"and presenting it poorly enough that many viewers didn't realize thee was no money in the trek universe until they were specifically told so"

Ah. Well, then, perhaps most American TV viewers are drooling idiots with no capacity to draw conclusions of their own? Maybe the guys in Hollywood were right about the average intelligence of their audience? ;-)

The thing that most interested me about Star Trek was the social justice and equality in that fictional society, and it was plainly obvious. If you want a peaceful and cooperative society of highly motivated people, you can do it first and foremost by one simple thing: remove money from the equation altogether, and see that education, employment, and a good lifestyle are freely available to all....but that you will advance no further than your own efforts to do so make possible.

That is a brilliant and just way to run a society. It indicates real responsibility rather than pork barrel rule by the most clever and ruthless, which is what we have now. We are living like barbarians compared to how we could be living. It's shameful.

Roddenberry clearly had a vision of a much more progressive society, but he had to work within the cultural presumptions of the time...or the show would never have been accepted by the Network and no one would have ever seen it. Thus, the status of the female officers in the 1960's crew was much secondary...Uhura as Communications Officer and Nurse Chapel as assistant to Doctor McCoy, that was about it as I recall. It took until the 80's to bring in a female Doctor and a female Security Chief and until, I think, sometime in the 90's to bring in a female Commanding Officer (Janeway) on the Enterprise.

Those were indications of the quality not of the shows themselves, but of the society in which those shows were chosen to be aired. They aired what they figured the general public would be willing to watch.

Like I said, at present we are a society of barbarians, comparatively speaking, and I've known that all my life. It's painfully, blatantly obvious. We have barely begun to build a real planetary society here. We're still engaging in vicious robber baron and caveman tactics and acting like we were proud of it!

If I was a visitor from space, I'd watch this place from a safe distance and wait for it to grow up a bit before dreaming of trying to make any friendly trade agreements or anything else like that. Earthlings are dangerous, mainly because they are so ignorant.