HOW THE FORCE WAS WITH US – UNTIL IT WASN’T
Life imitates art, and the reverse.
Too much of our art comes from Hollywood; a veritable Omaha Beach of leftism in our country – but one that everyone, at some point, can’t help but hear.
They steer our cultural direction, for better or worse.
If we invent a faster-than-light spacecraft drive, it will be, in part, because of the prodding from Star Wars and Star Trek.
People may shake their heads at a spaceship making the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs (we know Han Solo wouldn’t exaggerate) but then they saw their kids being made to believe there were multiple genders.
Real Mafia gangsters watched The Godfather films to learn, in theory, how they were supposed to act.
Yeah, this stuff sticks.
Let’s talk today, though, about Star Wars – and how it relates to our country and culture.
The world changed with Star Wars – a movie that people saw as many times as their parents or spouses would tolerate.
It is hard to describe to a modern youngster the effect that the opening scene had on an audience, circa 1977, as the Star Destroyer lumbered across the screen in hot pursuit of the desperately overmatched Rebel cruiser pew-pew-pewing away ineffectively at it.
We had never seen anything like that. Or like anything that followed that scene, up till the end.
George Lucas unleashed a cultural force on the world – and as if the term “Star Wars” wouldn’t be a clue to the content, it was one with an inescapable grounding in the masculine, the powerful, and in great acts, and people of consequence.
Sensitive, hesitant people got nowhere in this universe.
The entire franchise centered around an ensemble cast of characters, representing the spectrum of human personalities, coping with an interstellar war; one that was so big that it became the whole plot at times.
Anyone who believed violence couldn’t solve problems, or that ordinary folks didn’t need guns, would have an impossible time liking this.
Likewise, anyone who thought evil could be placated or negotiated with, or that moral relativism was a virtue, would be lost quickly in this universe where fighting in the name of justice and self-sacrifice to that end were necessary, and likely to happen.
People loved it.
And they loved the characters– especially the female characters.
The women of the Gen-X era in the 1970s and 1980s were empowered and knew which bathroom to use. Princess Leia was only one of several examples of a female character that was all that.
Erin Grey of Buck Rogers was another, along with The Bionic Woman’s Lindsay Wagner, and many female characters on Star Trek.
They didn’t lack anything relative to men—and all us young guys thought it would be cool to have many of them as a girlfriend (or more), or at least interesting as a sister, or one of our teachers for a week or two.
Women could still be women while being respected – with their traits seen as virtues, not liabilities.
They could be decision makers, trend setters, and leaders whom men had no problem following – even if we didn’t mind walking behind them for other reasons.
The character of Rey in Episodes Seven through Nine was, by contrast, an unlikeable Mary Sue escapee from juvenile detention whose limited talents were beating up guys (CQB trained stormtroopers, even) and staying in trouble until Jedi powers came to her by strange osmosis quickly enough to save her sandy behind.
This was the girl who gets hired at Burger King and is too slow to work the kitchen and too temperamental to work the drive through.
She had Force powers, but needed a bath and a change of clothes more.
All of this sets up the most baffling pop-cultural mystery of our modern times: How in the name of Darth Helmet were liberals—a craven, mentally ill bunch of dollar store hoplophobes that can’t figure out which bathroom to use and whose concept of virtue is choosing not to smoke or use plastic grocery bags, allowed to do this?
Why was the beast in the Death Star trash compactor allowed to take over Star Wars??
George Lucas sold the franchise to Disney, stepped back, and allowed woke producer Kathleen Kennedy and a gaggle of girly men and harpy scolds right out of daytime talk show Central Casting to take over the creative content.
J.J. Abrams, having made the 2009 Star Trek a story of neo-fascist corporate backstabbers infighting, came over to Star Wars and left it never quite the same again.
It didn’t take a Jedi to figure out that this would not end well.
George either (likely) didn’t care, or perhaps was naïve to think they would stick with the tried and true.
And the answer appears to have been… they wanted to destroy what was there and make something new out of the detritus, as a sort of liberal “gotcha” against the patriarchy, our sense of smell, and against what had been a solid piece of American cultural honeycomb in our hive.
I had gone down to Pasadena, Texas for a gun show in 2015 and just happened to get out in time to catch The Force Awakens in a theater up the road.
I sat in a good seat, with the required Coke, and waited. My thoughts drifted back to another theater in 1977, and to others later, in anticipation.
A Star Wars film was about to start. And here I was.
Then the trouble began. The movie started off plausibly okay, but rapidly turned into a litany of events that were pulled and modified from the past films, or idiotically written and pointless; a Star Wars film where the writers tried to do something that they really weren’t into nor had any desire to understand.
