Showing posts with label James Tiberius Kirk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label James Tiberius Kirk. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Saturday, September 18, 2010
CAPTAIN'S LOG, SUPPLEMENTAL: I only wish I could make all my confessions in the captain's-log format.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Monday, July 20, 2009
...AND TOUCHED THE FACE OF GOD: Megan McArdle on the cultural significance of the moonwalk. (On the actual moon, not Michael Jackson's.)
I don't know why this doesn't resonate with me. Some of it is doubtless temperament. But a lot of it is that my very first "public memory"--the first memory I share with most people my age--is the white clouds spiraling down from Challenger. "Obviously [there's been] a major malfunction."
I remember when that tanked series, Enterprise, started up, I wished it would begin with the Challenger disaster. Because I loved Star Trek. I love it now. My heart shudders with those first high, weird notes, and "Space--the final frontier...." I couldn't see the new movie because I knew I'd irrationally blame it for not being Shatner (my first and everpresent icon of leadership and loyalty), Nimoy and Kelley and Nichols and the rest. But I wanted the new Star Trek to acknowledge why we're still, culturally, Earthbound. We were chastened, and so we retreated into the greatest truth of science fiction: Wherever you go, there you are. We retreated into the alienation of home. I wanted the new series to redeem that experience, somehow: to grapple with it and still tell us that "the eyes of the world look, now, into space."
Well, it didn't. But ours has been an anguished retreat--not a philosophical rejection of the beauty in the dark spiral of stars.
Reagan's Challenger speech here.
I don't know why this doesn't resonate with me. Some of it is doubtless temperament. But a lot of it is that my very first "public memory"--the first memory I share with most people my age--is the white clouds spiraling down from Challenger. "Obviously [there's been] a major malfunction."
I remember when that tanked series, Enterprise, started up, I wished it would begin with the Challenger disaster. Because I loved Star Trek. I love it now. My heart shudders with those first high, weird notes, and "Space--the final frontier...." I couldn't see the new movie because I knew I'd irrationally blame it for not being Shatner (my first and everpresent icon of leadership and loyalty), Nimoy and Kelley and Nichols and the rest. But I wanted the new Star Trek to acknowledge why we're still, culturally, Earthbound. We were chastened, and so we retreated into the greatest truth of science fiction: Wherever you go, there you are. We retreated into the alienation of home. I wanted the new series to redeem that experience, somehow: to grapple with it and still tell us that "the eyes of the world look, now, into space."
Well, it didn't. But ours has been an anguished retreat--not a philosophical rejection of the beauty in the dark spiral of stars.
Reagan's Challenger speech here.
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