is now losing), and the Enterprise is a heavily-armed, heavily-shielded space-faring battleship. This is perfectly normal to everyone aboard. This has always been their reality.
One member of the crew, however – an enigmatic alien named Guinan, played by Whoopi Goldberg – somehow knows this is all wrong. The Enterprise isn’t supposed to be a warship. There is no war. There should be families aboard, and children. Tasha, whom she knows well, is also somebody she’s never met, because the poor, doomed officer was long dead before Guinan ever joined the crew. Unlike everybody else, she’s aware that reality has shifted around her, and they’ve all been dropped into a radically different and uglier present, all because, it turns out, the older Enterprise has emerged through a temporary gash torn in the very fabric of the universe. Enterprise C is not supposed to be here. It’s from the past, and by departing its own time and appearing in the here and now, it’s changed everything; it’s been prevented from doing something back there that had been crucial to the creation of the reality Guinan remembers. The old ship therefore has to go back and fulfill its proper destiny. The timeline needs to be restored. Billions of lives turn on it. Guinan has no evidence of this certainty beyond her own intuition. How to convince the others of what she knows? How to persuade Picard?
It really is a hell of a good episode. Once seen, it sticks with you.
Well, a couple of days back, as we sat on the couch watching an increasingly orange and visibly deteriorating Trump use his sharpie to cross out “Lake Ontario” on the little map he’d been supplied for the purpose, and then write in “Lake America” as if he was actually able, by fiat, to change the name of an international body of water, Kathy, having herself viewed Yesterday’s Enterprise for the first time just a few weeks prior, looked over at me and said “I feel like Guinan. This isn’t supposed to be a warship. There is no war. None of this is right”.
I was taken aback. It really resonated. My immediate thought was Yes, exactly. We must be living through the Star Trek scenario right now! For real!
Think about it. The burnt umber asshole scribbling on his map is laying waste to national landmarks (the latest threat is to tear down the Kennedy Center), destroying global alliances, coddling mortal enemies, engaging in economically ruinous trade wars, outright losing geopolitically calamitous honest-to-God shooting wars, wreaking fiscal havoc, and grifting, always grifting, while he beclowns himself by merrily changing what our own PM Carney referred to drolly as his preferred “hydronyms”. He thinks the Gulf of Mexico is now legally the Gulf of America for everybody all over the world, just because he says so. Ditto Lake Ontario. He thinks he can rename the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans too, if he feels like it. He’s a basket case. He’s fit for the straitjacket, sitting there looking confused during his clown car cabinet meetings, filling his diaper while falling off to sleep. At night, motivated by impulses more typical of an eight-year-old, he posts AI slop like this on his bullshit faux-Twitter social media platform:
Don’t even get me going on fucking Elon Musk and DOGE.
You can’t tell me that all of this insanity just happened organically, and the bulging bag of unreasoning Crisco now slouching behind the Resolute Desk is actually supposed to be President of the United Goddam States.
It cannot be so.
Somebody tampered with the flow of events.
I mean, look at his various appointees, you still need convincing. The assembly of this bumbling squad of witless moonbats isn’t just madness, it’s practically impossible. How were all of these brainstems available and willing to serve The Donald at the same time? Besides, the whole constitutional system of checks and balances, of hearings and Senate confirmations, was designed to prevent any such nonsense, yet a pop-eyed lunatic is running the FBI into a deep and muddy ditch, a straight-up thug runs Homeland Security, and an anti-vaxxing science denier presides over the dismantling of the Centres for Disease Control while pathogens long gone from these shores begin to reappear. The Attorney General thinks he’s Donald’s personal lawyer. The Secretary of Defense, a former Fox News weekend host and known alcoholic, lays waste to the morale and material readiness of the armed forces. On top of which, two words: Stephen Miller [involuntary shudder]. Shit, man, I could prattle on for ages, write thousands upon thousands of words, and never draw near to an exhaustive catalogue of the malfeasance committed by Donald’s rogue’s gallery of idiots and misfit toys. Nobody in power is in any way competent. Meanwhile, Congress does nothing. Under the Constitution it’s their frigging job to do something, mind you, that’s what they’re for, that’s why they’re the Article I branch of government, but nope. No dice. Not interested. On top of which, just so the written laws and established jurisprudence don’t throw up any roadblocks, a stacked Supreme Court lets them all get away with unconstitutional murder, issuing decision after decision to challenge Dred Scott for the apparently coveted Worst of All Time trophy.
You think we aren’t living in a time-twisted Bizarroland? Then explain to me how roving gangs of masked ICE agents are hauling legal residents off the streets and sending them to hastily constructed gulags, while now and then murdering US citizens, and of course the odd asylum seeker. Does that sound like the real America to you? Tell me how it is that the whole stinking Trump regime presides over the progressive enshittification (my favourite new word) of pretty much every facet and function of what’s soon to be a former superpower. This precipitous decline in national power and prestige is not how it works. Yes, prior great powers and global hegemons have risen and then declined in their turn throughout all of history, but none of them ever surrendered its dominance on purpose. No Roman Emperor ever rolled out of bed one morning and decided Hey, you know what, fuck the Pax Romana. No British Prime Minister ever resolved one day that the Royal Navy was getting to be a real pain in the ass, and it was high time that Britannia stopped exerting its command over the world’s oceans. Trump and his crew, straining credulity, are deliberately dismantling an entire world order, the world order their own nation constructed for its own enormous benefit. They’re destroying themselves with evident glee as if that had been the plan all along. By all appearances, they’re on a mission. What? How?
Don’t you see? None of this is even remotely plausible. None of it should have happened. Clearly, some malign actor jumped into his Wayback Machine and travelled back in time to pull on some crucial threads, cut a few vital links, fiddle with a few important predicate outcomes, and thus guarantee that we’d end up under the authority of this wretched kakistocracy, mired in this fucked up, thoroughly impossible mess. That has to be it.
Think of me as your enigmatic alien seer, who knows that we’re supposed to be flourishing within a much saner and more congenial timeline.
OK, you say to yourselves, fine, but now what? How do we fix this? How do we restore the proper timeline? Well, look, I’m not saying it’s going to be a cake walk. I’m not here to tell you that we can never fail so long as our hearts are pure and our objectives just. All I can say for sure is that it’s way too late to try to set anything right within the reality we now inhabit. In this timeline, kids, we’re well and truly fucked. We have to go back and cut this shit off at the pass. We have to track down the bastard with the Wayback Machine, chuck him into the deepest unlit cell of some Alabama supermax, and commandeer his diabolical contraption to mess with history ourselves, aiming for a date before all the jiggery-pokery that got us here could possibly have been accomplished. It should then be possible to nudge things preemptively back in the right direction. No doubt, it’ll be complicated. Decisions made decades ago will need to be changed. Certain births may have to be prevented. Some folks will need to be denied certain opportunities. God forbid, a couple of people may have to be pushed in front of buses, regrettable pursuit of the Greater Good and all that. There’ll be lots of delicate and sometimes ruthless stuff like that. Not simple. But doable.
America, I’m your guy. I’m volunteering to go back and give it my best shot. You can trust me. I’m Canadian.
the needlefish 