Category: Current Events

I know I’ve been somewhat delinquent in updating.  The truth is, it takes many hours to write one of these.  Multiple days if I wanted to do it better than I have been so far.  But I have a day job and more than once I’ve gotten home from work at 8pm, gotten something to eat, and started one of these articles only to finally post it at 5 or 6am before taking a shower during which I fall asleep multiple times, then crawl into bed and log about four hours of snooze time before I have to get up and start getting ready for work.  And then my employer wonders why I don’t seem to have any energy.

So I worked seven days straight last week, and then spent three recovering, and spending a little time with friends and family.  Yesterday at work it felt like my only speed was reverse.  Anyway this is a long way of saying, this article is a week overdue but I’ve known all week that I wanted to write it.  This is the story of how Bill Paxton made me a better writer.

No, I never met him.  This story goes back to my years studying Art at Longwood University (or Longwood College as it was then known).  After a tumultuous freshman year during which I experienced a bit of culture shock while steadfastly refusing to sell out my personal values, I settled into a kind of rhythm in my sophomore year that carried me all the way through to graduation.  I found my people, and surrounded myself with them, and I always knew that no matter how crappy a given day was, it would end with time spent among friends.  It is friendship that got me through.

That sophomore year that established this structure, I was sharing a dorm room with a guy named Wayne, whom I had known from my freshman hall.  Wayne is absolutely one of my people, and he helped me find the others.  Sophomore year we shared a suite in Frasier hall with two guys named Nayan and Mikee.  Nayan was a science major, who also happened to be an incredible guitarist with a love of blues and alternative rock, and Mikee was a skater who was studying commercial art.  Two of the nicest guys I ever knew, and the four of us, though we had different interests, were united by our love of movies.

Now as a kid, I didn’t get to the theater all that much.  My earliest memories of the movie theater are seeing “Stir Crazy” in the movie theater on base in Dahlgren – making the “we bad” scene a part of my personal head canon that none of my friends ever understood – and the Robert Redford baseball movie “The Natural.”  I remember seeing “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Back to the Future,” but my parents have never been big on going to the movie theater, and until I was old enough to go to the movies myself or with my friends, I only got to go once in a while.

So in college, I had a lot of catching up to do as far as seeing movies I’d missed out on in my childhood.  Wayne and I would rent a few movies on a Friday night and often they were ones he liked and that I had never seen.  The ones I liked I’d end up buying for my collection and then we’d watch them often.  I’d put a movie on while I worked on a painting, maybe we’d have “Empire” in while we were doing homework.  We communicated almost exclusively in movie quotes.

Among the movies Wayne introduced me to, and that I loved and added to my collection, was the Alien Trilogy (for at the time, three is all there were).  If I remember correctly, it was Nayan who knew somebody who had the director’s cut of Aliens, a VHS tape dubbed from a laser disc, which not even Wayne had seen.  And “Aliens” is one of the movies that most influences me as a storyteller.  It’s on the short list with RoboCop and the Star Wars Trilogy in terms of movies that taught me about storytelling, and as quotable as the original “Ghostbusters,” or “Die Hard,” both of which I would easily place alongside “RoboCop,” “The Empire Strikes Back,” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” on the list of 80’s movies that are among the most perfect films ever made.

Everything about “Aliens” functions beautifully as well.  You may remember this article that I wrote recently about how the audience can accept almost anything if they have a good surrogate among the main cast who echoes their own feelings and perceptions.  “Aliens” is a movie that understands that.  It opens more or less where “Alien” left off, with Ripley and her cat Jones, in cryogenic sleep aboard the escape pod after destroying the Nostromo and blowing the Alien drone out of the airlock.

She’s discovered by a deep salvage crew, and wakes up in a med bay to learn that she’s been adrift in space for 57 years, and everyone she knew, including her daughter whose 11^th birthday she had hoped to be home in time for, has died.  Haunted by the memory of her ordeal aboard Nostromo and buried under two layers of survivor’s guilt, Ripley has taken a job as a dockworker, and sees a therapist regularly.  She is miserable, and probably suffering from PTSD, though I would say this last piece is only clearly demonstrated in the third film.

Then, of course, the Weyland-Yutani corporation loses contact with the colony “Hadley’s Hope” on LV-426, and deploys a squad of space marines to investigate.  LV-426 is the planet where the wrecked spacecraft was discovered by the Nostromo crew in the original film, with its chamber full of eggs, where John Hurt was attacked by the facehugger that planted the embryo in his body, which so dramatically burst out of his chest in that first film’s most iconic scene.

In the director’s cut of “Aliens,” of course, we’ve already watched as a family in a rover discovers the same wreck, and as the mother frantically drags the father, with facehugger attached, back to the rover in full view of the children, her daughter screaming hysterically as she radios for help.

Paul Reiser, who plays a Weyland-Yutani officer named Burke, recruits Ripley to join to the expedition to LV-426 as she is the closest thing they have to an expert on the aliens, being the only known survivor of an alien attack.  This also gives her a chance to face the thing that haunts her nightmares, and to try to reclaim control of her life.

