to boldly go

I would just like to go on record, once again, as stating that I enjoy split infinitives and will continue to use them.  English language cultures are obsessed with arbitrary rules!  English is not Latin!  Believe me . . . if it was, I wouldn't have spent so much time trying to understand it last quarter.

Enough personal venting against the wide world, though.  (Not that the English speaking world is wider than any other world.  Though we do have a large personality?)  I've got something serious to talk about.

World, Imma let you finish, but Star Trek is the craziest tv show of all time!

So I'm gonna nerd it up here and just have a short discussion with myself (and any readership's inner thoughts) about how yeah, maybe Star Trek is not the most interesting or entertaining show one hundred percent of the time - I've personally seen fewer than ten or twelve episodes - but that doesn't mean that we can't appreciate it's extreme positive impact on our culture.  We all know the story behind cell phones, right?  I mean, "beam me up Scotty?"  Hello?  GPS?  Radio frequency tracking capabilities?  But it wasn't just the flip phone circa 2003 for which we can thank Star Trek.  Oh no, we can also thank the Original Series for being the most diverse American television program ever at that point in time.  It's the Cold War, and we've got a Russian reading our maps?  A black woman is handling our interstellar messages and is later taking an officer's seat?  An Asian lieutenant?  Et cetera.  I don't know about all of the characters, but that seems to me to be fairly well covered in terms of diversity.  So I came across this book called Star Trek and History: Racing toward a White Future.  Maybe I should ignore it, but I just don't understand Bernardi's thesis and it is irritating.  The whole point of Star Trek was to sort of demonstrate what life can be like when people with even extreme differences can work together.  I don't think it was meant to stifle diversity.  I would like to be clear that I am not really a Star Trek person, nor did I read the entirety of Bernardi's book, so maybe I'm missing something.  But I just think that Gene Roddenberry and the writers who contributed to the Original Series deserve a little more credit.  It was the 1960s, and Star Trek was incredibly modern for its time.  It created a lot of new concepts - it didn't destroy them or seek to homogenize America.  What is a White Future, anyway?  What does that even mean?  What is the historical interpretation?  Is it objective?

Anyway, I think that looking at the impact television and movies have had on us is really interesting, and it's disappointing that such a smart show is so misunderstood.

Also, I wanted to write about something a little less heavy this evening as my next post may require a fair amount of reading and prep work (i.e. thinking and better editing) in addition to taking down my reactions to Ivan and Prelude's latest posts.  Hoping it shall all come to fruition tomorrow afternoon!