Regarding Star Trek - really

Lileks has a way of even making me weepy using something I couldn’t care less about – Star Trek and the finale of “Enterprise”. It’s not the reference that makes me weepy, it’s what he does with the context and the theme and the grandieur of his theory.

Spoilers follow.

And so we saw the entirety of the Enterprise story as something that had
become Distant History, a story you read in second grade. The ship was Old
Ironsides – interesting, inert, historical, a relic. That was a fun tour, let’s
have lunch. It was a contrast between the tone of a standard episode (what
happens now is incredibly important and the Federation hangs in the balance and
any one of our heroes may be killed, despite the fact that they have signed a
contract for the next season) and the cool regard of history, for whom these
events are simply a matter of record. What Riker was worried about would be
history in the same way, eventually. That’s the point. We think that Today is
incredibly vital and pertinent; surely history will see it as we do, feel it as
we do. Well, no. Not unless it’s a very bad day, and certainly not if it’s a
nice one. Battles turn into paragraphs. Sunk ships are footnotes, if they’re
lucky.