Throughout the beginning of the film, Ripley is the outsider.  Nobody believes her about the alien until Hadley’s Hope goes dark.  Even then they’re skeptical.  And we, as the audience, have seen the first film and know that Ripley’s telling the truth.  But moving forward, we’re going into territory that’s going to be familiar yet horribly difficult for Ripley, and James Cameron knew that there would be people who watched his movie who never saw the first one.  So, while Ripley is a fine surrogate for those of us who know what happened to her in the first movie, the newcomers will need a new surrogate.

Enter Bill Paxton, as Private William Hudson.  PFC Hudson is mouthy, emotional and erratic: in short he’s the guy the rest of the squad probably wishes were not with them, because a guy like that can get you killed in combat.  But from a storytelling perspective he’s crucial.  The reason is simple.  Watch every scene that Hudson is in, particularly when we first meet the marines.  By being the wise-ass who torques everybody, he gives the rest of the characters a chance to show us who they are.

Whether it’s Sergeant Apone (above) or PFC Vasquez, Hudson’s antics are the catalyst for them to show their personalities and attitudes.  It’s simple and effective.

Hudson is also the conduit by which we find out that Lance Henriksen’s character is a synthetic – which freaks out Ripley given what happened between her and Ian Holm’s character Ash in the original.

Then, as the action ramps up and the film intensifies, Hudson’s attitude creates levity for the viewer, which keeps everything from getting too heavy, something that would probably make a film about phallus-headed cockroach aliens collapse very quickly into the realm of farce.  He keeps the audience laughing no matter how horrible things get within the context of the movie itself.  He’s a joker, a cynic, a wise-ass.  In short, if you want new audience members to buy into this kind of madness, you need Hudson.  I learned that lesson, about audience surrogates, from watching this movie until I could just about quote it end-to-end.

It’s telling, I think, that when Hudson finally exits the film, it’s at a time when the number of characters has been scaled back to just a few, where the time for joking has passed, and where if the audience is not now onboard, they never will be.  It’s just Ripley, Corporal Dwayne Hicks, Newt, and Lance Henriksen’s synthetic, Bishop.  It’s also important to note that Hudson never upstages Ripley as the main character.  Hudson’s moments are standouts, but he’s almost entirely unmanned when the drop ship crashes on the way to pull them out, and it’s Ripley who settles him down.  It’s Ripley who, having lived through the nightmare aboard the Nostromo, never loses her wits in the horrors of Hadley’s Hope.  She’s a mama bear, she takes charge and in the end, it’s Ripley who takes out the Alien queen and gets Newt, Hicks, and what’s left of Bishop to safety.

Ripley is absolutely the hero of the film, but Hudson gets the job of making her show us why.  In many ways it’s a thankless task, playing the ass, but Bill Paxton did it so well that he’s remembered for it, probably more than any other role he played.  I was always happy to see him in anything I was watching.  The fact that he was Hudson made him a favorite of fanboys like me.  It was upsetting to hear that he had passed away, but I am truly thankful for the work that he did.  My life would not be the same without PFC Hudson and his smart mouth, and I would not be the storyteller that I am.  So, Bill Paxton, thank you for the good work, sir.  Godspeed.

NOTE:  This is Part Two of a two-part series.  If you haven’t read the first part, you can find it by clicking this link.

Last time, we took a look at the clues in the Original Trilogy of the Star Wars Saga to determine as much as possible about the economic situation in the First Galactic Empire, and came to the rather obvious conclusion, which I hope we all already were aware of, that the Empire is a military dictatorship.  Hopefully we have added to that, the understanding that in a dictatorship the government controls the production and distribution of goods and services.

To be clear, this means there are no private businesses.  All business is state business, and therefore Imperial Subjects would all work for the state, and be paid by the state.  In this model all money not only originates with the state, but returns to it as well, as there is literally nobody else to trade with.  Money in this context is little more than a government voucher.  As stated in part one, this is just slavery by another name.  That should give you a pretty clear picture of what the Rebel Alliance was fighting to get free of.

Here in Part Two we will examine the Prequel Trilogy to see what new information we can gather from those films.  This will be fairly illuminating as the prequels are very political in their focus, and as we will soon see, Palpatine’s rise to power is predicated almost entirely on economic factors.  From the opening crawl of “Menace,” we are told that the taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute, and that a group called the Trade Federation has created a blockade to stop all shipping to the planet of Naboo.  We are given to understand that this is somewhat unprecedented, and that the Galactic Senate is doing an awful lot of talking about it and not much acting to settle it, so Supreme Chancellor Valorum has dispatched a couple of Jedi Knights, aboard a small diplomatic vessel called Radiant VII, to mediate the conflict.

The Trade Federation would be a massive conglomerate, a number of huge shipping companies and possibly other mercantile operations, joined together for shared security.  The Galactic Republic has no standing army, but apparently it is legal for each member civilization within the Republic to have its own military organization and its own unique system of government, and it seems that huge conglomerates like the Trade Federation have similar rights, so they have a fleet and an army in order to protect their interests – hence the blockade, which they make sure to remind the Jedi and their escorts at the beginning of the film, “is perfectly legal.”

