I remember Starbuck
… And not just Melville’s version of him. For those of you old enough to remember Dirk Benedict, NRO has an article on him here and Big Hollywood posts a recent screed against antimasculinism (if I may coin the term) here titled ‘Lost in Castration.’
Apparently he was as taken aback as I was to have Starbuck ‘re-imagined’ from a gallant cigar-smoking man to an angry cigar-smoking woman in the revised BSG.
(I was not taken aback because the pilot was female, merely because she was unfeminine. By ‘unfeminine’ I do not mean she was wearing trousers, I mean that the writers treated her like a pseudo-masculine caricature. There was one scene where hersuperior officer hits her in the face, something, I am sure, would be OK for Sergeant Rock and his Howling Commandos, but not something little girls want little boys to learn is honorable behavior. Considering the innate, inherent violence which lurks at the back of all masculine behavior, peeling away the safety feature known as chivalry, even in the name of so noble a word as equality, is imprudent, to say the least.)
Here are two quotes from the NRO article:
“Even up in Montana I’ve spent the last 20 years defending the right of my boys to throw a frickin’ snowball, to climb a tree, to jump off a little cliff, to go out in the canoe off my dock without a life jacket,” he says. “All the little boys that refused to give into that were put on Ritalin. The future warriors of America are all on Ritalin in the second grade.”
During his recent appearance on Celebrity Big Brother, a wildly popular reality-TV show in the U.K., he was greeted by a snotty British punk-rock singer, who announced: “It’s Dirk [expletive redacted] Benedict.” Without missing beat, Benedict replied, “I seldom use my middle name.” It’s an unscripted quip more than worthy of Face or Starbuck.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
