Ichabod's Kin
A place for politics, pop culture, and social issues

This may merit a buzz-saw of reaction, for I deign to speak  of our infantile society. Not that there’s anything wrong with childhood and youth, but I must be so bold to ask: “Is anyone around here grown up, anymore?”

Apparently not. Intelligent conversation on substantive topics must be directed to The Hand, for even NPR is indulging our moronic tastes in a fictional, bizarro world. The latest installment of our social infancy is over Star Trek, the never-ending story we can’t seem to get over. Reality is left only to those of us who are the odd and the strange, whilst the nation worships at Shrines to Things That Never Happened–and never will. And don’t even start with me over the supposedly profound wisdom that we are proffered via this tale and other “epic” sagas that are at best superficial plagiarisms of other and better literature. But, never mind.

There’s something in the Good Book about a child becoming an adult and putting away childish things, but that’s nonsensical crap; the Bible wasn’t created by Lucas and directed by Spielberg, so off with its head (cover?) and into the bonfire of our vanities! Better are the man with the pointy ears and Will Shatner’s stunning role as a stick-figure with a personality like an oyster. Hey, man, this is heavy stuff! But where, oh, where are real book and movie critics when you need them–ones not slaves to the bitch goddess of banal popular culture?

A writer once hopped, skipped and jumped to my editorial desk to advise that I run, not walk, to a new movie about–Superman–and see him fly through the air! Need I say that I never saw that or any sequel, and live to affirm that my IQ has not since lessened nor has one leg become shorter than the other. I was conned into seeing one of the first of that jerkwater genre, 2001 Space Odyssey, and was awakened at the closing credits by fellow movie-goers’ raves about the ape men (whose early appearance had induced my slumber) and how realistic they were–when to me they looked like–well, like guys dressed in monkey suits. And if we are truly descended from the arboreal apes, are we half-way down, or half-way up, the tree?

Thus I am here to declare ours a Star Trek Nation, lost deep in the space between our ears, and headed for a galaxy that is, and will be, nonexistent. But it lives in our minds, and that’s all that counts in this Comic Book World of our own creation. I think of Ionesco’s play, Rhinoceros, a gem from the enlightened days of the Theater of the Absurd, in which Berenger finds society turning into rhinos while his resistance is trumped by facial mutation–a reference to the real-life threat of fascism.

I was about to recommend its reading but, hark!–is that the Enterprise, hovering above my home, offering free rides to NeverLand, whence I may join a club of imaginary friends?
A caller to NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” once allowed it was the greatest day of his life to be able to discuss the latest “Star Trek” on air. As he cited inconsistencies that he said “only a Trekkie could know,” the show’s guest, connected with the production, politely suggested that it was, after all, a movie in its umpteenth incarnation and that such trivia was not uppermost in the makers’ minds.

Years before, a listener to a similar program about another so-called “epic,” asked the guest for the number of the license plate on a Lamborghini in the movie. By this time, the guest had it Up to Here with such idiotic queries and shot back that the caller needed to get a date, kiss and girl and move out of his parents’ basement apartment. I cheered.

Then there was the “Independence Day” movie; one of its “stars” actually declared, on a TV talk show, that said flick was a “humanitarian” undertaking.

Yes, indeed. And I am Napoleon Bonaparte, about to take tea with Lady Godiva.