We had TIE Fighters that you could use for Ubers, with extra seating. Star Destroyers with homing-gun-things.
Weird, unlikeable characters – a stormtrooper who suddenly found his inner Rebel after being raised in indoctrination for twenty odd years, a tired Han Solo who had backslid in maturity since Episode Six, and a lifelong friend in Chewbacca who had apparently put up with it too.
Add to that Rebel mechanics that had hired on at a job fair because their sisters were Rebel pilots, and shiny-armored, buff female stormtrooper captains who someone had planned to write into the story more before deciding not to bother – even with names like “Phasma.”
We found that the Empire was still going strong—after being soundly defeated before apparently returning to a galaxy that had forgotten about their apocalyptic war crimes and atrocities in the previous three films and the lead-up in the three films before that.
A dude was trying to be an emo version of Darth Vader, wearing a face helmet for no reason, and having all of Darth Vader’s menace but none of his class, deliberation, or reserve.
And he, for some reason, was following a Force villain no one had heard of – ever.
The focal point of the film, and the Build Back Better big project for this ship of fools was…. a superweapon that could destroy planets (built out of a planet near a bunch of other occupied planets, without anyone noticing) but that had a weakness that a “snub fighter” could exploit and….
No. Poof. Bad writing, bad concept, bad everything.
And that was not even counting Mary Sue Rey, the Force Sponge.
I walked out shaking my head. The magic was gone. What do you do with a space opera fantasy that makes no sense even when you allow for fantasy?
And many fans agreed, taking to the Internet against Star Wars being done by people with no clue about Star Wars.
And then the next phase of this very weird story began: the people who ruined Star Wars told all of the fans that they were the problem.
This was rather unique in the history of entertainment and confirmed what we suspected—the whole point was to destroy it, and make us applaud the destruction like if they all came out in 43 random, new gender identities.
They doubled down on the failure in the next two movies. I itemize, and by no means get everything:
Tactical UPS space truck bombs a Wedgie-class Bigger-than-Super-Star Destroyer. Snoopy in his Sopwith Camel could have done better.
City councilwoman from Santa Monica helps run the Rebel Alliance or whatever it is.
Where are the B Wings?
Our heroes attack a space casino while the three remaining ships in their fleet get chased by the bad guys in something of a space road rage incident.
National Lampoon’s war fleet of Space Winnebagos ambush a fleet of Star Destroyers, crewed by angry suburbanites who only got a week off for vacation this year.
Hey, Palpatine’s back! Sort of like an evil Fonz from Happy Days!
With occasional flashes of promise, the downward spiral into the spice mines of Kessel continued and wound up, most lately, with The Acolyte being cancelled.
The few things in the Star Wars universe that have gone right post-Lucas were when, out of desperation, someone with a clue was put in charge of the production.
Star Wars: Rogue One was rescued from disaster by improvising, and there are rumors that Donald Trump was originally supposed to be in charge of the Imperial Fleet and NRA members were going to be crewing the Death Star.
Solo: A Star Wars Story revealed the Millenium Falcon as a starship with the brain of a woke social justice droid that had a big booty.
Many people remember The Mandalorian as the production famous MMA fighter Gina Carano got fired from for speaking her mind.
I could talk about a lot of the rest of the stuff but for two problems—everyone knows it sucks and I never bothered to watch most of it.
Me, a fan, who had as a kid collected enough Star Wars cards to stop a .50 caliber machine gun slug at point blank range, won’t even watch free clips online now.
What are the lessons at the end? First, none of this is entertainment.
Star Wars used to be that, but now it’s just social justice garbage at worst and poor writing with an irrelevant angle at best.
Secondly, this is a trend that will continue.
The good thing is that modern kids, who are unimpressed with showy special effects like they can see on their phone daily, won’t get hooked by this as readily and will walk away faster.
And lastly, Hollywood, like the cultural icon of Star Wars, is increasingly estranged from its audience, the taxpaying and decent people who, to the frustration of the elites and the propagandists, won’t get with the program and applaud their destroying our brains and country.
Expect them to continue to double down with election fraud, hostile laws, woke schools, onerous regulations, reinterpretations of the U.S. Constitution into the Soviet Constitution, and other in-your-face assaults on our minds and spirits by trashing what is good over here still.
And when the velvet-covered fist fails, expect the velvet to come off fast.
Get your blaster now. You have been warned.
Mark Deuce has had a life-long career in community law enforcement. He is the author of Deuces Wild for TTP.