We can surmise that the trade routes are being taxed by the Republic, and that the Trade Federation is obviously unhappy about it because it’s cutting into their profit margins.  The text of the crawl also paints the Trade Federation as “greedy,” – Lucas’s exact word choice – which is a clear signal to the viewer that the Federation are the bad guys here, bullying this little planet over profits.

Likely this shipping tax has already raised the price of goods and services for the people of Naboo (and other worlds for which trade is affected by the tax) but depending on the needs of the Naboo, they may simply decide to reduce the amount of importing they do.  This would not be solved with a blockade, unless some measure of imports are necessary for the survival of their civilization, or if they are a planet whose economy is supported by a healthy export business, which would obviously also be affected by the tax.

George Lucas is the master of visual clues (my main man Zack Snyder is masterful with them as well), so what can we deduce from what we are shown of Naboo?  The planet is populated by at least two civilizations who have had limited contact – first, the human inhabitants, who identify themselves as “the Naboo,” and the amphibious Gungans, who are a technologically advanced race living within a tribal system.  They Gungans are insular and reclusive, preferring to remain mostly in their submarine home of Gunga City.

The Naboo, however, are spacefarers, whose ships are elegant, shiny and chrome, and they live in classically styled renaissance-type buildings, their cities resplendent with canals and massive statuary.  This is an intentional choice by Lucas, and not just because he wanted to film in Italy and Spain.  This choice shows us that the Naboo are artists, poets, and philosophers.  Remember that in Star Wars, planets are one thing: Desert, Jungle, Blizzard, Swamp, Sky, Redwood forest… Naboo is the Liberal Arts Planet.  The Renaissance Planet.  This is supported by even the smallest details, like the Queen’s kabuki makeup and the Gungan chief basically calling them a bunch of pointyheads.  And damn if the people in the Queen’s court aren’t dressed like they’re in a play about Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella.

Probably they export a lot of art and craftworks, and the blockade would be a serious issue because despite what people think, artists do what they do for more than just the sheer enjoyment of it.  Artists like eating and living in houses as much as anyone.  It takes time to create anything worthwhile, and it’s much more satisfying, as well as conducive to the overall quality of the product, if you can make enough money from your art to survive on it.

At any rate, it’s fair to say that there is mostly free trade in the Galactic Republic.  I say “mostly” because the tax on the trade routes represents a form of regulation.  The question, and probably an unanswerable one, is how much regulation there is besides that.  The fact that a little old tax has led to a situation described in the opening crawl as, “turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic” probably suggests that regulation has previously been next to none.  Apparently, also fairly rare is armed conflict, as Sio Bibble is fond of pointing out that “there hasn’t been a full-scale war since the formation of the Republic!”

Of note is the fact that one man has played both sides of this.  The Senator from Naboo, Sheev Palpatine, is also a Dark Lord of the Sith, who goes by the name of Darth Sidious.  This isn’t revealed until Episode III, but if you’re a fan (or really good at recognizing chins) you knew it from the beginning.  The Trade Federation is shown to be in league with Darth Sidious, even as Senator Palpatine is advising Queen Amidala of the Naboo.

He advises Amidala to accept Federation control of Naboo, knowing full well that she won’t, while he works to spur the senate into action; meanwhile under the guise of Sidious he tells Federation Viceroy Nute Gunray to assassinate the two visiting Jedi and invade Naboo, occupying the capital city of Theed.  He even tells Gunray that “Queen Amidala is young and naïve.  You will find controlling her will not be difficult.”  He’s looking to escalate the conflict in the hope of generating enough sympathy in the senate to challenge Chancellor Valorum’s seat.

I don’t think he necessarily intended for the Jedi to survive the Federation’s assassination attempt, nor for them to break the blockade and escape offworld with Queen Amidala and her entourage, but the delight on his face when she arrived on the Republic Capital of Coruscant and rushed straight to his office to discuss their next move was probably genuine.  After all, he gets to play the gentle soul while Amidala, in all her fiery, youthful glory, appears before the senate and demands that they resolve the conflict swiftly.  “I was not elected to watch my people suffer and die while you discuss this invasion in a committee!”

Palpatine has stacked the deck, though; Chancellor Valorum has, by Palpatine’s account, “little real power.  He has been mired by – baseless – accusations of corruption.”  Soon afterward, as Queen Amidala asks for the senate to act, several senators refuse to believe that the invasion is really taking place, or that there have been any deaths at all.  The Trade Federation has representation in the senate (which is fairly alarming) and denies any wrongdoing.

Now, as the pressure mounts for the Chancellor to lead the way, the bureaucrats step in and talk him down, and suddenly he shrinks back, buckling under pressure from the special interests to form a committee and investigate the veracity of the Queen’s claims.  She can’t wait for a senate committee, of course, it’ll be a year or more while her planet remains occupied by the Federation.  Palpatine, ever the master persuader, suggests they could take it to the supreme court, and the Queen is disheartened, knowing that this will likely take even longer than waiting on some useless senate committee.  So, with masterfully played reluctance, Palpatine suggests that the queen could call for a vote of No Confidence in the chancellor, and watches with satisfaction as she does exactly that.

