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I learned two important lessons from watching Star Wars and all of its sequels.
The first thing I learned is to always trust your feelings. This is very, very important. How I feel can help me more
than what I can see or what I know. So no matter what I'm doing, I can close my eyes and listen to the voice of the dead British
Jedi master in my head telling me "trust your feelings".
The second thing I learned is that anger is bad. That way lies chaos and darkness and death. So even standing in a room
with an unarmed, elderly emperor whose death would bring about the end of centuries of oppression, I should never give in
to my anger by killing the bastard.
I've carried these lessons with me throughout all of my adult life. I always trust my feelings. Well, I mean, unless
they tell me to be angry. Because that's bad and wrong, even though anger is itself a feeling. It's a bad
one. Don't ask me why, it just is.
What's interesting is that this is totally the opposite lesson I learned from Star Trek. On Star Trek,
feelings are illogical and every problem is solved by rerouting chroniton particles through the warp field plasma induction
array. No one cares how you feel about it. Well, I mean, except for Counselor Troi.
On Star Trek, there's no Force. Dead people don't appear as translucent ghosts while you're hanging out with
teddy bears in their treehouse (unless they're non-corporeal alien life-forms who've taken on human form and manifested themselves
through the ship's duodynetic subspace holographic matrix relays and trapped you and six other crewmen on the holodeck while
your chief engineer feverishly labors round-the-clock to reintegrate the quasi-polaric isolinear field emitters). And finally,
on Star Trek, you can fall in love, have an affair, or just get freaky with someone, and still be relatively certain
that he or she isn't going to be your brother or aunt or something.
Now, on Star Wars, you have this Death Star. It's so enormously huge and gigantically massive and so oppressive
in its ghastly humongousness that even the cynical, seen-it-all space smuggler, Han Solo, is in awe of its indescribable garagantuinity.
The Death Star blows up whole planets. The Death Star is undefeatable. But it's no match for the down-home folksy charm of
Luke Skywalker. Why, he's so earnest and freshly-scrubbed that the first time the rebels tell him about the single six-inch
wide vent that will completely destroy the Death Star, he says "Why, shucks, we used to shoot critters back home that warn't
much bigger'n that!"
This is another important lesson that Star Wars teaches us: That is, no matter how huge or unsurmountable your
problems may seem, they're always just that easy to solve. I'm glad to learn this lesson, as it hasn't been drilled into me
enough by multiple viewings of Forrest Gump and all-night Gomer Pyle marathons.
Don't believe me? Look at what happened in Episode I.
You got these hundred million robots fighting the computer-generated people down on this planet, right? A massive, overwhelming
force of robots just decimating the poor dog people, right? But wait! They're no match for Anakin, who saves the day! How?
Well, you'd think that anyone smart enough to build a hundred-billion killer robots would also have the foresight to
equip each one with its own power source and a bit of programming that says "Just kill whatever's in front of you". But apparently,
these hundred-billion killer robots have one central power source, which amounts to a giant off-switch.
And not only that, but a single power source that easily accesible to a three year old in a pod-hopper.
Problem solved.
With these type of organizational skills, it's a wonder that there isn't a big red button in the Imperial Palace with
a sign that says "Do Not Press", because if you do press it then every Senator and stormtrooper drops dead, every droid and
x-wing fighter self-destructs and the entire galaxy descends into political chaos. Or maybe there is a button like that, I
don't know.
Then there's the Force. A lot of folks think the Force is like God, but it totally isn't, at least not in the Judeo-Christian
kind of God way. It's more like Karma, or space voodoo. The Force is not a Creator or a person or even very much like a mind
in and of itself. It's just kind of there, floating around. Why? Just because.
Now you can say you don't believe in the Force and that's all cool, but then you have to explain how Yoda can lift an
airplane just by raising his hands, or how Obi-Wan Kenobi can control your mind, or how Luke Skywalker can get his hand cut
off and not bleed at all. You could just say it's some old weird religion, at least, until you dropped dead from Darth Vader
holding up two fingers on the other side of the room.
Anyway, you never had to believe it, at least that's how it was in the first three movies. But in the last one that hippy
Jedi guy said that there were some kind of nuclear chloropeptides in Anakin's blood that made him this big Force guy. So apparently
it's biological and you can measure it and quantify it and there's no point arguing about it because now you can prove it.
And you can master the nice side or the dark side of the Force, but if you master the dark side you have to change your
first name to Darth. Which is easier for some than others. |
