Nomad Codes

when I raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Oh, there are lots of pagans in the armed forces.”
    Having already participated in a “war machine,” Greene was attracted to both the code of honor and the pragmatic, no-nonsense worship that marks Klingon warrior society. “The Klingons are very similar to the Norse, the Japanese samurai, Genghis Khan. It makes sense—if you’re taking from those people, not only are you gonna take their organization, but you’re gonna take the basic concept of their religion.”
    Ambassador Khristine Arengar Azhir plops down next to Keon and cools him off with a Japanese fan. He starts to massage her stockinged feet. “We’re a crazy lot,” she says to me.“Like one big happy dysfunctional family.” A pale brunette with large glasses, a stick-on dragon tattoo, and a button that reads “To Hell with the Prime Directive I’m Going to Kill Something,” Khristine wears decidedly kinky garb—along with a short black skirt, black stockings, black fingernail polish, and pumps, Khristine’s “showpieces” include a cat-o’-nine-tails, a riding crop, and a knife jammed into her red garter (it’s actually a key chain).
    The twenty-three-year-old unemployed billing clerk from Queens proceeds to explain the “hodgepodge smorgasbord” of Neopagan elements that go into the Tera’daq ritual, fingering the pentagram and the Bajoran symbol that dangle from her neck. “Mostly this is for show. We would have fog machines if we could afford it.”
    “We’re not really doing anything,” Keon insists. “When we do Tera’daq we are in character. Once you close the door, you’re it. Once you walk out the door, you’re back in your normal life. When I play my character it’s sort of like a different person, but it’s part of myself, something that no one can take away. Klingon is what’s inside you. You have to let it out.”
    Khristine found that getting in touch with her inner Klingon was not only fun, but also empowering. “One of the reasons I became a Klingon was that I was going through a bad relationship and it helped me build self-confidence. I like interacting with people, growling at them and stuff. It’s healthy for me,” she says. “It keeps me sane, actually. A lot of people here are paramedics or work in law enforcement and public safety. Stressful jobs. This is a way to act out. ‘Cause they see the darker side of reality.”

    With their Siberian swagger and their talk of empire and conquest, the Klingons on the original Star Trek series obviously represented the Soviets. But by the mid-’80s, glasnost forced Paramount’s hand, and in the sixth Star Trek film the Klingon Empire and the Federation moved towards peace. The Star Trek movies also opened up Klingon subjectivities—literally. For the first time, we saw the dark, cramped interiors of Klingon ships and met the Imperial race—the Klingons with the walnut ridges on their foreheads. As one fan put it, Klingons were no longer “just guys painted brown with a Fu Manchu mustache.” But perhaps most importantly, the movies gave us the harsh, guttural Klingon tongue—which, years before Dances With Wolves , was respectfully subtitled.
    By the time Star Trek: the Next Generation takes place (seventy years later), the Klingons have formed a tentative alliance with the Feds. ST:TNG added a further twist by placing a Klingon on the bridge (like many Klin fans, doing security). Raised by humans, Lieutenant Worf constantly struggles with his split identity, and some of ST:TNG ’s best episodes, Worf wrestles with—and gives into—the call of his Klingon blood. By casting Worf and many Klingons with African-American actors (most notably, Tony Todd as Worf’s brother Kurn), ST:TNG added an alien dimension to TV’s tentative engagement with cultural difference. Taken solely as racial allegories, Klingons come off as galactic gangsta rappers with Afrocentric pride—like most liberal and mainstream representations of ethnicity, a thoroughly problematic blend of stereotypes and positive imagery.
    But as good myth-weavers know, the potency of myth lies in the magic of ambiguity. Myth derives its power from twilight, from straddling the here and there, like those optical illusions in psychology textbooks that signify different images depending on how you look at them. Strong myth has room for many specific and contradictory functions, political or otherwise, but it always opens up into another secret garden.