The senate votes Valorum out of the chancellery and, in a sympathetic reaction to the conflict on Naboo, the senate elects Palpatine to replace him.

By Episode II, entitled Attack of the Clones, ten years have passed and a separatist movement has sprung up.  The opening crawl says that a number of star systems have announced their intentions to leave the Republic, but we’re not told why.  However when we meet the separatists, they seem to largely be made up huge conglomerates like the Trade Federation.  The others we meet have names like InterGalactic Banking Clan, the Techno Union, the Hyper-Communications Cartel, the Commerce Guild.

The separatists are under the leadership of a former Jedi with political ambitions, who goes by the name of Count Dooku.  Dooku is actually Darth Sidious’ new apprentice, Darth Tyranus, and he’s a plant because the Trade Federation knows that Sidious played them.  In order to continue to manipulate them, Sidious needs a middle man.  Since Palpatine/Sidious is always playing two sides, and since the separatists are all massive conglomerates with interests in the production and distribution of goods and services, we can safely conclude that as chancellor, Palpatine has applied a very liberal helping of trade regulations.  This would serve him well as it shows clearly that he is not like the feckless Valorum, and makes perfect sense as a platform for a chancellor whose homeworld was famously victim of a bloody invasion by a militant trade conglomerate.  In effect, this is what he was elected to do.

His dual identity has allowed him to continue escalating the conflict, by pitting the people against big business; in effect turning the common people against the rich, driving a narrative of regulation vs. corruption and greed.  The Separatist Union, being comprised of mostly giant businesses and their supporters, has the resources to mount an army, and begins doing so, quietly, on the strength of the Trade Federation’s droid army and its manufacturer, Geonosian Industries.

The increasing conflict has overwhelmed the relatively small Jedi Order, and Supreme Chancellor Palpatine has begun pushing for the senate to commission an Army of the Republic in order to back up the Jedi and protect the Republic’s member nations.  Senator Padme Naberrie Amidala, the former Queen of Naboo, is nearly assassinated upon her arrival on Coruscant where she would surely have voted against commissioning an army.  All of this acts as a distraction that splits up Jedi Knights Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi on separate missions – at the chancellor’s request – while the separatists are developing plans for a very familiar planet-killing superweapon.

Obi-Wan, attempting to track down the would-be-assassin, ends up on the ocean world of Kamino, where he discovers a large cloning operation, creating an army they claim was ordered by a Jedi Master whom Obi-Wan knows to have been dead at the time the order was placed.  Still, the army is for the Republic, and the Kaminoan cloners happily show Obi-Wan around the facility.  Of course Anakin and Padme’s paths intersect with Obi-Wan’s by the end of the movie, on the termite-mound planet of Geonosis, where they are all to be executed in a gladiator arena, having been captured by the separatists.

By this time, though, Jar Jar Binks, now a Junior Representative for the Gungans in the Senate, was convinced to propose the Emergency Powers Act.  When the vote passed, Palpatine, promising to lay down the powers as soon as the crisis was averted, immediately issued an Executive Order commissioning “a Grand Army of the Republic, to counter the increasing threats of the separatists.”

Yoda was sent to Kamino to pick up the first wave of Clone Troopers, while the rest of the available Jedi converged on Geonosis and tried to bail out Obi-Wan, Anakin and Padme.  Yoda arrived with the cavalry just in time to back up the depleted Jedi ranks, and the first battle of the Clone Wars raged across the planet.  By the end of the film, Bail Organa and the rest of the Loyalist Committee stood by in despair as a legion of Clone Troopers arrived on Coruscant on huge Corellian cruisers.

Now Palpatine’s Machiavellian plan is in full force.  The captains of commerce and industry are standing on one side, the leaders of the free galaxy on the other, and he controls both sides.  He effectively has two ways to win.

In Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, it’s been some three years since the Battle of Geonosis.  The Separatists are kicking some serious ass, and in a metaphorical sense, everything is on fire.  They’ve gained so much ground they’re able to kidnap Chancellor Palpatine before the movie starts.  Naturally Palpatine wanted this, it’s the natural escalation of the conflict, but it also serves to let him pit his favorite young Jedi, Anakin Skywalker, against his existing apprentice, Darth Tyranus, who is doing his existing in something of a state of decrepitude.

As Palpatine begins to make his persuasive case for Skywalker to join him, he chooses to reveal his true nature.  When the Jedi move against Palpatine, this plays directly into a narrative he has created by having the clone army ordered from Kamino in the name of a dead Jedi Master, and by having a former Jedi head the separatist movement.  As Anakin defends Palpatine against Mace Windu and his posse, this not only seals Skywalker’s fate, but allows Palpatine to finally cast the Jedi as traitors to the Republic, effectively making Anakin, the newly-minted Darth Vader, his champion and lord defender of the realm, as it were.  Using this extra layer of chaos to justify his last push for supreme power, Palpatine activates a secret piece of genetic programming in the Clones, authorizing them to use deadly force to put down their Jedi generals, and sending Lord Vader to slaughter all the children in the Jedi Temple.

