Former President Jar Jar

If you're going to try and force an analogy here, I think no one fits Vader better than the American people themselves.

JE: Yes. Except that when it came to sanctioning torture on behalf of the Empire (or his own ambitions), Vader was hands-on. Like Peggy Noonan, we tried to turn away and "just keep walking" -- or we pretended it was the work of "a few bad apples" (even though we knew better) rather than our government's official policy.

"Like Peggy Noonan, we tried to turn away and 'just keep walking' -- or we pretended it was the work of "a few bad apples" (even though we knew better) rather than our government's official policy."

I think it's more than this, Jim. A lot of folks, after 9/11, actively wanted the slaughter and torture of our new enemies to be policy. I still know people that feel this way. One of my close friends, whose judgment I usually trust, told me that he would be proud if Sy Hersh's recent disclosure about Cheney's personal assassination squad turned out to be true.

JE: You're right, I fear. There are those who think "24" reflects reality -- or that revenge is the most important motive, no matter what the cost. Admiral Dennis Blair, Obama's national intelligence director, drew the key distinctions in his memo, even though the right-leaning media is only reporting the first part of this: “The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security."

I prefer Lord of the Rings analogies, myself (the one true trilogy!).

Actually, I've never given much thought to how the Bush Administration can be seen in LotR (surely there's juicy grist in Jackson's Denethor, the possibly-illegitimate Steward of Gondor). But this much is clear: John Kerry is obviously Treebeard.

JE: I had a college lit professor who liked to interpret everything through the looking glass of "Alice in Wonderland." Imagine the possibilities: the Red Queen, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, the hooka-smoking caterpillar...

Oddly enough, though I see what Lucas was referring to (the puppet and the master) I always thought the Star Wars prequels had a brilliant Bush analogy in the Trade Federation leader Nute Gunray - a powerful but none-to-bright cretin who talks big and was easily pushed into war and somehow managed to cling to power despite a public backlash.

The metaphor also doesn't work because Anakin (eventually) came to a self awareness about the consequences of his actions.

This is brilliant. The seemingly arrested nature of political debate that reduces discourse to either sports or Star Wars metaphors annoys me so much. For once, I wish political commentators would resort to analogies using better films. How awesome would it be if someone on Fox decided to reference Fassbinder, for example? Or Renoir? A boy can dream.

By the way, slightly tangential to the actual matter at hand, and Jim knows this already, but I might as well share it with my fellow Scanners fans, too. Yes, I am a Lucas apologist. And, yes, I love Episode One and I love Jar Jar (the "real" one). Instead of the cross, an albatross...

A funny thing that struck me while reading this thread is, despite my having seen episodes I-III, perhaps twice each, I still have only the vaguest idea what you guys are talking about. It's a testament to Lucas's lack of storytelling talent that, but for the all-too-obvious story arc of Anakin to Darth, most of the politcal nuance of Prequel saga failed to hold my interest. And I'm a guy who watched all of Lars Von Treir's "The Kingdom" in one sitting and happily relished most of my long weekend spent with the 15 hour long "Berlin Alexanderplatz."

JE: That's part of what amused me about the Battle of Star Wars Analogies. I had to link most of the character names because I'm not familiar with them. After suffering through "Phantom Menace" I swore off seeing the other two prequels.

To say that Cheney is the bad one who leads the good George W. astray is the failing of too many unskilled pundits who spent eight years taking pathetic cheap shots at the president when they should have been eviscerating him. Bush was not a poor, misguided idiot. He was an idiot who always had his own bad intentions. He wasn't a dopey frat boy. He was a self-righteous bully.

Slate.com did a great piece about the Hollywood's failure to properly criticize Bush.
"Our image of Bush via the movies has been stunted—he's a goofball, a bumbler, an amiable frat boy. In the days before 9/11, Iraq, and Katrina, that irreverent caricature may have sufficed. But just this summer we were subjected to the sight of Harold and Kumar toking up giddily with W.—this from a movie with the word Guantanamo in its title. As the weight of his eight years becomes fully felt in the slumping present, the question needs to be asked: Is Bush the buffoon the best Hollywood can do?"
See the slide show.

