Posts tagged "rants":

Context is everything

My buddy was complaining about his disappointment in Star Trek: Discovery, and the apologetic response it had received in the press and, especially, among the fans.

Josh Bell, the violin prodigy, once pulled a Red Sox cap over his face and busked in a DC Metro station T station hours before he was to play with the Boston symphony, if this story isn’t all wrong in my memory. Famously ignored by the morning mob of commuters.

If you’re seated at a Michelin-rated restaurant in Paris and the waiter brings you a floret of steamed broccolini that has been drizzled in diarrhea, you will quickly conclude that it is you that made a mistake somehow. Surely! The famous guy behind that door could not have ordered a slave to cover this cruciferous delight in poop!

Now we use the verb “to conclude” in the functional sense: reflexive, infrarational. This category of mistakes reflects yet a fucking nother suite of cognitive shortcuts that, like so many others, were hugely—HUGELY—adaptive fifty thousand years ago. The miserable irony, so commonplace that many miss this irony, is that in our current environment these hardwired shortcuts—so difficult for us to overcome—are often anti-adaptive. Just the environment: we haven’t even gotten to the part where various classes of adversaries pull on the end of the lever to move the earth. Scammers, advertisers, politicians.

Also! Do not forget, Senhor Viejo, that in this particular case both the creatives and the viewers are separated from the source material by a full generation, possibly two.

Looking more closely, the CBS organism is simply trying to Maximize Profits, and the most distal CBS tentacles are doing their level best to produce something of Quality. But the cells secreting scripts from the tentacles have the Disease. It isn’t their fault that they’re infected with the bitter end of our culture. They may even think that their hackneyed cargo-cult burlesque of our society’s mindless, vengeful cannibalism is an Allusive Statement. Within the restrictions of the Star Trek straighjacket, True Art. Instead of a facile, self-referential cliche that directly and repeatedly contradicts, to the fucking letter, the work they’re deriving so ignorantly.

Meanwhile it is innate for the fans desperately to scramble for an explanation why the broccolini—steamed perfectly! oh, the tooth on this!---tastes like raw sewage.