Flawlessly Logical

A warn­ing right off the bat: I’m going to get nerdy here.

It had occurred to me ear­li­er in the week and I twit­tered it, but it hit me again, full-force, dur­ing the final Pres­i­den­tial Debate: 

Oba­ma = Spock.

There are the obvi­ous par­al­lels: The off­spring of two races (white and black vs. Human and Vul­can), the odd look­ing ears, strange name and most of all, the cool, calm log­ic. It’s true that Barack Oba­ma does show emo­tion, which no self-respect­ing Vul­can would do, but his demeanor, elo­cu­tion and sheer unflap­pa­bil­i­ty sug­gest the same, dis­pas­sion­ate (and hence, very sexy and admirable) role mod­el that so many of us kids of the 70’s had.

Like many oth­er gawky high-school­ers, I want­ed to be Spock. Even though Star Trek was already in syn­di­ca­tion, I knew most of the episodes by heart, and hence, was inti­mate­ly famil­iar with the Vul­can half-breed out­sider char­ac­ter. Fast-for­ward to this evening; as I watched John McCain get angri­er and grumpi­er, throw­ing every­thing he could at Oba­ma in this final debate, the oth­er man remained cool and calm, as he always does. I half expect­ed him to say some­thing like ‘Excuse me Sen­a­tor, but you are let­ting your emo­tions get the bet­ter of you.’ and per­haps even (a real quote from the series): ‘After a time, you may find that hav­ing is not so pleas­ing a thing, after all, as want­i­ng. It is not log­i­cal, but it is often true’

I’m not alone in mak­ing this obser­va­tion. A Google search for Obama=Spock hit pay dirt instant­ly. I was pleased to see that the New York Observ­er had an arti­cle on this very sub­ject a lit­tle over a week ago: Be Log­i­cal, Cap­tain! and two pro­fes­sors, Mitchell Aboulafia, who teach­es at the Jul­liard School, and Hen­ry Jenk­ins, who is at MIT also made the con­nec­tion. In fact, Jenk­ins made a speech at Future of Civic Media con­fer­ence host­ed at MIT this past sum­mer that dwelt deeply upon the par­al­lels between Spock and Oba­ma, and came to this inevitable (I think) con­clu­sion, and then some.:

In its own small way, Star Trek and Spock may have helped to pre­pare the way for Oba­ma’s vic­to­ry in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­maries, help­ing us to imag­ine a dif­fer­ent set of rela­tion­ships between the races. Nowhere was this social utopi­an vision more ful­ly expressed than the “great friend­ship” between Kirk and Spock and so we can see some lega­cy of this theme of accep­tance across racial bound­aries emerg­ing through the slash fan fic­tion which became one of the major lega­cies of ear­ly Star Trek fan cul­ture. The oth­er “non-white” char­ac­ters may have been more sug­ges­tions than ful­ly devel­oped fig­ures — at least on the orig­i­nal series — but Spock was some­one we got to know and care about because, not despite, his dif­fer­ences. This is one rea­son why so many fans of my gen­er­a­tion were upset when Kirk prais­es Spock for being “the most human” per­son he has ever known dur­ing his funer­al eulo­gy in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. Can you imag­ine the uproar if some­one praised Obana’s “white­ness”?

I’ve includ­ed a cou­ple of pho­tos from Jenk­ins that point out the star­tling sim­i­lar­i­ty between the can­di­date and the character:

At any rate, if ever there were a need for a calm, log­i­cal Vul­can at the helm of the USS Amer­i­ca, it would be now. Let’s hope he can get the warp dri­ve work­ing before the ship drops out of orbit and burns up in the atmos­phere. Or some­thing like that.