JE: No question Bush was a lightweight. That's not to say he isn't 100 percent responsible for everything that happened on his watch. He bragged about not getting news from outside the White House because he had people around him who, he said, told him everything he needed to know. The infamously uncurious Decider made his decisions without knowing, or caring, about anything beyond the end of his nose. But you're right, he's not simply a buffoon. War criminals can't be dismissed so easily. He knew what he was doing. He just wasn't smart or well-informed enough to know that he'd eventually have to pay the price for his ignorance and ineptitude. But ignorance of the law -- or an unwillingness to distinguish between right and wrong, legal and illegal -- is no excuse.

Judging by his aim, I'd say Dick Cheney is the "Special Edition" version of Greedo.

"He knew what he was doing. He just wasn't smart or well-informed enough to know that he'd eventually have to pay the price for his ignorance and ineptitude."

Ah, but will he? I'm crossing my fingers that Obama's recent kind-of-sort-of about-face regarding the officials who authorized torture will actually lead to prosecutions, but what are the odds of those prosecutions traveling all the way up to Bush and his puppet master and/or accomplice VP? Call it learned helplessness, but not very high, I fear.

Hey, as Bush so often likes to say, at least we still have history's judgment of him to look forward to. Uh...if historians are still around in the next 20-30 years, of course.

(And if all else fails, we'll always have this. That video always warms my heart.)

JE: I don't know how dearly he'll have to pay eventually, but the disgrace of his conduct is acknowledged worldwide and will outlive him. Obama has said the same thing all along: It's up to the AG to follow the evidence wherever it leads. He's not interested in spearheading a movement to prosecute those who were following orders (that would be politicizing the Justice Department, as the Bush administration did). That's the right thing for him to say. As president, he should look to the future. He's walking a fine line: He talks about moving on, but he also insists that nobody can be put above the law. In the end this is not a decision he can or should be making. The proper thing is to leave it to Eric Holder and the Justice Department to do their jobs. And Congress, if they'll do theirs for once.

I don’t have a problem at all with pundits or comics referencing certain subcultures (like Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, or the Red Sox Nation) to make sense of traumatic events—or even pleasant ones. Remember, the Kennedy years have been referred to as “Camelot” in large part due to the popularity of Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot on Broadway in the early 60s.

I do get concerned, however, when such texts are invoked by actual policy-makers, such as when Rick Santorum declared his desire “to keep the Eye of Mordor on Iraq”, or Ronald Reagan’s labeling of the Strategic Defense Initiative as “Star Wars.” That’s a dangerous reduction of global complexities to Manichean, “us vs. them” dichotomies.

But when Maureen Dowd or Jon Stewart do it, it’s all in good fun. Sure, it would be great to see more erudite analogies—I’m already working on The Rules of the Game as a model for Bush’s Cabinet—but I’ll confess I’ve already mapped out the comparisons between Star Wars and 21st century politics.

Although I love the idea of Bush as Jar Jar Binks, I’ve always thought of Bush and Cheney, taken together, as somewhat akin to the two sides of Emperor Palpatine. Palpatine, like Bush, emphasizes the myth of his “humble origins” from the backwater planet of Naboo (his version of the Crawford ranch) to gain power, even though he was really born into wealth and privilege. I could see a young Palpatine asking the people of Naboo to vote for him because “he’s a guy you can have the Star Wars equivalent of a beer with”. One can also say that, as a Sith, Palpatine is a religious extremist who perverts a belief in The Force into a lust for power.

