Star Wars and Fake Nerds

The other day, a woman gave me the business over my lack of enthusiasm for the new Star Wars movie. When she told me about how she was going to the first night, I said I had saw the original three, but skipped the reboot. I may have caught clips here and there, but otherwise I had no interest and I have no interest in the latest rendition. When I called it cowboys and Indians in space, I seemed to have crossed some line.

In his latest transmission, John Derbyshire takes a similar position, but for a different reason and probably a better reason than I offered. John grew up reading classic science fiction, so he knows good sci-fi and Star Wars is just crap by comparison. I agree with that, and I would add that Star Trek, the original version, is the gold standard for Hollywood science fiction.

Way back when Star Wars came out in the late 70’s, it was largely considered a kids movie. The adult sci-fi weirdos were into Star Trek, with the first convention happening in 1972. Guys spending Saturday night playing Dungeons and Dragons or learning to code on their Commodore PET were doing so wearing Spock ears, not fondling a fake light saber.

But we now live in the age of the fake nerd, and I think that’s where Star Wars fits best. The people that “fucking love science!” and watch Big Bang Theory can’t shut up about Star Wars. It’s another method to signal their membership in the cult of pseudo-scientism. They may never have made it past geometry in school, but they swear they grew up on comic books and were always a nerd.

Fake nerds are everywhere in the media these days. Jonah Goldberg is the one that always comes to mind when I think about this stuff. He has invested a lot of time casting himself as a bookish nerd-boy who grew up reading Batman comics and watching re-runs of Gilligan’s Island. Maybe it is true or maybe it is just clever marketing. You never can know for sure with people in the media.

In sports media, the fake nerd is everywhere because statistics are such a big part of sports. ESPN loves dressing up a millennial as a dork and having him rattle off numbers on TV. It’s often hilarious as the typical sports reporter is innumerate, barely able to count to ten without help. But they dress them up as nerds, anyway, figuring it is what the public expects.

Of course, turning science into a religion is why we have kooks like Bill Nye demanding to have skeptics thrown in prison. He’s a good reminder that you can be batshit crazy and still be able to design a decent toaster. The amusement park manager, Neil deGrasse Tyson, made it through a doctoral program, but found better money in peddling pseudo-scientific nonsense to rich people.

The funny thing about the fake nerd stuff is that real nerds are usually active people who enjoy the outdoors, playing sports and doing the sorts of things normal people do. I used to play hoops with a bunch of programmers. I know a few body builders who are engineers, one is a rocket scientist at NASA. In my experience, the highly numerate tend to be a little nuts and anything but nerdish.

Of course, the fake nerd stuff is just a pose. We live in an age of marvels where the technology is far outpacing most people’s ability to keep up. In that regard, our era has another striking resemblance to the late 19th and early 20th century, before the great wars. When Wells, Gernsbacker and Verne invented science fiction, it seemed as if science would conquer the human condition.

A century ago, to be thought of as smart you had to be a tinkerer and love what passed for science and technology at the time. Everyone was convinced that all the answers were just around the corner and the pace of technology would only accelerate. Taylorism was the economics of its day and everyone that was thought to be intelligent was into science.

A big difference between then and now is that fake nerdism is probably filling the void where religion used to reside. A century ago, even the most empirically minded went to mass, just to keep up appearances. Today, no one believes in anything, so everyone falls for everything. Slap the word “study” onto any batshit crazy idea and your fake nerd friends will be posting infographics about on their Facebook page.

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el baboso
Member
8 years ago

You nailed it Z. I am forced to constantly remind myself that the world is largely run by people who don’t know what an algorithm is, can’t grasp simple mathematical concepts like negative numbers, and have never heard of the laws of thermodynamics. I have to remind myself of these things because every time I’ve tried to enlighten them, I’ve run into violent resistance. But they do love charlatans pitching them Science!

JimmyDeeOC
JimmyDeeOC
Reply to  thezman
8 years ago

Scarce on the ground indeed…

My burrito comes to $2.83. I give the cashier three dollar bills, a nickle, and three pennies.

They look at me like I just dropped doggy doo in their hands. “Just punch it in….” I tell them. “Mr Register will tell you to give me a quarter.” Sometimes I’ll let fly with “Why, in my day (early 80s, cashiering at the college cafeteria and one of the Yellowstone lodges one summer) we had to figure that out IN OUR HEADS.”

Roy
Roy
Reply to  JimmyDeeOC
8 years ago

Most days, I’m happy if they just manage to get the order right.

el baboso
Member
Reply to  thezman
8 years ago

My migrant farm worker grandmother got me through long division and her self-educated father knew enough trig to work on surveying crews throughout the American Southwest. I’ve always sensed a certain amount of contempt for maths among managerial class types. I agree with them that the human dimension or Leadership! or the art of the deal will always be more important than material considerations. But for crissakes, let’s make sure that there is enough gas in the car to make it to Albuquerque before we set off, boss. Outer party types like me always sympathize with Winston Smith when O’Brien… Read more »

UKer
UKer
8 years ago

The original Star Wars worked because it had a story with recognisable elements, mostly built on the fairy tale concepts projected into another place and technology. It wasn’t particularly well-written, but it had a princess, a castle, and a villain who had everything you needed in a baddie including dressing all in black, the rasping voice and the pseudo-German helmet. It even had the Lord Of The Rings-type hero whose mystical quest takes him from humble backwater to saving the world/galaxy. So far so good. The series declined (fighting teddy bears destroying high tech army was ludicrous, but gets repeated… Read more »

