O.K., I'll go ahead and admit it...I liked to watch Star Trek... and I still like it, damn it! I'm no Trekie, but I like to watch Captain Kirk whoop some alien ass. Captain Kirk was basically an intergalactic John Wayne, kicking the living shit out of any alien who happened to be a mean prick.
However, as much as I liked watching the show, one part of the show irritated me, even as a kid. All right, I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was as a kid (since I was too busy trying to survive the South Carolina public school system), but I know that something about it bothered me even then...and, one day, everything was crystal clear. What bothered me was the all-too-often use of the ultimate dichotomy accepted by most people: emotions versus reason. That's right, I'm talking about Spock versus Kirk.
Kirk was the guy who lived on "instincts", and Spock put all of his Vulcan dollars on reason. Even though Kirk supposedly was about "instincts" and emotions, he still used his mind to figure things out. The writers of the show never addressed that, but it was obvious. So, he didn't bother me since he was a pretty healthy combo of both thoughts and emotions. However, the best example of the dichotomy of which I'm addressing is Spock, by far. He was the man of "pure reason", which meant to the writers that he could have cared less if he ever got a hard-on. But let's face it... Spock needed to get laid. And not as the caveman that he became in that one episode, but as himself.
The portrayal of Spock's character is something which pretty much everyone has seen elsewhere. In almost all forms of arts and entertainment, people love to present these two things as if they are naturally opposed to one another (much like the way I'm opposed to people taking up good parking space with those stupid cemeteries).
People don't seem to even entertain the notion that your mind can value something and that your emotions can respond to the choices that you've made with your mind. I mean, is it just me...or do you get happy when you get something that you've chosen to value? Like, when you decide that you want a Red Rider bee-bee gun (a.k.a., choosing a value), you're happy when you get it (a.k.a., emotional response), right? We need to resolve this dichotomy bullshit.
