Death to the Trekkies

You've seen them. You know them. The people that dress up in Star Trek outfits, whether they don Starfleet garb or sharpen Vulcan ears or corrugate their foreheads to become Klingons. They show up at Star Trek Conventions and Comic Con every year en masse, either frightening casual fans or challenging über-nerds of another sect to useless trivia battles with nothing but the mantle of true dorkdom at stake.

I know them. I share their interest in what's considered geeky, from superheroes (Spider-Man, Superman and Batman, in that order) to the original Star Wars trilogy (my Bible, along with the first two Godfather films) to The Lord of the Rings (which already inspired the name of an earlier post). Hell, I might as well be one of them. But I'm not.

No, I'm not forsaking my claim to being a ginormous nerd. I'm simply pleading with Trekkies (or "trekkers", if you'd like) to stop what they're doing.

What are they doing? They're giving people like me an awful name, and it's never been more clear than now. See, last weekend at Comic Con 2008, the teaser posters for the new Star Trek movie debuted, and as far as I'm concerned, they're awesome.

Splooging Trekkie pants where no movie has splooged them before

But here's the problem. Every time I discuss the new movie with people, they either shun me or Trekkie me.

Both stances have serious flaws, but let's start with the Trekkies. I don't want every single person who's a Trekkie to die, I just want their obsessively flamboyant fanhood to end. If I start a conversation about the fascinating ideas that Star Trek has presented over the years, I don't want you to launch into some doltish discussion of how you can see a double-take during the original series when Captain Kirk fights an alien. It doesn't matter. I don't care.

Yes, the original series was amateurish when it came to special effects, continuity and editing. It's a funny staple of the series, and nothing else. I'm not that kind of nerd. I'm the kind of nerd that wants to kick around the idea of Bones altering the course of history in "The City on the Edge of Forever", or the regenerative Genesis planet in Star Trek III, or the time-loop implications of The Next Generation episode "Cause and Effect." You know, ideas that were revelatory notions at the time, and not the trite staples they've become in present-day science fiction.

Mr. Spock, surely there must be a history devoid of Trekkies

That's what Star Trek is ultimately about. The original series may have been supremely cheesy, but it was also innovative, highly intelligent and relentlessly optimistic. The same could be said of The Next Generation. I don't really care about the other shows, because Star Trek didn't need any more iterations by the time those shows aired, nor did it need megalasaurus dorks parading around in costumes to get the point across.

And it's people like that who've twisted the rest of America into bigoted jackasses. Whenever I try to discuss the new Star Trek reboot with non-Trekkies, they shun me. They ignore me. They don't want anything to do with me.

It's truly sad, because seriously, guys, it's time to get over yourselves. I understand that you don't want to get labeled as Trekkies by other people. I've spent the last three or four paragraphs explaining how I understand that. But before you lambaste Star Trek for its dorky detraction, you might want to, oh I don't know, familiarize yourselves with it.

Like I said, if you're remotely interested in captivating, intriguing sci-fi, or even character-driven storytelling, it's not hard to like Star Trek. Shed that ego you build every time you lift weights or pop your Hollister collar. Don't be afraid of embracing something that doesn't involve the scatological or requires more than a second's worth of attention. I'm not here to galvanize you into attending every single Star Trek function across the country every year. I'm simply here to have an intelligent discussion about Star Trek's profound ideas. That's it.

If you still want to neglect Star Trek, that's your choice, but you'd better start neglecting half the entertainment industry as well. If you're a fan of the TV show Lost, you might as well stop watching, because executive producer Damon Lindelof -- who also happens to be producing the new movie -- is a big Star Trek fan. So is Seth MacFarlane, the creator of that popular poop smear Family Guy. Don't forget Bryan Singer, director of The Usual Suspects and the first two X-Men movies, who recently compared his forthcoming Superman Returns sequel to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. And then there's Trek devotees Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the masterminds behind South Park (which influences my creativity more than anything else).

Star Trek and Creative Differences are super sweeeet

All those people prove my point. I'm not one of those super-dweebs who eats, sleeps and breathes Star Trek. I just want Trekkies to discard their ridiculous obsession. You can't change narrow-minded nitwits, but you can stop the bombastic, costumed celebration of Star Trek that gives the rest of us a bad name.

That's all I can say. If you still want to dress up like a Romulan or treat Trekkies like outcasts, just keep in mind...