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Freshly Remember'd: Kirk Drift (2017)

There is no other way to put this: essentially everything about Popular Consciousness Kirk is bullshit.

We reach the point of no return when the omnijerk (really I suspect there’s just one vast eldritch horror sitting in another dimension that extrudes its thousand tentacles into our own, and that each one of This Guy is merely an insignificant manifestation of the beast: they couldn’t all be so boring in precisely the same way by chance, surely) decides to voice some Dinner Party Opinions on original-series Star Trek. To go back to other potent cheap serial fiction, let me quickly point out that we remember Dickens as a novelist, but not as a lifelong radical who fronted a journalists’ strike at 20, made his name initially as a parliamentary reporter as much as anything, ran a major women’s shelter for years, directed a vast array of others’ charitable projects, visited every new form of prison to open in his country and wherever he traveled to as part of his effort to stay an informed advocate for carceral justice, edited liberal periodicals for decades and promoted many female authors therein. What right-wing activists call “debate” or the “introduction of different ideas” is an excuse to recapitulate content that has already been completely worked-over and deconstructed, that sits within larger patterns of speech and production and acquires significant altered signification from this positioning, and that does not address itself to the intellect (as its advocates would pretend) but rather to an audience’s insecurities and prejudices.

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