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A Warning to All "True" Trekkies |
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Take a seat. You're in big trouble and the Captain needs to have a few words with you.
They say that a paradigm never ends until its last supporters die out. This is as true for Star Trek as it is for any other paradigm, be it in religion or in science. This is also why I am so angry at those "old school" Trekkies who do nothing but bash and nit-pick at the 2009 movie even though it went so far as to make Star Trek popular again.
It was a well-made, lovingly researched and meticulously filmed masterpiece that did so many things that you'd never think Star Trek could ever do: it remained #1 in the box office for over 2 weeks and in the top ten for almost two months. And it recruited tons of young folks - kids, preteens, even adults who'd given up on Trek or were never interested in it - into the fold.
People who for years before the movie had come out would have insulted or terrorized me for being a Trekkie were suddenly coming to me and asking about it. New people were falling in love with the series and the movies and coming into the fold en masse - it made me think back about what it must have been like when the show was first coming out in 1966.
So maybe the movie wasn't perfect. And maybe the creation of an alternate timeline and a "Reboot" was a drastic measure. But the way it was rebooted left the original series unchanged - if those "hardcore" Trekkies (and this is an insult to me, as I consider myself one!) really care, they can just not watch the movie and sit back in their mothers' basements with their 1966 reruns. I hate people who are so closed-minded.
And as a scientist, and an evolutionary biologist, do you know what this really reminds me of? Have you ever heard of the "Scopes Monkey Trial" in Tennessee? The fight between science and religion? Or between religion and just about everything else? That's right. These "old school" Trekkies are a phenomenon where people are convinced that "my way - or what I have been dictated by generations past - is right and everything else is wrong, and therefore it is my solemn duty to put it down, bash it, hurt the people who like it, and expound my hatred to the world so as to turn everybody against it or away from it."
These "fundamentalists of Star Trek" think just like the way certain other groups think, and I can name a few names: the Nazis, the Fascists, the Japanese Imperialists, the forces of Empress Dowager Cixi that blocked the Chinese modernization movements in the cradle, the evil Iranian government under Khameini and Ahmadinejad, the equally evil North Korean government under Kim Jong Il, televangelists, religious fundamentalists all over the place from the Bible-thumpers who declare that gays and non-whites are going to Hell to Islamic car bombers, or those Christians who try to force the teaching of the truth to be expunged from American primary schools for solely religious reasons - in a country built on the separation of Church and State.
This way of thinking is not just wrong, it's dangerous. It is a roadblock to the progress that the movie has made not just in winning new fans for the franchise but in convincing the non-Trekkies of the world that we are normal people too, not freaks who live in our mothers' basements and know nothing about real life. It is hurting the new fans who weren't there when all those years of history - TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT and all the previous films - were coming out, who didn't know the magic when it first happened like we did and who are just getting into it and need a different impetus to buy into it than the rest of us did; face it, not many people get into fandoms by liking old things and TOS just looks primitive and suffers from simplistic story writing. (The show was so heavily focused on morality plays that it often presented situations, like a Nazi planet, that weren't exactly realistic or believable. Star Trek is still very much a morality play type show today, but now we're becoming better at masking it and making it more subtle.)
Furthermore, when you extrapolate this kind of ultraconservative thinking to human beings in general and religion and politics, this kind of backward thinking is dangerous to humanity as a whole because we aren't going to make any progress if people's emotional responses, gut reactions, adherence to tradition, and unwillingness to believe in new evidence or let go of what they are used to is causing us to lag behind and not make use of developments when they occur - or to let go of old grudges and try to accept one another.
So these "fundamentalist Trekkie" fools are very lucky that I observe an "Internet code of honor" that forbids me from trolling or flaming anyone directly. Because if I were more audacious, I would have called for their freedom of speech to be permanently taken away. We can't and won't have this kind of thinking. Not on my watch. Not if we need to move forward, not for the sake of humanity. And if you're one of those foolish "fans" who dares to be what my professors refer to as a "True Believer" when talking about terrorists, Fascists and Nazis, then consider yourself rebuked and warned because I'm not going to tolerate any of that garbage that's coming out of your mouth. Fall in line, or get out of the fandom. scream
Dismissed!
 Shaolan Lu · Tue Dec 28, 2010 @ 08:56pm · 0 Comments |
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