UKer
UKer
Reply to  thezman
8 years ago

Star Trek was pre-dated in the UK by Doctor Who, which was the epitome of shaky TV sets and clumsy special effects and all in monochrome, too. It was also family fare as the Doctor picked up a couple of kids from the streets and whizzed them not only round the galaxy but back and forth in time, and best of all no one thought he was a dirty old man abducting children. You are right about TV not being Shakespeare, but as for the ‘greater good’ I think you can interpret Macbeth as being about both ambition and the… Read more »

james wilson
james wilson
Reply to  thezman
8 years ago

War is, necessarily, the ultimate socialistic enterprise.

Roy
Roy
Reply to  thezman
8 years ago

War movie? Star Trek? You’ve got to be kidding me. Here you had this fantastic space battleship. Did it ever fight battles? Did it ever go toe-to-toe with the Romulans or Klingons? Or participate in the occasional fleet action? Well, once in awhile – once in a very rare while – there would be an actual shootout with photon torpedoes or phasers, but not very often. Mostly it was a lot of Vietnam era moralizing with cold-war politics and damn little science – fiction or otherwise. (Now, “Wrath of Khan” – the movie. That one was different. And then there… Read more »

Roy
Roy
Reply to  Roy
8 years ago

…and I have true nerd credentials. I used to screw around with computers that had vacuum tubes inside.

Roy
Roy
Reply to  Roy
8 years ago

…and don’t get me started on “Big Bang Theory”. When I walk into a room where that show is playing on the TV, I can actually feel the intelligence being sucked out of the room.

ErisGuy
ErisGuy
Reply to  Roy
8 years ago

And then there was that one episode of TOS that was essentially a rip-off of “Run Silent, Run Deep”

Balance of Terror. Added a wedding and racism to Run Silent, Run Deep. (IIRC)

Joseph K
Joseph K
8 years ago

The reason why Star Wars resonates with The Cult is because the series wears its pseudo-religious mythos on its sleeve. It’s THE TEN COMMANDMENTS for the Neil deGrasse Tyson crowd, soaked in a watery soup of Joseph Campbell, fake Zen, and the ersatz profundity of the old KUNG FU series. The STAR WARS series gives the type of people who make Alzheimer jokes about Chuck Heston permission to enjoy the same sort of thing they make fun of the hinds for enjoying. It’s no coincidence that Lucas re-imagined the chariot race from BEN HUR for THE PHANTOM MENACE. The first… Read more »

Chris
Chris
Reply to  Joseph K
8 years ago

That is an excellent review. Well done, sir.

sami
sami
Reply to  Chris
7 years ago

nice hair due!!!

Drake
Drake
8 years ago

I always thought of Star Wars as fantasy, not sci-fi. It is just adventure, and contains none of the intellectual challenge of even mediocre sci-fi. It was fantasy done well in the first trilogy and poorly in the second.

I saw the new one and was fairly bored. The final scenes were like a geriatric repeat – disable the shields so pilots can kill the death star while old Princess Lea waits to see if she’ll be vaporized.

guest
guest
8 years ago

The worst are those trailer reactions, adult actresses don’t put it on that thick!

Z, but at least watch this comedic review on why the reboot is awful, must see…

Peltast
Peltast
8 years ago

“A century ago, even the most empirically minded went to mass, just to keep up appearances.”

Isaac Newton made models of the Temple of Solomon and other Kabbalistic non-senses.

Anon.
Anon.
8 years ago

I was a kid when Star Wars was new but I didn’t get to see it in the cinema and somehow have never seen it. I loved Star Trek but I am sure I would have loved Star Wars if I’d gone to see it, just like I loved Superman. I think kids who loved it back then are adults now and love it now and other kids who watched the later films grew to love it too. I don’t think you’re quite right in your assessment. There’s a grain of truth to what you’re saying but that’s all (in… Read more »

Blake
8 years ago

Gernsback not Gernsbacker.

Yeah, I used to be a nerd, but now I can’t watch enough TV to qualify.

trackback
8 years ago

[…] Of course, turning science into a religion is why we have kooks like Bill Nye demanding to have skeptics thrown in prison. He’s a good reminder that you can be batshit crazy and still be able to design a decent toaster. The amusement park manager, Neil deGrasse Tyson, made it through a doctoral program, but found better money in peddling pseudo-scientific nonsense to rich people. […]

Hucbald
8 years ago

I was the target demographic for the original Star Trek; nine years old when it premiered. Was still watching reruns in high school. So when Star Wars came out, I was genuinely not interested at all. I’m thinking it was just before The Empire Strikes Back that I finally saw A New Hope, and it was fun, but Star Trek episodes were morality tales, and some of them were very, very good. BTW, I’m OK with the JJ Abrams reboot, unlike some of my friends, who came out of the theater with their hair on fire. Not as good as… Read more »

Andy Texan
8 years ago

This latest episode is the nadir of movie making. Hollywood is totally exhausted. The money they are making is an obscenity. I am sure they paid the critics to keep their mouths shut.

trackback
8 years ago

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