Darth Condoleezza?

There’s a new Star Wars movie out. You may have heard mention of it in passing. It’s pretty typical of the franchise: great settings, fantastic action sequences, lame dialogue, and acting that leaves you glancing at the bottom of the screen to see what the silhouettes of Joel and the ‘Bots are saying. 

Now the plot is fairly basic. There’s this Galactic Republic, see, and it’s been fighting an insurgency for some time, apparently over a trade dispute. George Lucas went into long and involved detail about these trade disputes in the previous two Star Wars movies, since political analysis of trade disputes is something no red-blooded eight year old boy can resist. Maybe you remember what the hell they were about, because I sure don’t. Nor do I want to, so don’t email me.

The insurgents, headed by this guy who’s a human brain and some other unappetizing pieces of meat inside a cyborg body mounted with a steer’s skeleton head, are losing to the Republic, due in large part to the Jedi Knights, who are sort of a cross between Green Lantern, Jet Li, and Milton Freiberg. You’ve got Ewan MacGregor and Samuel L. Jackson, and Yoda, who combines the looks of Kermit the Frog and the derring-do of Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Interesting: my spell checker recognizes “Yoda” but not Governor Muscles). 

Now, the head of the Republic is this guy named Palpatine. Palp is your typical glad-handing sack ‘o shit politician, but it turns out that’s just surface dressing. Palp knows that if the Jedi knights polish off the insurgents, then his ratings go in the tank as several trillion people all notice the schools are in disrepair and there are Wookies moving into their neighborhood, and blame him for it. Further, he loses a bunch of nifty powers the Senate gave him back when the rebels looked like they could be a serious threat. He’s gotten kind of fond of those powers.

So Palp, who is secretly part of an evil organization known as the Sith, hits on the idea of secretly helping the insurgents while making the Jedi, who are his only real obstacle to seizing unlimited power, look like chumps. When that doesn’t quite pan out and old steer-head gets turned into a prop for a “lost-in-the-desert” cartoon, he sends out soldiers to ambush and kill the Jedi. While he’s at it, he suborns Anakin Skywalker, who becomes Darth Vader. Hope I didn’t ruin the movie for you by mentioning that. Skywalker goes out and slaughters a bunch of children, because, after all, that’s what bad guys do, and Palpatine mixes it up with Samuel L. Jackson, and while he does manage to throw Jackson out the window on the 300th floor of the latest proposed New York replacement for the WTC, Jackson hits him with a whammy that makes him look like the Pillsbury Dough Boy after two hours in the hot sun. 

He pulls it off, and then goes before the Senate and explains that the Jedi Knights had turned traitor, which is why he looked like ten lightyears of bad wormhole, and that he needed the unlimited power of an emperor to clean up Kermit and the rest. The Senate, with a whoop and a holler, gives him that power. Natalie Porter, who somewhat resembles a talented actor of the same name who has appeared in other movies, turns to someone and says, “This is how liberty ends – with thunderous applause.”

It’s all very space-opera-ish, and it’s good dumb fun. If you fast forward through all the expository sequences, it’s a terrific hour and fifteen minute action move. 

Now here’s the part that’s really, really weird.

The Republicans are taking it personally. 

They’ve been running around, huffing that George Lucas has put politics into these movies, meant for innocent little children to enjoy. Oh, Anakin ends up burned all to shit, dragging his smoldering body over hot lava with one arm because his other arm and his legs have been burnt off, but it’s the fact that there’s -politics- in the movie that might upset them!

OK, let’s see: head of a democracy is secretly a bad guy, wants to frame the good guys and seize unlimited power. Manipulates a war, finds a way to smear the opposition. Gets the Senate to become a cheerleading squad for him.

Why would Republicans look at that and take it personally? Hmm?

I’m not making this up. There are Republicans running around and huffing that Palpatine, the Sith Lord, is meant to portray George W. 

Now, there have been a lot of Science Fiction movies and books that dealt with the rise and fall of mighty empires, and featured corrupt and power-hungry demagogues. It’s sort of a favorite motif in science fiction. FDR wasn’t offended by Heinlein’s future history, which featured the US falling into a theocratic morass at . . . hmm, right around 2001. Truman wasn’t fazed by “A Canticle for Liebowitz,” although perhaps he should have been. Ike didn’t get upset with Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy. Even Nixon, that most paranoid of presidents, failed to look at any SF movie and wonder if it was meant as a shot at him.

But the Busheviks are running around complaining that “obviously” Palpatine is meant to be George, because they so obviously . . . er . . . resemble one another. Even though they have nothing in common. Nothing at all. Just a resemblance. That’s all. But not really!

Even the Republicans who have enough sense not to voice such complaints aren’t doing a real good job of deflecting the comparisons the complaints are attracting. One fellow on Usenet explained that where the resemblance broke down was that the insurgency had already begun before Palpatine took power, and in fact, he was elected to deal with it. Whereas in George’s case, the problems started after he took office. 

Which of course leads one to wonder: if Palpatine didn’t already have a war when he took office, would he need to create one? Maybe claim that the other party in the trade dispute had weapons of mass destruction? Claim that the steer-head guy ate Ewoks for breakfast? “Fix the intelligence”?

Well, I probably wouldn’t have made a link between Star Wars and George W., except for that stupid and expensive anti-missile program, but the paranoid yammerheads of the right who saw Star Wars as something else to whine about have left me wondering:

Is George W. a Sith Head?