Riddle Me This Captain
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 41 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
First Frost poem I ever memorized.
I know the classic series and all, but to be honest – that episode kind of sucks. Agree with the message and all, but it’s very heavy handed and not the best acted.
For my pick, the best Trek episode expressing the same idea was the DS9 episode “Duet.” Great acting, timeless message subtly delivered, and a memorable ending.
I’ve heard something the last couple days that caught my attention. It goes something like this: we used to think equality was the answer. Or a variation: equality is for the equal, inequality is for the unequal. I’d like to know what that means in the present context.
Agree with the message and all, but it’s very heavy handed and not the best acted.
There I disagree with you Nate. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to have one character a simple bigot and other character a noble crusader for civil rights. Instead the flaws of both were highlighted, and their hate, magnified to a planetary level, having destroyed their peoples. A somber message.
Nate-
I think the term is “Anvilicious.”
Or a variation: equality is for the equal, inequality is for the unequal. I’d like to know what that means in the present context.
In current context? “Equality” has been so abused by the activists, add in “equality,” and it would mean anything from “promote systematic injustice” through “shut up and quit pointing out my double standards.”
Which is why equivocation sucks.
(Looks like the original quote was defining justice, and given the time it was said, it would have meant that justice requires treating things that are different as if they are different, and things that are the same as if they are the same.)
“It would have been the easiest thing in the world to have one character a simple bigot”
Remember In the Heat of the Night, where Detective Tibbs has to overcome his own prejudices and bigotry before he can ultimately solve the case. In those days, we hadn’t come to the notion that racism was only possible with one race.
Quite right. We understood back then that it was an affliction which besets all of humanity.
You are correct, Foxfier.
I’ll allow that, but still say it was quite heavy handed. Like I said, all of the above you list is also present in “Duet.” If anything, I think it was even better because the “simple bigot” in the episode was Kira, the victim of Cardassian oppression and the noble crusader for justice, the Cardassian “criminal.”
Yet by the end of the episode, both characters had growth, Kira learning to overcome her bigotry, and the Cardassian learning that justice can also involve mercy.
“Let that be your last battlefield” works great as a parable, but not as a story or episode.
Oh, and of course I agree with @Dave G and @Don that once upon a time, stories were richer and more complex. I also miss those days. (Do you think anybody would make “Enemy Mine” nowadays?)
Enemy Mine-an under appreciated gem of a movie.
Remember In the Heat of the Night, where Detective Tibbs has to overcome his own prejudices and bigotry before he can ultimately solve the case. In those days, we hadn’t come to the notion that racism was only possible with one race.
The people in charge of institutions in this country at that time were those born in 1914, give or take 10 years. Some people in those cohorts had it in for blacks or were dismissive of them, but, by and large, the professional-managerial element were not in the business of manufacturing strata and arrogating to themselves the franchise to assign value points to each stratum (with non-exotic white wage-earners at the bottom). You began to see the phenomenon at that time among some (the odious Joseph Rauh was born in 1911), but it did not get manic until people a generation younger took over. One thing I despise about the Bushes is that they worked to sabotage efforts to maintain and extend impersonal performance standards in higher education. And what do you know, George W. Bush has weighed in after 12 years of silence. And he says something inane. Can we exile the Bush clan while we’re at it?
Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention did a social commentary song titled “Trouble Every Day.” The song dates from the 1960’s and the Freak Out! album liner notes say that it was written during the Watts riot. It contains a lot of social commentary that is still all too relevant in today’s world, especially commentary about the media and identity politics.
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