Earlier this summer I caught up with cultist fans of Joss Whedon's television series Firefly and, in a marathon DVD viewing of the three-fifths of a season Whedon managed to produce before a 2002 cancellation, found a favorite show that never really was. If Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry were still alive and didn't immediately take offense to Whedon's mockery of his jumpsuit, egalitarian determinism, he might have been impressed by a literal interpretation of his famous concept pitch for "Wagon Train to the stars," complete with horses, corrals and Wild West paraphernalia amid the starship docks. Within a month I watched Serenity, a 2005 feature film that elaborated on Firefly's fifteen episodes.
Firefly was patently libertarian. The cast played the crew of a transport vessel led by an independent man who fought for independent governance and — in an interstellar war reminiscent of Star Wars — lost before absconding to the Milky Way's rural fringes. Government, said the captain, does one thing best, and that is to get in the way. The Alliance, authoritarian galactic victor, was an oligarchy whose vision was more ponderously and dangerously insipid than evil. In Serenity the consequences of the Alliance's bureaucratic insouciance were made sordidly clear, but throughout Firefly's television run viewers were presented with a rarely sincere critique of statism.
Jonah Goldberg, traveling and privy to cable, celebrates Whedon's narration of "a capitalistic freebooter" defying "the egalitarian — democratic — 'Parliament.'" He does so with reservations, being "a big skeptic of trying to overread pop culture through partisan ideological lenses." Still, his observation is sharp, so one wonders: what is Goldberg's interpretation of Fruity Oaty Bar?