Less the heroes of our stories than the villains of some other bastard’s

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L.I. Underhill is a media critic and historian specializing in pop culture, with a focus on science fiction (especially Star Trek) and video games. Their projects include a critical history of Star Trek told through the narrative of a war in time, a “heretical” history of The Legend of Zelda series and a literary postmodern reading of Jim Davis' Garfield.

1 Comment

  1. Daru
    May 10, 2014 @ 2:25 am

    "And yet idealistic Star Trek remains because people like Admiral Kirk and his crew exist: Good people who strive for, if not perfection, constant self-improvement in an imperfect world."

    That for me is just the most perfect summation of where Utopia can can be found, or as the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa describes it, Shambhala in his book on the Sacred Path of the Warrior, the ideal that we somehow remember, that we strive for and that we can see just out of the corner of our eyes.

    He says:"The idea of a warrior is based on a sense of fundamental fearlessness. There is no reason why you should be a coward. It’s as simple as that. You are not being a warrior because a state of war exists in your country. We are not trying to win against the egohood people. We are not trying to fight with them. You are being a warrior because you are a warrior. If someone asks you, “Are you twenty-one years old?” you say, “Yes, I am.” They don’t ask you why you are twenty-one years old or how you have done this. You would have no answer for that. You are just twenty-one. Warriorship is a basic sense of unshakeability. It’s a sense of immovability and self-existing dignity rather than that you are trying to fight with something else."

    Sounds almost like Kirk to me.

    Reply

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