With that done, Palpatine reassigns Anakin to go to the secret lair of the Separatist Council and murder them all, thus ending the conflict and bringing all means of production and distribution directly under state control.  Palpatine appears before the Galactic Senate, announcing that “the Republic shall be reorganized into the First Galactic Empire, in order to create a safe and secure society.”

There are a few takeaways from this.  The first is that this absolutely confirms my reading from Part One of this essay: that the Empire controls all means of production and distribution of goods and services throughout the Star Wars galaxy.

In your face, Randal!

It also fits Lucas’s overall theme for the prequels, which is greed.  Greed turned Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader.  But it also drove the Republic into corruption, and drove the Trade Federation into working with a Sith Lord.  Greed divides us, and love unites us, and that, my friends, is Star Wars in once sentence.

Are there lessons here for us today?  Oh, absolutely.  I can think of a million of them.  Our current president is a persuader, a trait he shares with Palpatine.  He also is creating a rather hectic tone in Washington, and is manipulating the media in ways both obvious and subtle (there are layers).

However, I don’t hold anyone blameless.  Most of the media is dishonest most of the time.  One major party wants to create conflict between the rich and the rest of us.  The other party talks about the free market but loves to wield authority just as heavily as the other.

Corruption is everywhere.  At least our industries don’t have senators, but they do have lobbyists, which nets the same result in the end.  It’s all a bit terrifying and it’s hard to know which way to turn.  However, a few things are obvious.

Both president GW Bush and President Obama, gave themselves more power than presidents had before.  And now we have this guy, who I still maintain is probably not the second coming of Hitler.  However, he is a persuader and that can be terribly effective, either in a good way or a bad one, depending solely on intent.  And the fact that trust is not something he inspires in the American people, makes it difficult for most to expect anything good.  Especially when his policies go against what half of the country apparently believes in.

So…the guy talks abut Civil Asset Forfeiture?  BAD.  Guy talks about reducing government regulation?  Good.

The most important thing, however, is the free market.  As long as we have a free market, we have the means to control our own destiny.  As long as the government does not control the flow of money, we are not slaves, but free men and free women.

I talk a lot about balance.  You hear me borrow a phrase from some of my anarcho-capitalist friends.  I’m not one, but I know a few, and I like them.  They talk about how government is literally evil.  You hear me basically lean into that when talking about liberty.  What nobody ever asks me, is if I think government is necessary.  Like I said, I’m not an anarchist.  I DO believe government is necessary.  I also believe that it is basically the opposite of freedom, since in order for government to exist, you have to give something up.  That’s just the way it works.  So we give up some freedom in exchange for security.  Taxation is theft, but it buys safety in the form of police, firefighters, and armed forces.  Yet some of these people are not very popular right now with a lot of taxpayers.  Just think about it, is all I’m saying.  You get mad when your tax dollars go to pay for stuff you don’t like.

The more power you give government, the more freedom you give up, right?  I had a liberal friend-of-a-friend recently tell me that we’re not free, and she said it like it was a good thing.  I basically stopped arguing with her after that because in my mind she’d just torpedoed her own ship.  Any impartial reader would have walked away from her side of the table after that.  Cognitive dissonance is an amazing thing.

Just remember, the First Galactic Empire — like Adolf Hitler’s Nationalist Socialist movement – was all about peace, through the eradication of conflict.  Palpatine actually utters the phrase, “safe and secure society.”  He literally stole all the freedom so he could have security in power.  In his mind he really thought this was better, because there’d be no conflict he couldn’t end, no war he couldn’t win, no wrong he couldn’t right (actually no right he couldn’t wrong, if we’re being honest, but he wouldn’t have called it that way).

So, here’s my point.  Greed is bad.  Don’t be greedy.  But be careful who you give things away to.  Don’t give your power to the Sheev Palpatines of the world.  Don’t even put your power where it can be used against you.  If Trump does turn out to be evil, it won’t merely be the fault of people who voted for him.  It will be the fault of every single politician who gave the presidency more power, of every congress that undermined the checks and balances in the constitution, and of every voter who didn’t participate when they had the chance.

Don’t be greedy, but don’t cast your pearls before swine.

Don’t breed division, but don’t fear conflict.  Fearing conflict leads to the need to squash differences of opinion, which leads to a lust for power, and that IS greed.

Respect differences.  Don’t hate, don’t fear.  Talk.

Be rational dissidents.

Star Wars is one of those things that is applicable in nearly every area of life.  I mean it doesn’t have much useful relationship advice, I’m afraid, but apart from that it’s pretty solidly on point.  Now, I post a lot about politics and I post a lot about popular culture, and it’s always interesting to me when I can bring the two together.

As it happens, Star Wars is very much about economics.  I realize it doesn’t seem that way, crazy movies about magic warriors with swords made of lasers and super weapons with embarrassing fatal flaws, of bickering robots and annoying-ass frog aliens who ruin your enjoyment of the prequels.  But Star Wars was one of the first entertainment properties in my life that proved stories could keep on giving, almost indefinitely, when they were built properly.

