My Name is Captain Future

UPDATE: 7/08: Front page at Booman Tribune and E Pluribus Media.
7/09: on Rec list at European Tribune.Great comments at all three!

When I chose the Internet ID of Captain Future, I didn’t realize that right wing bloggers often used “captain” in their names. I was paying playful homage to heroes of my childhood who often seemed to have that rank and title, like Captain Video, Captain Midnight and of course Captain Kirk (though I tended to identify more with Mr. Spock), and the captain who brought these figures and what they represented into the adult world: Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

These childhood heroes—which also included Superman, Robin Hood, Lancelot, the Cisco Kid and the Lone Ranger, as well as Saturday morning space opera commanders---championed the weak against the tyranny of the strong. They stood for social justice as well as the rule of law, and personal qualities of integrity, honesty, intelligence, courage and loyalty.
Those early TV heroes (partly in response to public pressure) kept violence to a minimum. They never killed even the worst villains--- Captain Video didn’t even used the word “kill.” They tried peaceful solutions first. They stood for tolerance and friendship across boundaries, opposing tyranny but honoring peace. (To my benefit, some socially conscious blacklisted American writers found employment writing for kids’ adventures in England, like the Robin Hood series.)

I’ve been astonished recently to see that right wingers are trying to co-opt Star Trek to support their ideology. It doesn’t, and it was in many ways the adult version of those Saturday space operas. Episodes of Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers and Rocky Jones, Space Ranger dealt with the dangers of radiation, and these series (as well as “Tom Corbett, Space Cadet”) often promoted peaceful solutions and disarmament. After Buzz Corey, the hero of Space Patrol encountered a planet that had destroyed itself through hatred, he returned to earth determined to see that it didn’t happen there.

Space Patrol was the police arm of the otherwise peaceful federation of interstellar governments, United Planets. The others were similar. Like Star Trek, they saw human institutions evolve and correct past patterns of prejudice and conquest. Starfleet, like Space Patrol, combined military discipline and organization with peaceful and principled purposes: universal rights, respect and communication, exploration without exploitation. Having diligently erased poverty and disease, Star Trek's Earth is united. People work not for money but to “better themselves and the rest of humanity.”

"Recent science fiction must be accorded high credit for being one of the most active forces in support of equal opportunities, goodwill, and cooperation among all human beings, regardless of their racial and national origins,” said Dr. Hermann J. Muller, discoverer of the genetic effects of radiation, a few decades ago. “Its writers have been practically unanimous in their adherence to the ideal of 'one free world."

Space opera from Flash Gordon to Doctor Who is a wonderful combination of myth, adventure, philosophy and science fiction. Although I didn’t know this when I thought of using the name, the original Captain Future was a pulp magazine hero in the 1940s. An orphan raised by a disembodied brain, a robot and an android, he is a brilliant scientist and athlete, with ”a strong sense of responsibility” and desire to help others, who offers his services to the President of the Solar System. I’ve never read any of the stories, though the covers suggest it was a pulpy but imaginative amalgamation of elements familiar from the likes of Batman and Superman to Buckaroo Banzai. (Captain Future was resurrected in a Japanese anime series, apparently remembered in France and Germany for its music, and as the subject of Allen Steele’s 1996 Hugo-winning novel.)

I chose the name because the future has become a major personal and professional preoccupation. Looking back, I can see some of the connections from childhood to now: including my political coming of age in the Kennedy administration and the late 1960s rebellions and visionary quests, my 1970s interest in Buckminster Fuller and the fledgling futurist/futures studies movements, my book on the shopping mall as the embodiment of postwar America and its vision of the future, and so on.

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