Cheney is Palpatine’s alter ego Darth Sidious, the schemer, the calculating politician who sows seeds of fear to augment his power. Someone like Cheney (or Sidious) always needs an external threat (e.g. the Soviets during the Cold War, or Al-Qaeda during the “War on Terror”) around which his political identity can be formed. Darth Sidious is actually Count Dooku’s master, and he himself is really pulling the strings behind the Separatist rebellion against the Republic to create such a sense of fear and instability in his own government that the Republic’s elected representatives will abdicate all their power and make him Emperor. As Emperor, he can more effectively deal with the external threat of the Separatists—even though he’s actually their shadowy leader. Here is the logic where conspiracy theorists would claim that the Bush administration was responsible for 9/11, as absurd as that may be. But there’s no denying that Cheney, and his mild-mannered alter ego Bush, capitalized off an external threat, real or manufactured, to enhance his own power, just like Palpatine.

That would make Osama bin Laden Count Dooku in my analogy, because, even though there is certainly no direct connection between Cheney and bin Laden in our universe like there is between Palpatine and Dooku in Star Wars, bin Laden and similar terrorist leaders have been able to enhance their own power because of Bush/Cheney policy. There was no greater example of the Muslim world being threatened by America for Islamic extremists to exploit than the invasion of Iraq. Likewise, the militarization of the Republic and Palpatine’s rejection of planetary self-determination validated what Count Dooku was saying about the Republic embracing Imperialism. The Bush/Cheneys and bin Ladens (and the Palpatines and Dookus) need each other to increase their power.

As to the question of Darth Vader, I had always been partial to the idea of Colin Powell as the tragic convert to the dark side. Anakin Skywalker falls into darkness believing that “he has brought peace, justice, order, and security to my new Empire!” even if he knows better. Likewise, Powell made the case for removing Saddam before the U.N. Security Council, even if he had serious misgivings about it at the time as he now claims. Of course, he was wrong, and spent years serving an oppressive agenda. But eventually he was redeemed, as Vader was, by admitting his mistakes--and by supporting Obama.

To me it’s actually more of a critical exercise to link up a popular entertainment like Star Wars with its oddly harmonious thematic echoes in the Bush Administration, than it would be to write or read a more explicitly allegorical narrative, an Animal Farm for the Bush era—if such a text exists.

Lucas’s saga is by no means intended as an allegory for the War on Terror. Similarities have also been noted between the Star Wars prequels and the fall of the Roman Republic, the American Civil War, and the rise of Nazi Germany. Jonathan Rosenbaum has essentially claimed that the original Star Wars film prefigured the desert combat of the First Gulf War. And it should be noted that it’s only really in Revenge of the Sith that Lucas seems to be making any explicit connection to Bush and the War on Terror, most notably by having Darth Vader say “If you’re not with me, then you are my enemy!”

Comparisons have also been made between George W. Bush and Henry V, as the great English king is characterized by Shakespeare. But whereas Henry V turned a desire to one-up his father’s legacy into the glorious victory at Agincourt, Bush only got to don a flight suit and strut in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner.

I wanted to take a moment to defend Lucas' political analysis of his characters. Provided that we aren't attempting to create perfect analogies between every Star Wars character and every member of the Bush administration, his ideas aren't that bad.

The simplicity of saying that Bush is Vader and Cheney is the emperor points toward the idea that Bush, in all of his youthful buffoonery, simply let his Vice President do a good bit of his thinking for him. Like Vader, he was a sort of puppet being controlled by his older, more crooked, master.

I have no crystal ball to look into the hearts of Bush or Cheney, and so I don't claim to know exactly how their relationship worked politically or personally - but Lucas' idea of comparison matches up with what some pundits have suggested. It also matches up with some of the public perceptions surrounding them.

At any rate, comparing Bush and Cheney to Vader and the emperor is much easier than Count Dookou or Grand Moff Tarkin - precisely because the average person does not remember who those characters are or how they might compare to the Bush administration. Maybe in choosing Vader and the emperor Lucas shows more understanding than he is given in this article. He understands that Vader and the emperor are characters we will remember and relate to, and that all his other creations are just filler.

