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From: leeper@mtgzz.UUCP (m.r.leeper)
Newsgroups: net.startrek,net.sf-lovers
Subject: "His was the most human"
Message-ID: <1623@mtgzz.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 2-Feb-86 07:54:04 EST
Article-I.D.: mtgzz.1623
Posted: Sun Feb  2 07:54:04 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 2-Feb-86 19:46:46 EST
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For reasons of my own, I just saw the end of STAR TREK II:
THE WRATH OF KHAN.  That is the one that has Spocks's tear-
filled eulogy by Capt. Kirk.  It should have been one of the
great sad slobbery moments of science fiction film,
comperable in human terms only to the suicide death of the
second monster in RODAN.  But the content only confirms for
me what I have known all along, that Kirk is and always has
been (strike that, STAR TREK takes place in the future, make
it "Kirk will be and will always be") the consumate jerk.
It is a particularly insensitive thing to say about his
friend who is only half human and has always been (will
always be?) sensitive about his piebald origins.  There is
the implication that what the speaker is something that it
is good to be.

Kirk's eulogy goes with other odious phrases like "Mighty
white of you!" and "You have behaved like a Christian."
Anyone who knows anything about history knows that behaving
like a Christian -- or someone of any persuasion -- covers a
multitude of possible actions, some of which are now
considered to be less than socially wholesome.  Torquemada
was a Christian and, at least he thought, a defender of the
faith.  There has been the prejudice through the whole STAR
TREK series that being a human was the ideal and being a
Vulcan was less than the ideal.  Never mind that Spock was
always 3/4 of the brains on the ship (Scotty had another
1/3, and the remaining -1/12 was made up of Kirk.)  The
script writers always sharpened their bigotry on the concept
of human superiority to Vulcans.  The human solution to
problems always was made to sound better in the end, even
though it probably would have gotten everyone killed if it
wasn't Spock logically choosing the human solution.  Working
on a hunch as to the source of this prejudice, I checked the
names of the people who worked on the scripts.  As I
suspected, they were overwhelmingly human names.  Not a one
had name like Sarak or Kalak or Pavak.  The pro-human
prejudice was an understandable problem, I suppose.  No
Vulcan wrote a script for STAR TREK.  They were all too busy
out exploring the stars.