Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
Is Peter Rabbit a Democrat or a Republican?
“You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him
in the original Klingon.”
-Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered
Country
Davis School District in
Utah has pulled the Bible from its elementary and middle schools due to a
parental complaint [https://tucson.com/news/utah-district-bans-bible-in-elementary-and-middle-schools-due-to-vulgarity-or-violence/article_38d3a71b-1c97-5f79-8651-f2fa895d2a3a.html].
This is part of the latest
spasm of book banning in this country. Once upon a time people regarded public and
school libraries as repositories of thousands of years of civilization, open to
all, with John Milton shelved uneasily close to Geoffrey Chaucer and with Phyllis
Wheatley a few aisles away from Margaret Mitchell. An old saying is that if a library doesn’t
contain books with which you vehemently disagree, it’s not a good library.
Book banning was an
expression of Nazism and Communism and other tyrannies. Molly Guptill Manning
makes an excellent study of books and freedom during the Second World War in
her excellent When Books Went to War.
Unhappily, in the last
decade or so banning and censoring books has become quite a fashion in the
United States, with citizens all along the political spectrum demanding control
of what others and others’ children may or may not read.
The irony is that this nation
is one of the poorest in the world in reading [Can You Guess Where in the World People Read the Most?
(mic.com)]. One does not imagine a father fussing at his son with, “Junior,
I don’t know how many times I have to tell you to put down Macbeth and
go watch television or play video games!”, or perhaps a mother advising her
daughter that, “The Brothers Karamazov is okay, I guess, but I wish
you’d spend more time at the nail salon or on Thick-Tok.”
When Star Trek VI: The
Undiscovered Country was first released, audiences, mostly young people,
enjoyed chasing down the references to Shakespeare, including the title. Star
Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is enriched and informed by references to Charles
Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, and Shakespeare’s King Lear (there
is something of Lear in both Kirk and Khan). The eponymous villain quotes from John
Milton’s Paradise Lost, misusing this Christian epic about the Fall as
an instruction manual rather than as a cautionary tale. Khan also quotes several times from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick,
using some of Captain Ahab’s lines for his own dramatic self-destruction:
"From hell's heart, I stab at thee!"
The producers don’t simply
take bits of Shakespeare and others for isolated quotes, they mine The Great
Tradition of literature to explore the transcendental themes of the good, the
true, and the beautiful in new ways through the cinema.
Those who made the first
cycles of Star Trek television shows and films understood that the
teenagers and young professionals of the 80s and 90s, the maligned millennials,
appreciated The Great Tradition and appreciated being approached with respect
instead of the patronizing self-referential cartoonery that infects popular
culture just now.
In sum, in a nation where
a family home might have more screens than books, citizens angrily wave their
little made-in-Communist China Orwellian telescreens while banning the books
that no one ever reads anyway.
Oh, and the bit about
Shakespeare in the original Klingon is a joke. The Klingons know very well that
Shakespeare was a human. The reference is to the Cold War, when Soviets claimed
to have invented everything from baseball to antibiotics, and blamed the West
for appropriating their work. In the original series Ensign Chekhov, a Russian,
often claims proudly that a certain book or song or bit of technology was
invented in Russia. Further, the
original Chekhov was a popular Russian writer from the Czarist times who is
considered the master of the short story.
Everything connects.
-30-
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