JE: Re: "...all his other creations are just filler." There's a lot of truth to that. Lucas's mythological universe is packed with detail, but lacks resonance apart from a few central figures.

I'm sorry Jim, but the fact remains that simply being out of office for three months is not enough time to have history for all time judge George W. Bush. Methinks a lot of attacks levied at him during this period have less to do with intelligent insight and are more along the lines of the winners, still basking the glow of Obama, taking out their aggression on Bush with impunity. Comparing George Bush to Darth Vader, Grand Moff Tarkin, Boba Fett, whatever, is childish and nothing more than immature name calling. I can compare Barack Obama to Napoleon from "Animal Farm," but that wouldn't be fair or intelligent.

Bush's actions, regardless of how foolhardy they really are, will be judged by how well Iraq ultimately ends up. I'll give you some real examples so I'm not just written off as a right-wing stooge. When the Founding Fathers made the move to create this country, it was not a 100% popular sentiment. In fact, I've seen figures that suggest as much as 2/3rds of what would become the U.S. were still British Loyalists. It was unpopular with the majority of the country, but history bore out that it was a good idea. Also, look at Chile. The assassination of Allende and the installation of Pinochet at the time was a pretty horrific thing, as was the subsequent crackdown on civil rights and concentration camps and mass murders. But... I've spoken with several Chileans today, and I've asked them pointblank is their country better today that it would have been if Allende had remained in power. I have not heard a single one say they wished their country had remained socialist.

So my point is, in 200 years if Iraq is a stable and safe nation, no one is going to remember or really care how it got that way. It may not seem right to us, but in reality, people often enjoy the freedoms and privileges their societies provide them today that was bought by relatively short-term injustice in the past.

JE: It's this simple: Bush ordered and sanctioned the use of torture, imperiling our military, our Constitution, and our power and influence worldwide. The military acknowledged it, the CIA acknowledged it, the FBI acknowledged it. They all resisted the bogus legal opinions that were coming from the White House. Everyone involved knew it was torture, that it had always been considered torture under the Geneva Conventions and by the US itself in past wars. This is something that has been confirmed in the public record for years (even when Bush was saying, again and again, "We do not torture"). The whole world knows it, has for years, and the memos released in the last few weeks and months have given us specific details about who, what, when, where and how.

It is not too soon to judge what is plainly in the public record. Nothing can change what has already happened. It IS history. The evidence for WMDs was not what it was presented to be. The invasion of Iraq was done haphazardly and on the cheap, costing thousands of lives. And so on and so on. Disgraceful measures -- like, say, the internment of Japanese Americans during WW II -- do not become less disgraceful over time. Indeed, perspective makes them seem all the more reckless and shameful.

"I'll give you some real examples so I'm not just written off as a right-wing stooge"

Unfortunately your ridiculous examples prove that you are in fact just that: Your detailed survey of Chileans completely exculpates the U.S. involvement in ousting Allende for a brutal dictator???? While there are obviously too many ways to point out how ridiculous that statement is in particular, as well as how absurd the underlying assumptions of it are (an equally faulty analogy between the Holocaust and the state of Israel comes to mind, I'll try this example.
Suppose I shoot you in the heart in the commission of some CRIME but when operating on the bullet hole, the doctors find some tumor that they otherwise would not have found and remove it. Should i now be considered the person who saved your life for if i had not tried to kill you they never would have found the bullet? We, and history, should judge people's and countries' actions based on their intent as well as their consequences: we know the intent of much of the Bush docterine was nefarious. No amound of hindsight can absolve that.

I don't know if anybody has seen this but I for one got a mild kick out of it. I applaud the filmmakers for this YouTube history re-write and using very little manipulation to do so. Then again, it was easy. Basically, they just read between the lines, like so many yet too few of us did throughout the reign of the Bush administration...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvqVTXpnjYg

(It reminded me of Jim's video where he added a laugh track to McCain and Palin...)

