Modern innovations inspired by the old "Star Trek" show: the cell phone, the flat-screen TV, and the Obama presidency.
The latter occurred to me as I watched J.J. Abrams dandy new "Star Trek" movie, which arrives amid polls showing that 80 percent of Americans continue to find President Obama personally likable.
The findings jibe with the phenomenon that led to his electoral landslide - the feeling among people, all sorts of people, that somehow they knew the guy.
I now believe this is because Obama is Spock.
Let's review: He's smarter than everybody else and favors logic over emotion, especially in a crisis. Pandemic? Depression? Cool as a cucumber. He's tall and thin, he's got big ears, a deep voice, and he's famously mixed-race - a creature of two worlds. Mom an American, dad from another realm. (And some people can't get over the fact that he's an "alien.")
And what are Obama's main policy initiatives?
Health-care reform, economic recovery.
He wants us to live long and prosper.
That clinches it.
Or maybe I've just got Spock on the brain - Abrams' new "Trek" is kind of a Spock-tacular. Yes, it's a prequel that starts with the adventures of young Jim Kirk (Chris Pine) in Iowa, but it rapidly moves into the origins of the Kirk/Spock bromance, and concludes with a focus on Spock (as a young man, Zachary Quinto).
The movie is, contrary to disclaimers, very Trek-ish. You can't do "Trek" this well without understanding and enjoying the gist of the old show.
For instance: the coolest thing Kirk ever did was make out with that foxy green alien chick (on her planet, you're allowed to call them chicks). In one early scene, Abrams has young Jim doing exactly that in his Star Fleet dorm room (talk about going green).
I think Abrams' disclaimers ("I never watched it") are spin - a sop to young audiences who regard the old show as corny, which it most certainly is. That said, I think Abrams tells the truth when he said "Trek" is also a tribute to the movies he grew up loving as a kid, "Raiders of the Lost Ark" chief among them.
"Trek" has that pell-mell, seat-of-the-pants, action-serial rhythm, moving madly from Kirk's days in Star Fleet Academy (where he meets McCoy and Uhura) to his first mission as a cadet and his decisive role in a desperate mission to save the earth and other planets from a time-traveling Romulan madman (Eric Bana, finding a happy home as a villain).
