Not that I claim to be a great mind. Too much TV as a kid. (I owe my scintillating vocabulary all to Stan Lee and Marvel Comics.) At any rate, I wanted to highlight a couple of items sent in by readers:

1. Down in the previous post’s comments, Josh Brown reveals that the Republicans are invoking much BIGGER terror fears than even I previously suspected. Go look at the full-sized version. It’s much funnier than my post.

2. At the very respectable U.S. Intellectual History blog, they are discussing the politics of the new Star Trek reboot, even providing a sort of review of the scholarly literature on the young, vigorous [as in, roughly the same age as your host] science fiction franchise. It seems that the popular culture studies universe only recently got the memo about the original series being a tissue of American Cold War self-regard wrapped in the brightly colored synthetic fabric of liberal internationalism.  Did they miss the Kennedy-esque opening credit narration about how “we must be bold” to go “on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked?”

Now me, I am pretty sure the first time I actually heard JFK’s “New Frontier” speech or cracked a book on the Liberal Consensus, I was thinking, “That was just what Capt. Kirk would have said.” The discussion on the Intellectual History site has turned on whether New Kirk/Spock or the Avenging Romulan Mining Ship Captain represented George W. Bush throwing away his ancestral values in the name of revenge. Not sure about that myself — J.J. Abrams seems pretty eager to avoid any discernible political subtext or social commentary. The Federation’s quiet, if still largely white-guy-led, multiculturalism was present but updated nicely; Uhura and Spock got to make out more than Kirk, and not under mind control or reality alteration of any kind.

The new Star Trek also features a subtle subversion of the currently most prevalent form of cinematic racism, the typecasting of presumed Muslim actors as terrorists. The noble, steely captain of the first ship we saw destroyed, who sacrifices his life trying to save his crew, was played by Faran Tahir, a Pakistani-American actor that American audiences would probably instantly pick out as a terrorist if he showed up in any other action movie.  (In fact, he played the main terrorist villain in last year’s early summer hit Iron Man.) I’m not familiar enough with latter-day Trek lore to know whether that was Star Fleet’s first Muslim captain, but it was a nice touch in any case.