As a Star Trek officianado, I'd like share one of my many thoughts concerning the franchise.     Gene Roddenberry was born in El Paso, Texas, to Eugene Edward Roddenberry and Caroline Goleman. The Roddenbury surname is of French origin, however no family history can be verified under this surname, perhaps indicating that he is an Ashkenazi Jew...    http://www.ancestry.com/facts/Rodden...e-meaning.ashx      24th century Earth as depicted in Star Trek: TOS and its successors is a monoculture of American values (such as in human names, for instance). However, regardless of the real-world justification (It's an American series after all), could Earth's future be actually like this? According to Star Trek: TOS and dozens of Star Trek novels, the Earth suffered a Third World War in which Asia and Eurasia were sterilized of life and in Star Trek: TNG and dozens more novels a Fourth World War obliterated S.E. Asia and most of S. America and Africa. After these events the globalization of business, advertising, work, communication and travel blurred cultural borders, and favored the strongest remaining culture. But if we don't believe in such a development or don't want to resort to the fictional explanation (Maybe it's what Earth is like after two centuries of American world domination), couldn't Earth appear just as Americanized to aliens (in addition to the Federation being human-dominated) as alien cultures seem to be monolithic in our eyes?    In addition, humanity as portrayed in Star Trek has a predilection for classic European art, literature and music. Spock, Picard, Data, Janeway or the holoDoctor, for instance, appear to be fond of European culture just up to the mid-19th century. Above all the Shakespeare references in Star Trek: TNG are innumerable. Even though Shakespeare is arguably the greatest writer of English literature and may still be in the 24th century, there is hardly a place for anyone else. There are comparably few examples of a 22nd or 23rd century equivalent of a popular culture, much less of something like a subculture. Homosexuality exists neither as a subculture nor as a generally accepted way of living. A number of crew members such as Tom Paris or Trip Tucker are very much interested in the TV programs, movies, music and cars of the 20th century, and in the Star Trek: Voyager episode Real Life we get an impression what a 24th century Klingon-flavored subculture on Earth could look like, when the Doctor's holo-son brings his Klingon friends home. But overall, pop culture of any age seems to alienate many Starfleet officers, like the punk in the bus in Star Trek: IV or Zephraim Cochrane's Steppenwolf music in Star Trek: First Contact (although I suspect Riker liked it). Since no pop culture, language, fond remembrances, cultural references, music, entertainments, art or literature from the 22nd to mid-23rd centuries are ever referred to by the officers and crewmen of the Federation, one has to assume that this period was a second Dark Age in which a world of stunned and bedraggled White Americans and Europeans struggled to survive in a world poisoned by the ultimate results of Jewish capitalism and Jewish Marxism.    Yet, even if we leave aside the national and the classical humanist slant in Star Trek, we may make out a common goal among humans that is perhaps equivalent to the Klingon blood thirst and the Ferengi greediness. Not only the society of the Federation, but the human nature itself in Star Trek was deliberately laid out by Gene Roddenberry as being better than today, and this continued in the sequels, even though some installments of Star Trek: DS9 cast a shadow on the perfect world that is Earth in the 24th century. But overall Star Trek is governed by the motto We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity, as Picard explains to the negress Lily in Star Trek: First Contact.