Captain Kirk:
The Typhoid Mary of the Alpha Quadrant?
by Chris Morrill
7/4/03
As sometimes happens between geeks, I became involved in a heated argument several days ago about, of all things, Star Trek.
Most folks only have a passing familiarity with Star Trek; if you know enough to truly argue about it, it means you are likely a geek. If you know enough to actually speak Klingon, chances are you’ve never had to use the Klingon word for “intercourse.”
Anyway, the argument we got into was an eternal one: who was the better captain? James T. Kirk of the original Star Trek series, or Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek: The Next Generation?
My vote was, unequivocally, for Captain Picard. But not for the reasons one might think. I’ve no problems with Kirk’s brash, fly by the seat of your pants, authority-hating command style. I rather like all that.
My main problem with Kirk is that he is the original Galactic Horndoggy, the Bill Clinton of Starfleet.
Yes, that’s right, my beef with Kirk is all about the fact that he got more ass than a toilet seat. How, you may ask, is being sexually promiscuous a knock on someone’s management style?
Well, I think it detracts from Kirk’s appeal for three main reasons:
How can you put your trust in a commander when you know he’s so easily distracted by the presence of a female? (See: Clinton, William J. Also, the concept of “thinking with the wrong head.")
Can you imagine Kirk negotiating with the Borg Queen, for goodness sake? How can he negotiate fairly when he’s no doubt undressing her in his mind? (The fact that the Borg Queen has numerous detachable body parts no doubt would point his sick fantasies in all sorts of nefarious directions).
Isn’t there an ethical quandary with bonin’ all these aliens?
Think about this: here on Earth, we have a word for doing the nasty with animals: bestiality. We have a word for diddling your relatives: incest. We have a word, even, for defiling the dead: necrophilia. There are strict cultural taboos against all these things.
Well, if it’s not okay to have sex with mammals of a different species, how in the world can it be okay to have sex with something that’s not even from this planet?
Wouldn’t such an act need a word?
I propose “Kirk”. We’ll make it a verb. Like this:“Boy, I kirked the hell out of Lieutenant Saavik last night!"
or:
“I gotta tell you, I’d just love to kirk Counselor Troi’s brains out!”
This new word could then, also, be used as an expletive. Such as:
“Kirk you, asshole!”
or:
“Kirk off, jerk.”
or:
“No kirkin’ way!”
or, even better:
“What the kirk is going on here?”
Captain Kirk was a public health risk, not only to humans, but to all the myriad civilizations of the Alpha Quadrant.
This is no lie. Kirk probably single handedly spread every known human venereal disease to the farthest reaches of the galaxy, and brought numerous alien rashes back to Earth. Now, it’s possible he used a condom; but even if he did, he was carrying so many different forms of crotch-rot that he would have needed special titanium rubbers. And just between you and I, he just didn’t seem like the condom kind of guy. The whole condom thing pretty much goes against the “spur of the moment” thing that is Kirk’s trademark.
It’s silly to assume that Kirk was disease free with that many notches on his bedpost. He had to have been afflicted with any number of venereal diseases, both terrestrial and otherworldly. But he never took ill.
So, we must assume that Kirk was that most dangerous animal of all: a carrier. A guy who has all sorts of diseases but is immune to them, therefore all he can do is spread them. Kind of like a Typhoid Mary of the Alpha Quadrant.
(We must assume that, just in case, the Enterprise never left SpacePort without a few metric tons of penicillin.)
Not only did Kirk travel the galaxy to spread such heinous things as crabs, gonorrhea, syphilis, and who knows what else, he actually traveled through time on numerous occasions as well. The health risk posed by Kirk not only threatened the Milky Way, but the integrity of the space-time continuum.
The case for Picard (?)
Jean-Luc Picard carries none of that baggage. Sure, he’s boring. Sure, he’s too calm and cool. Which is exactly why I want him sitting in the big chair when things go wrong. There’s no chance Picard will sell you down the river for a chance to fondle a quadruple-breasted Romulan transsexual. Picard’s all business.
Not to say that Picard doesn’t have his downsides. The fact that we don’t know much about his sexual proclivities in itself hints at some dark, dark secret.
Think about it. A French guy who speaks with an uppity English accent is, by anyone’s standard, going to be potentially a little light in the loafers. I noticed on a couple of occasions that Picard was looking a bit too fondly upon Wesley Crusher.
Or was that just me?
Are there any truth to the rumors that Captain Picard recently purchased some land in Texas, so he can pursue the new constitutionally protected right to buggery?
It really doesn’t matter to me, really, as long as Picard keeps it to himself. No matter what he does behind closed doors, he doesn’t flaunt it like Kirk did, so I don’t care.
After all, he wouldn’t want to violate Starfleet’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” regulations.