I’m not alone in that.  My generation is almost defined by our love of Star Wars.  If you don’t believe me, ask Disney’s bankers.  Hell, Kevin Smith has basically made a career out of being a fan.  Remember this scene from Clerks?

It’s funny, but it’s also bullshit.  I mean, that’s okay, it can be bullshit, it’s Randal.  Randal’s hardly a bastion of reason and sanity.  And Kevin Smith was making a comedy.  Still, I always feel the need to tell anyone who will listen that there’s no such thing as independent contractors in the First Galactic Empire.  The reason is simple economics.

Don’t believe me?  Let’s begin with the Original Trilogy and try to understand, from clues in the films, what kind of economic structure the empire has.

In the first film, retroactively titled “Episode IV: A New Hope,” there are many clues about the structure of the empire.  Let’s start with life on the desert world of Tattooine.  Luke Skywalker lives with his uncle, Owen Lars, and aunt, Beru Lars (nee Whitesun).  They’re farmers, in the middle of the desert.  The landscape is dotted with these odd antenna-like structures called vaporators.  The vaporators pull moisture, either from deep in the ground, or from the air, and use it to feed the crops.

Given Owen’s talk about hiring more hands the following year, and being unwilling to let Luke leave for the Imperial Academy until next season, it seems the Lars farm is rather large, so they’re probably commercial farmers.  Seems all very familiar to our own reality, right?  Given that Luke’s landspeeder (Star Wars for “car,”) is battered, scorched, and missing an engine cover; and given also that Uncle Owen buys his droids on the black market from scavenging Jawas who sell whatever useful stuff they find to farmers and frontiersmen they come into contact with, we may deduce that the money is tight, and that this is a backwater star system, far removed from the usual business of the Empire.

Additionally, we never see how goods move offworld, or the market where goods are bought and sold.  So we don’t know for sure if the Empire controls it, or not.  It’s actually fairly unclear if Tattooine is part of the Empire, or is an independent system.  It’s referred to as being along the Outer Rim, meaning it’s a fairly remote part of the galaxy, not one of the core systems, and as far as we can tell in the movie, the only imperial presence there follows Princess Leia’s corvette, the Tantive IV, into the system during the opening moments of the film.  It doesn’t look like the Empire would have much interest in a sun-scorched ball of sand, particularly one containing nothing but farmers, nomads and scavengers.  Indeed, when Obi-Wan is trying to recruit Luke to his cause, Luke says, “it’s not that I like the Empire, I hate it, but…that’s all so far away from here.”  Likewise, Obi-Wan, as we come to learn, was trying to hide from the Empire so it makes sense he’d go where the Empire is not.

In fact Tattooine is run by the Hutts, who are notorious gangsters.  But the thing about gangsters, they have legitimate front companies to hide their illegal activities behind.  Jabba, the Hutt who seems to be the boss on Tattooine, is into smuggling.  We know this because we learn that Han Solo, captain of the Corellian light freighter Millennium Falcon, was employed by Jabba when he was detained by an Imperial starship and ditched his illicit cargo in order to avoid getting in trouble.

The best way to think about Han in this context is that he’s actually a truck driver; in fact he is what is known as an independent operator.  He has his own freighter and he hauls what he wants to haul, when he wants to haul it.  This leads me to believe that Jabba is probably responsible for the movement of goods to and from Tattooine.  In this way he can also buy and sell things under the table and use his operators to move contraband in secret, in exchange for some extra, unreported income.

Though it isn’t canon, as far as I know, it has been suggested in various peripheral materials that the shipment Han dumped was Spice.  What “Spice” is, in Star Wars, is never explained, though it’s generally understood to be something like the Spice from Dune.  However at the very beginning of the movie, as C-3PO and R2-D2 are dodging blaster fire during the arrival of the Imperial boarding party on the Tantive IV, Threepio muses that they’ll be “sent to the Spice mines of Kessel, smashed into who-knows-what!”

When Obi-Wan and Luke talk to Han and Chewie in the cantina on Tattooine, Han boasts that Millennium Falcon is “the ship that made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs.”  As a parsec is a unit of distance and not time, this claim is nonsense, unless the ship folded space in some way, but what is clear from this is that Han probably has hauled spice.  What is also clear, from Threepio’s remarks, is that the Empire actively mines spice, and uses labor camps as punishment for miscreants.

This would seem to point to the Empire controlling production of goods and services within its own borders, and probably explains why they detained Solo, as they would probably do routine stops of freighters along trade routes.  We have scales for trucks; no doubt they have something analogous to “weighing stations” for starships, even if it’s only boarding and physically inspecting at a chosen port, like you’d do for a seagoing freighter.

Where we do see the Empire, we learn some very important things.  First, we learn that Princess Leia is an Imperial Senator who is secretly a member of what the Empire calls the Rebel Alliance (they call themselves The Alliance to Restore the Republic).  We also learn that the commander of the Death Star, Wilhuff Tarkin, is referred to alternately by his rank of Grand Moff, or the less formal title, “Governor.”  We are also present in the briefing room as Tarkin sweeps in and announces “the Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us; I have just received word that the Emperor has dissolved that council permanently.  The last remnants of the old Republic have been swept away.”

