Star Trek’s 60th

Star Trek’s 60th Anniversary has come and gone now, and as I’m roughly the same age, I’m feeling its and my years quite a bit this week.

I don’t know if I’ve ever quantified how Star Trek has shaped my life.  Star Trek was omnipresent during my childhood. Oh, I had other flirtations with different TV series over the years, like when I was in first grade and the teacher sent a note home saying, “Gene (for they called me Gene back then) is an extremely bright child, but his fixation with Batman is hampering his academic progress.”

This led to me being banned from watching Batman.  Fortunately, no such note was ever sent home about my fixation on Star Trek.

My earliest memory of Star Trek is not actually Star Trek; it’s a memory of a memory of Star Trek.  Somewhere, in the dark recesses of my mind, I distinctly remember when one of the local TV stations, probably Channel 11, aired one of those old-time still image promos for a new show they were going to start airing on weekday afternoons.  It was a promotional still of Kirk, Spock, and a red shirt that I think was Scotty, in front of a star field and the Enterprise.

When I saw that ad, I distinctly remember being excited because it was “that spaceship show with the guy with the ears!”  That means I must have been remembering its first airing on TV, which was about when I was about 2-5 years old.  If there are any actual memories of watching the original, they are lost in the countless times I watched the show in syndication.  It was a staple of Channel 11 through the 70s and into the 80s.

I let my subscription to newspapers.com lapse, so I cannot scan through the back newspapers to find out exactly when that was, but it was certainly the early 70s.

It is absolutely true to say that I grew up, without realizing it, using Captain Kirk as my role model.

Scotty was my favorite character. He had the cool accent, and in his way, he was smarter than everyone else. He was always saving the ship because he was better at what he did than anyone else. And, he had a personality.

Spock, on the other hand, had the raw CPU power upstairs.  Stoically controlled his emotions, but had the most impractical streak of anyone on the ship. 

“Spock?  Impractical?” you say?

Damn right he was impractical.  Just imagine every time he said, “X will happen in 17.294 seconds.”

How long did it take to say “seventeen point two nine four”?  If you’re going to split a gnat’s ass at the millisecond level, then speak it out loud; you are not being logical — or practical.  You’re pointlessly showing off.

I liked Spock for that.  He was a smart asshole who liked to show off.  I could relate to that.

Captain Kirk, however, was different.

I never really thought of him as a father figure, but it turns out he was.  He exemplified intelligence with compassion, reasoned consideration with decisive action.  The Federation values that he espoused were what I absorbed through the skin (okay, eyeballs) as being the default behavior that a person should hold.

Christians often posit “What would Jesus do?” but I’ve never been one of those (a Christian, that is), and while I certainly never formalized it in my head, my default position was “What would Jim Kirk do?”

Have I ever asked myself that question? No. It was just there by osmosis. Have I lived up to that? No, not always. I’m human, and Kirk is a fictional character.

It is no exaggeration to say that Star Trek has informed the very path of my life. It is infused in me.

Live long and prosper, Star Trek.