"Nowhere Am I So Desperately Needed As Among A Shipload Of Illogical Humans."

This post's title comes from Mr. Spock.

From Salon.com:

     Spock has been on many minds lately, and not entirely because of the new film. Big thinkers in both print media and the blogosphere -- from New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd  to MIT media moguls -- have referenced the Enterprise's science officer in recent months, drawing parallels between the dependably logical half-Vulcan and another mixed-race icon: Barack Obama.

     They're not just talking about the ears. For those of us who watched the show in the 1960s (or during the countless reruns since), (Leonard) Nimoy's alter ego was the harbinger of a future in which logic would reign over emotion, and rational thought triumph over blind faith. He was a digital being in an analog world; the Pied Piper who led our generation into the Silicon Age.

     Anyone who followed the early "Star Trek" with regularity knows how charismatic Spock was. If there were two characters I wanted to be as a young man, they were Spock -- and James Bond. Both displayed total self-confidence, and amazing problem-solving skills. Both traveled to exotic destinations, and were irresistible to women. And both shared a quality that my generation lacked completely: composure.

     "I am a first-generation 'Star Trek' fan, and I've long argued that many of my deepest political convictions emerged from my experience of watching the program as a young man growing up in Atlanta during the civil rights era," declares Henry Jenkins, co-director of the MIT comparative media studies program and author of "Convergence Culture." "In many ways, my commitment to social justice was shaped in reality by Martin Luther King and in fantasy by 'Star Trek.'”

     Obama, Jenkins points out, positioned himself in the primaries as a man "at home with both blacks and whites, someone whose mixed racial background has forced him to become a cultural translator." In this sense Obama even surpasses Spock, whose struggle to reconcile his half-human, half-Vulcan genes is a continual source of inner conflict. In one episode, the entire Enterprise crew (except for Kirk) is infected by alien spores that turn them into doe-eyed flower children. The "cure" is anger -- thus Kirk is forced to provoke his first officer to rage. He succeeds, spectacularly, by insulting Spock’s racial pedigree: "All right, you mutinous half-breed! You’re an overgrown jackrabbit! An elf, with a hyperactive thyroid! A simpering, devil-eared freak whose father was a computer and his mother an encyclopedia!"

     Confronted with a similar insult, Barack Obama would probably just laugh. "The Vulcan side of Obama, the core of his character, and his character, hasn't changed [since the election]," Jenkins believes. "He's tough, he’s cool and he’s rational." His appeal stems from the self-aware integration of all aspects of his personality: black and white, wonk and poet, athlete and aesthete.