When General Tagge presses the issue, asking how the Emperor will maintain control without the bureaucracy, Tarkin says something else very telling: “The regional governors will now have direct control over their territories.  Fear will keep the local systems in line.  Fear of this battle station.”

It isn’t just that the Empire governs with an iron fist; it’s that Tarkin is a regional governor, as in the Roman Empire.  He wears a uniform, he is a military officer, but he is also a regional governor who will rule over his section of the Empire and report only to Emperor Palpatine.  In other words, what was probably sort of a communist oligarchy is now for certain a military dictatorship.  The last pretense of democracy is gone.

You will also notice visual cues within the Empire.  The interior of the Death Star, and the capital ships, are all grey and austere, bare metal, fluorescent lighting, exposed conduits and open maintenance pits.  On the bridge of the destroyers, the officers stride around on catwalks while the crewmen at their consoles sit in pits below them, forced to look up as a slave to a master.  TIE fighters are simple and geometric, no hyperdrive, no shields; they’re disposable, and so therefore must their pilots also be.  Stormtroopers wear buckets that hide their entire face.  Protection, to be sure, but also dehumanizing, faceless goons with numbers like TK-421 as their identifiers, rather than names.  As we would learn in the prequel trilogy, these are clones, human beings grown for the express purpose of being used as cannon fodder.  Serfs.  Slaves.  This is the way of the First Galactic Empire.  Even the symbol of the Empire is a cog wheel.  Think about that a minute.

Meanwhile the Alliance has rickety starfighters scorched with blaster marks, patched with mismatched sheet metal, paint jobs not maintained; but the ships have shields and hyperdrives.  The pilots are few, they have names and faces, and their lives are precious.

The only new economic information we get in Empire comes when Han, Leia, Chewie, and Threepio, aboard a crippled Millennium Falcon, come limping into port at Lando Calrissian’s tibanna gas mining colony, Cloud City, hovering in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant called Bespin, in the Anoat system.  Anoat, like Tattooine, is a backwater system and Calrissian’s mining colony is shiny and bright, a veneer of respectability across the place.

Han refers to Calrissian as his friend, but makes it clear to Leia and Chewie that he doesn’t trust Lando, “but he’s got no love for the Empire, I can tell you that.”  Almost immediately upon arrival we learn that Millennium Falcon used to belong to Calrissian, apparently put up as collateral and lost, in a card game with Solo.  This seems to still be a point of some contention for Lando, and the two have a tense reunion where all of the humor seems forced and neither man ever seems quite relaxed.  This is at least partially due to something we learn later, which is that the Empire arrived before the Falcon did – after all, the Empire has functioning hyperdrive – and Lando wanted to warn Han off if he could.  The escort shooting at the Falcon, and Lando’s line, “you know seeing you sure brings back a few things,” are subtle hints.

Still, the fact that Calrissian used to own the Falcon suggests that he was once a smuggler, too, and it begs the question, is he still?  Solo pokes him a little, teasing him for being responsible.  Calrissian shrugs it off, sort of noncommittal:  “yeah, I’m responsible these days.  It’s the price you pay for being successful.”  Like much of what Lando says in these scenes, this could easily have a double-meaning, since he’s going to sell out his friend before he’ll destroy his business.  But suppose Lando has become successful in another sense, too, having moved on from hauling contraband, to managing it?

Down in the bowels of Cloud City, there’s a facility called the carbon-freezing chamber.  Here, the tibanna gas is frozen in carbonite slabs for easy transport aboard freighters.  When Darth Vader and his minions arrive, having been summoned by bounty hunter Boba Fett who tracked Millennium Falcon to port, Vader begins making arrangements to lure Skywalker there as well, in order to freeze him in a carbonite slab and transport him, without fuss or muss, to the Emperor.  Of course he plans to test the process on Solo, in case it doesn’t work he doesn’t want to kill Skywalker.

Well, if you can freeze people safely in carbonite, you can do it with damn near anything, and if one were a former smuggler, say, with underworld contacts and a lust for profit, one might see opportunity.  After all, a lot of contraband could be easily frozen inside these slabs and moved across the galaxy with no one the wiser.  When Lando sells out his friend Solo, he says he’s “just made a deal that will keep the Empire out of here forever.”  But when that doesn’t work out for him, he makes a play to free Solo, and fails, then escapes offworld with Leia, Chewie, Luke, and the droids.

The implications are twofold.  First, the Empire will take over Calrissian’s operation.  It’s just what they do.  If there’s usefuless in this mining colony, they want it to be their own.  But, given Vader’s thought for using the carbonite to transport his prisoners, it’s just possible he suspected that Lando was up to no good, whether or not he actually was (of course he was, it’s Lando…).  In either, or both, of these contexts, it makes sense that Lando would want to keep the Empire out, and would flee when he realized that he could not.

In Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, we revisit Tattooine, and this time get acquainted with Jabba.  Depending on your preferred cut of the films, we either only know him by reputation, or have met him only briefly in Docking Bay 94 in the Mos Eisley Spaceport way back in Episode IV.  In either case, here we see his palace, a kind of science-fiction harem with alien slave girls, cruel droids, and an assortment of thieves, thugs, bounty hunters, and smugglers as hangers-on as the band bangs out a few jazzy numbers and Jabba’s girls dance for his pleasure.  Then there’s Jabba himself, a huge, corpulent slug of a thing, sucking on a hookah and swallowing frogs.  He’s done quite well for himself, and all of this begs the question: what kind of an economy creates such an overwhelming market for smuggling?  The answer is, “the kind that’s been over-regulated all to hell.”

The simplest lesson in economics is that he who controls the flow of money, has all the political power; and he who has all the political power, controls the flow of money.  That’s why the free market is a good thing, because the ability of the private citizen to control his or her own money, is that citizen’s power, and freedom.  You choose to support what you believe in, and not support the things you don’t.  That’s your voice.  Nobody should be able to make you buy anything you don’t want.

One of the things the movie “Rogue One” did so well, was it had Mads Mikkelsen’s Galen Erso, a scientist, having turned away from his work because he turned away from the Empire.  He was living as a subsistence farmer on a distant world until the Empire came and found him, and threatened him until he agreed to go back to work for them.  He isn’t hired, he isn’t offered a contract.  He is simply taken, and kept by the Empire, provided with work, lodgings, food, uniform.  It also showed us his daughter, Jyn Erso, as an inmate in an Imperial Labor Camp.  This is exactly what the Empire is in the original trilogy.

Remember, slaves don’t own property, and don’t get paid except in food and lodging.  When the state controls production and distribution of goods and services, and the people work for a share of said goods and services, that is the exact definition of slavery.  The lack of freedom leads to desperation; and when the government is hindering the people, the people will cast off the law and do for themselves according to what they know is right and good.

Well, that’s it for Part One.  In Part Two we’ll explore the Prequel Trilogy, and see if my understanding of the nature of the Empire, and the economic nightmare that is the galaxy far, far away, is corroborated by the story of how the Empire came to be.

Continue to Part Two by clicking this link.

I don’t usually get upset over celebrity deaths.  It isn’t that they don’t matter, it’s just it seems selfish and presumptive to mourn someone you don’t really know, when they have actual friends and family who will miss them on a day-to-day basis.  We just watch them perform and act like we know them, when in truth we don’t.  Often we don’t know much about them at all, and that’s as it should be.

So it’s strange to me, how deeply the death of Carrie Fisher has touched me, today.  But then again, it isn’t really that strange at all.  In 1977, with the release of “Star Wars,” retroactively sub-titled “Episode IV: A New Hope,” Ms. Fisher, along with her co-stars Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill, became not only household names but unavoidable faces almost overnight.  People my age grew up with those three faces, and names, on our walls, on our shirts, on our TV’s, on our lunchboxes.  We had action figures modeled after them.  They literally were part of the everyday stuff in our lives.

For a lot of people my age, Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia represents a first crush, but to reduce the character to that does her a disservice; she was one of the first examples I can recall of how strong and brave a woman can be, and that more than anything is the true legacy of the character Princess Leia Organa.

It’s a common thing, when a beloved celebrity dies, to canonize them, to talk about how great they were and when we do that it’s obviously done out of a desire to celebrate the legacy of their work, and their public persona.  This is, after all, what they leave behind.  I won’t try to canonize Carrie Fisher.  I don’t believe she’d have much use for that sort of thing anyway.  You can’t gloss over all her problems, because to do so is to undermine much of what she accomplished in her life.

Ms. Fisher struggled with mental illness and addiction.  She and Harrison Ford had an affair during the filming of the original Star Wars: I could be wrong, not yet having read “The Princess Diarist,” but I suspect on some level she was looking to get hurt when that happened.  Three years later, the two were drinking buddies during the filming of The Empire Strikes Back, and were pretty much permanently hungover during working hours.

By the time they were making Return of the Jedi, she was a full-blown coke addict.  When you know it, you can see it all over her.  Her glow is gone, her eyes dull and flat.  She’s much more subdued than in previous films, barely present at all.  Very little of her trademark wit and strength are to be found here.  And indeed, in the previous two, Leia’s smartassery is due to Fisher herself reworking dialogue — a role she would take on for a great number of Hollywood films throughout her career.  She was in high demand as a script doctor, and was a successful author of novels and autobiographies — a line that is often blurred as her novels were mostly thinly-veiled autobiographies themselves.

The thing is, in writing about her struggles, she was able to not only take them on directly, but in doing so she was also shining a light on some awful things that a huge number of people deal with on a daily basis.  She was able to advocate for people struggling with mental illness, she was able to lead conversations about addiction.  That took real courage, and strength.  It shows that while the heroic Princess Leia Organa may have just been a role she played, Carrie Fisher could be heroic, too.  Her struggles were real and she was real in how she talked about them and dealt with them.

So, while I cannot say that I knew Carrie Fisher, I can absolutely say that I think she deserves credit for fighting the good fight, and for being an advocate for the everyday people who deal with issues just like hers. Carrie Fisher’s wit, humility, and strength are the things I will always remember her by.