Choosing Words

Upon reading actor Wil Wheaton's response to U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan's tweet offering his prayers for people in Sutherland Springs, TX, one might be tempted to say, "Shut up, Wesley." This would be the wrong thing to do.

For one, "Wesley Crusher" was a character played by Wheaton in Star Trek: The Next Generation." So "Wesley Crusher" didn't tweet anything. For another, that phrase is at the center of a troubling response to the unpopularity of the character Wheaton played, during the time he himself was a teenager.

"Wesley Crusher" was a ridiculously implausible creation, a teenaged genius allowed to pilot a starship because Gene Roddenberry could still disguise the exhausted fumes of his creativity enough to have the weight to argue the character onto the show. But that's not Wheaton's fault. It's also not his fault that when the show was faced with two characters fast becoming narrative deadweight and two actors not really talented enough to reverse that trend, showrunners booted Denise Crosby's "Tasha Yar" instead of him. Sure, that meant that TNG now had only two female featured players and both of them were stereotypical feeling/reactive women's roles instead of the active one that Yar had been designed for. And fans were now going to be stuck with at least a dozen variations on "boy genius saves the day" episodes before they could finally unload him in season 4. But none of that is really Wheaton's fault either. He was a kid actor, and like most kid actors he basically played himself in whatever situation the script presented. The situations usually ranged from mildly implausible to flat-out silly, but he did what he could do.

The disapproval should be saved for the character's creators, the showrunners and the lazy scriptwriters who reached back for the same stock boy genius savior trope.

Even had it been Wheaton's fault, the large amount of haterade directed at him personally was uncalled for, and caused him some significant stress and problems. Mocking his clearly vile tweet with a phrase -- "Shut up, Wesley" -- meant to recall what more or less amounted to him being bullied by wrong-headed fans would itself be wrong.

So is the solution to say, "Shut up, Wil Wheaton?" While this would be legitimate since Wheaton is a real person, it would also be the wrong thing to do.

You see, Wheaton, along with similarly callous vulgarians like Michael Ian Black and Michael McKean, are people who are primarily paid to say words other people write down for them. The more they Tweet and talk like this, the more people realize that their own words -- and whatever thoughts skitter along the vast empty steppes behind them -- merit neither compensation nor attention. Which will bring us that much closer to the day when they will be heard only by each other, and people with ideas, potential solutions and compassion can be heard by those of us interested in such things.