Likelihood of Success

It has always seemed to me as if those who claim to be motivated and affected by intellection, cold logic, reason, to the exclusion of emotion, are really placing, or even jamming, slamming down, a template of rationality atop what is in fact a natural tendency to do quite the opposite. Or to be quite the opposite.

Some people, of course, are merely cold fish. But they don’t usually talk about their unemotional nature, nor even the emotionality of others; by and large feelings and spiritual temperatures do not register with them at all. I had a fine WASP roommate at Princeton, whom I love, who was like this. This is the hard oak of which our country is framed, mind you. To some extent, this personality type (if it even rises to that level!) may be contrasted with the older Eastern European Jews who made up my family and families like mine — affectless, yes, but upon inspection mainly affecting stoicism as a mask for the pain that they were living, and had lived, more or less for the previous century.

Mr. Spock, as you recall, could not register emotion. Or, rather, his “race,” the Vulcans, had disciplined itself not to, because emotion, when permitted, dominated them entirely, and they became beastly. Captain Kirk, meanwhile, could shmaltz his way through life being what he was and, foibles and all, more or less handle it — the peaks, the valleys, the humanity of it all. The closest things to a Protestant stiff on the Enterprise were probably those dispensable, and always dispensed with, security guys in the red tunics. Everyone else was too busy being an ethnic stereotype… but who am I to say?

Watch out for those Mr. Spock types. Still, icy cold waters run deep.

UPDATE: Ha! What timing! Remember — Shatner is Kirk and Kirk is Shatner!