Let’s not forget that the follow-up trilogy is all about how nothing changed with the defeat of the Emperor. There were still Nazis, there was still a civil war, and people were still being subjugated throughout the galaxy.
The real lesson of Star Wars is that you can never rest on your laurels and that the Galaxy, like American politics, is really ruled by a handful of people who are related or knew each other in college.
No. Really?
i think the fact we just had a successful election undermines that particular phrasing. so no. not so much with the monarchy
I think you are ignoring the gatekeeping on who has the opportunity to get elected. And I was not referring to a monarchy so much as how small a group of people it is that actually hold power and how that power remains concentrated by that gate keeping. Also, this is the first election in twenty years where one of the candidates attempting to get the nomination was not related to a previous winner, so…
Oh no! That means the prequels are next…
Thanks for posting!
I love that picture of Nichelle Nichols and Barack Obama.
Never been a huge Star Wars fan, if for no other reason than that franchise never seems to get the science right and has plots only painted with the broadest possible brush. I know Star Trek ain’t perfect either but they try harder and seem to be more accurate, full of nuance and gray areas and moral complexity.
I remember feeling hopeful when that picture was first taken. That feels odd to me now, having to look back at younger-me and wondering what on earth I could possibly have told myself as a warning, short of “buckle up, buttercup” and similar altogether inadequate cautions.
As a student of history, and also often as a student of yours through your posts here (much appreciated and thank you), I remember studying Mao’s “100 Flowers Campaign”…
… in college. As a lefty then and now, it made me queasy.
Was Mao sincerely opening China up for diversity of thought? Or was it a cynical trap for the unwary? Did he himself pull the ol’ bait-n-switch? Or was the campaign hijacked by his apparatchiks, seeking to solidify their power and position? ( /rhetorical )
My takeaway now from that section of that wikipedia entry–that having an active, vocal plurality of thought is may be useful is some ways–is that a painful small “positive” by-product of OrangeBadMan&Co is now having so many unhealthy adherents of his flushed out into the open for us all to address. This has been echoed by some ATX activists and organizers I talk with. I feel… conflicted.
Maybe my current queasiness could be the younger-me looking at the mess bequeathed us by OrangeBadMan&GriftersInc. as the older-me considers whether I have to, ouroboros-like, start eating my own snake-tail and take back my first impressions of Mao’s 100 Flowers maneuver.
I remain committed to and continue to work toward the kind of future that Star Trek modeled/models for us, where plurality of thought is a positive future, and definitely not the toxic, unjust, untrue, frankly bizarre crap that passes for legit thinking that any human should listen to or value.
When ABC and other major MSM outlets started calling it for Biden, I had a younger-me moment of feeling hopeful again, if for no other reason than seeing the allies in our struggle to get a fact-based, science-based presidential administration to fkn address the pandemic, climate change etc. even now, even before the swearing in and inshallah peaceful transition of power in the WH.
( insert “need of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one” img)
ETA: qualifier, see strikethrough; also, added missing verb
Pretty sure that the prequels were Nixon and Reagan…
Given how much time the prequels spent around the minutiae of governing and politics, maybe that’s not a bad thing? Just make sure nobody appoints Jar Jar Binks into Harris’ Senate seat.
America has a larger population than in any prior election year
It’s like comparing movie box-office receipts without adjusting for inflation
Are those taco trucks, finally, on every corner? 
Literally naming the campaign machine the Death Star might have been foreshadowing.
Meanwhile…
That is genuinely creepy as fuck; resemblance to the golem Kushner notwithstanding.
here’s the clincher for me,
with joe biden we have something close to a normal human being for our president. despite the fact that’s he’s been a senator for all those years and vice president for 8. despite the fact that he’s probably got more in his bank account(s) right now than i’ll earn in my lifetime.
in spite of that, he seems like a guy who might be struck by how beautiful a sunset is, who might go over to a friend’s house just to converse over a cup of coffee, the kind of guy who might pick up a little something he saw on the road and wrap it up to give to his wife because he’s going to enjoy the look on her face when she opens it. he strikes me as the kind of guy who might understand during a negotiation that a win/win is not just possible but desirable.
after four years of a man for whom nothing is joyful, for whom life is nothing more or less than a squalid power struggle . . . that is such a welcome change. trump’s dad had to have really fucked him up and i can find it in me to feel a little bit sorry for that young donald trump who got twisted into the remorseless bundle of id we’ve had to have as the leader of our country. but as much as i can barely empathize with the sucking wound at the heart of his psyche i feel so much more empathy for the people he has victimized as president and forced all the rest of us to be complicit in his crimes.
joe biden isn’t perfect, he isn’t any kind of progressive icon, but he’s a normal human being. that’ll do.
For now.
I plan on holding Biden’s feet to the fucking fire.
We cant ever let the powers that be come this close to running the country off a cliff, ever a-fucking-gain.
I’m still pissed off - but I plan to channel my righteous anger into every election going forward, into supporting the DSA, into making sure that the broken systems get fixed.
I agree with both of your sentiments @Melizmatic and @navarro. However, today, right now, I am just enjoying feeling the relief of not being assaulted daily.
I was talking about this with friends last night. We all expressed how nice it will be to have a boring leader for a while. Someone who won’t victimize us every day. We can tune in or tune out, as needed.
Of course I’m not suggesting we should tune out. The issues are too big to do that. The suffering isn’t over. People need help. The bad systems are still in place. But everyone needs a vacation for a few days, to rest and recharge. That’s where I’m at, today.
The country just had Trump in our faces every single day, every moment a hail of insults, derision and uncertainty… God, won’t that be nice to have the mental space to approach the issues with the care and attention they deserve?
I hope everyone in America can take the next few days just to get some breathing space from Trump and his gaggle of reality-bending weirdos. We need to take a goddamn breath and figure out what’s next.
The work will continue. But for now, a little namaste.
I ain’t even mad at ya for it.
As Jim Carrey put it so aptly on SNL, feel free to Bask in the Trumplessness…
I love that. I hope you are having a good day. I’ve been away from news and working on stuff outside.
Democratic Party in the US is a conservative party. Franky i prefer to have a stubborn and boring president rather than a flamboyant person that is conviced that a good politics means a lot of like in facebook.
