More Life

TRIGGER WARNING FOR SOME QUASI-ACADEMIC DISCUSSION OF SEXUAL ASSAULT.

WARNING: I finished this at 3am and I'm sure it's rambling and mad, but will edit later. When less... headed to bed.

**EDIT** Cleaned it up a little now, so all shitiness is my own.

( On Horatio Hornblower (the Hornblower series), Jean Luc Picard (Star Trek), the Fifth Doctor (Doctor Who) and Kerr Avon (Blakes 7). )

I am VERY TIRED. Still drained from the latest bout of illness, and not a little exhausted by my Pre-Guest Cleaning (girlfriend comes Sunday--I'm excited, a touch nervous, and frantically tidying things) and running around tonight, despite my ingestion of a 1) Java Monster, and 2) Caramel Mocha Chiller (tm, Sonic). Neither of which made me feel as if I had live hamsters who'd just been bitten by cocaine-addicted scorpions surging through my very veins, despite the adverts' implications and my own over-enthusiastic expectations. Energy drinks of the world: where are my hamsters with second hand substance abuse issues? Where?

ON TO THE SCI-FI RAMBLING.

Like everyone else in the world, the popular resurgence of Star Trek has drawn me back to my stream of origin a sci-fi salmon. In the past weeks I've managed to re-watch nearly all of ST:TOS.

It always bothers me that Other Planets have monolithic cultures, as if cultural globalization has just swallowed them as part of their evolutionary process. Initially, I assume a vastly alien culture would appear uniform by virtue of the great differences that must exist between products of entirely disparate cultural origins. But as we get to know a species over centuries, shouldn't some distinction become apparent between, say, Vulcans from different hemispheres? Betazoids of different religions?

Re: Vulcans, it sometimes seems as if we only ever come in contact with members of the highest class. In the original series we see Spock's marriage: hyper-traditional and redolent of privilege. In the later-made and earlier-set Enterprise we see another much like it.

Star Trek is big on advanced societies being inherently classless. Whether or not this is naive, and if wealth might be supplanted as the basis of such a hierarchical system by privilege based on traditional prerogatives, what might be seen as a meritocracy, or a valuation based on an individual or family's perceived contribution to society, can be laid aside for now. Suffice it to say that kibbutzniks traditionally wield a numerically disproportionate political power in the Israeli Knesset, as do Ashkenazim in Israeli politics, without the benefit of necessarily being more monied--so there's certainly precedent.

The Western perception of Japan is that everyone knows how to run a tea ceremony and cavorts with geishas. These are historically very upper-class activities, built around having the leisure time necessary to develop and devote to them. Vulcan attitudes and mental disciplines (meditation, philosophical education, occasional retreats into monasticism), at least according to human historical tradition, smack of the money necessary to devote to a fetishization of an ironically complicated scholasticism-cum-Buddhist-esque simplicity.

Also, there could be a wicked underlying complacency to stoicism--its easier to be untroubled, to consider emotional outbursts gauche, if you're entitled enough to make most worry unnecessary?

As this culture progressed, did identifiable upper class behaviors become the signifiers of Vulcan-ness? There's something disquieting about the loss of those other classes' cultural identities, even as the loss of ethnic identities is a sad end to what we have to assume was initially a plurality of experiences. The ways and views of the middle and lower classes seem to have been lost, either as these classes gained the resources that enabled mobility and imitative behavior (or is this romanticizing their difficulties?), in some reaction to contact with the larger galaxy, or by virtue of a wholesale trend towards homoginization.

This always bothers me about Doctor Who, as well, re: the 'Gallifreyans' vs. 'Time Lords' nomenclature thing. I have to say I much prefer it if the appellation 'Time Lord' is synonymous with 'Gallifreyan,' rather than handed out only to Academy graduates, nobles, or the somehow /specially/ intellectually gifted in Gallifreyan society. I think I find the Doctor running away from a species-wide elitism more resonant? I want 'Come now, we're both Time Lords' to be a call to something more fundamental and significant than 'help a brother out, we both went to Eton.' My general squick's more complicated than that, but I'm not sure how to parse and articulate it. I just wholesale /prefer/ 'Time Lord' simply meaning Gallifreyan.

Spock's class status is revealed rather slowly--we learn that he's from a /very/ well-placed family only in second season's Amok Time when Kirk and McCoy notice that a reactionary Vulcan politician of interplanetary renown is officiating at Spock's wedding, and comment on it. Spock's in no position at that point to observe or react to their surprise. Later we meet a prominent Vulcan ambassador, and Kirk is surprised that the ambassador and his human wife are Spock's parents. It's interesting that Spock's human mother and Nurse Chapel both imply that for all the touted superiority of their emotional stoicism, Vulcans have some expectations of submissiveness from their wives that humans typically find sexist or strange. This isn't mentioned again in later encounters with the species, perhaps thought better of by later writers.

From a social sciences perspective, the dragging out the 'tortured half-breed' trope with Spock's a bit of a backward-looking step from a show that so wanted to be progressive.

As a parting non sequitur, I'm so, so tired of chasing bats out of the kitchen. This is like the fourth this summer? We have to be /doing/ something different to attract them, or their diminishing habitat is pushing them further into the city than I've ever seen. But screw environmental worries: damn bats! All up in my kitchen! Confounding the Schnoodle! ...I'm sorry, I have to go now and found a prog rock group, 'Confounding the Schnoodle.' Excuse me. I'll be back later. With Grammies.