"I wasn't rude enough to let them know what I was thinking." -- Patrick Stoner, passionate Sherman detractor
Careful attention was paid. How Stewart's voice rose across the table from the intrepid interviewer whose mannerisms and verbal stilettos where formed in the states of American feudalism, but who knew when to hold back with the classically trained presence before him. "Why did he do it?" Patrick's voice rose an octave, not losing control but invested, trying to sort out the enigmatic nature of Shakespeare's darkest protagonist. Macbeth is less John F Kennedy getting his magisterial head blown off like a ripe melon, more Eliot Spitzer using his prosecutorial techniques to rationalize the perfect legitimacy of his needs to exhort power through ejaculation. Any literary mind can relate to Patrick's outcry. Why in the name of god does a good lieutenant destroy the sanctity of his place of honor in the realm and over reach, triggering an apocalyptic bloodbath? Beneath this is the unspoken frustration in the mind of a man who knows no matter how well trained he is, his fame rests on his inexplicable role as a Frenchman with an English accent in a children's science fiction series that turns grown men and women into loons, hence his modulated dialectical mentorship and rivalry with Ian Holm, who can play a synthetic android and escape being fenced in by a figure like Jean Luc Picard.
Stewart owes a great deal to Rick Berman's send up of European finesse, despite the entrapment, but the hints of frustration remain for public distillation. In his minor roles of ruthless villainy, one could envision Stewart actually inhabiting the Union's terrorist general, the one who raped the Shenandoah Valley. William T Sherman's destruction of the South was necessary. His mind was brilliant, critical, calculating, compartmentalizing native tribesmen into nuisance thugs. His brutality paved the way for this modern world where identity is paramount and genocidal in the same breath, and true value is in the efficiency profit margin.
We can't all be matinee icons.
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