I don't think Star Wars adequately maps to the Bush presidency; nor does Lord of the Rings.

Cheney as the emperor and Bush as Jar Jar is attractive, but if that were to be true, then Bush would have to have been the Emperor and the dupe at the same time. Not quite...

By the way, I've always been kind of puzzled by the criticisms aimed at Episode I. I'm not a fan of Star Wars in general - they're occasionally fun fluff in my opinion, and nothing more. But a lot of the comments about Episode 1 puzzled me:
- how could the entire Galactic Republic be thrown into chaos over trade routes to a small world like Naboo? People who ask this, imho, don't know how WW I started.
- it's racist, presumably because of the Japanese accents of the "greedy trade federation" types, and the Gungans being "backwards", "primitives", etc. First, re the Gungans, let's remember that it was the bad guys who called them primitives; second, they had some pretty cool tech, like being able to have an underwater city with force field walls - talk about needing your highly availability technology. The Threat Risk Assessment on those force fields must be funny reading. And most people think of Gungans as a race of Jar Jars, which they're not - but because he's the one who gets the screen time, that's all people think they are. As for the Trade Federation...well, I have less to say about them.

I don't think Lord of the Rings works to explain Bush, Cheney et al. The closest I can come to it is a novel by James P. Hogan, Voyage from Yesteryear.

One conservative and sixteen liberals? This thread is an echo chamber.

JE: How can you tell who is conservative and who is liberal from Star Wars comparisons or the acceptance/rejection of torture?

I don't believe Jar Jar fits. He was a good natured buffoon that always tried to do the right things, or at least ended up doing the right thing, if only by accident. He had a good heart.

But from what i've read over the years W has a bit (or more) of the dark side in him. that, like his mom he's nice and personable in public, but can be quite horrible in private. (Barbara being described by people that know the family as being a complete *female dog*)

And I'm surprised Carl Rove hasn't been brought up.If there was one Bushie that could be compared to a Sith Lord, its Carl Rove.

It is awfully easy to live life looking at others decisions in hindsight, Mr Emerson. The one demonstrable fact is that in the very dark days post 9-11 (which was real, and not a movie) we were all waiting for the other shoe to drop. And W and crew did what they felt was necessary to prevent a follow up attack. How do you know their actions weren't exactly the right way to go? The men in power reacted to the best of their abilities, acting on the best information they could gather. I will chalk that up to real, humans with foibles doing their best, and thank goodness they did.

So the mainstream media is Lando? And David Barstow is the bald guy with the thing around his head, that gets left behind to deal with the details?

George Lucas What the....? George Bush as Darth Vader? It shows how serious Lucas is about his story. Actually he sorta seems to resent Star Wars. He seems old. Kinda lame. You couldn't insult Darth Vader much more than by saying he is like Bush. That article you linked sums it up well.

Jim Carmignani: If it really was necessary for Bush et al. to torture detainees in clear violation of the Geneva convention, then they should have explicitly said so to the American people and withdrawn from said convention. What they did instead was lie about it, and distance themselves from and encourage the prosectuion of low-level people like Lynndie England at Abu Ghraib for what were not even the worst offenses sanctioned secretly by the Bush administration.

9/11 was real and not a movie. So is the leader of the free world sending orders to detain prisoners without trial, perhaps indefinitely, torturing them, and lying about it. The difference is that the latter was committed by someone who represents himself as being dedicated to freedom, transparency, and justice.

"I will chalk that up to real, humans with foibles doing their best, and thank goodness they did."

...Why?

I follow your argument that people do based on what information they had but... 'thank goodness they did'? Why 'thank goodness'? What good came of it?

And there was another option: swiftly not react. What Bush did was sit in a Kindergarten class with a blank look... and then react strongly. Alternatively, he could have announced that America was going to show that it is strong, intelligent, mature enough that senseless, pointless, insane attacks like 9/11 will not get a rise out of Americans, that America will not dignify (in the minds of the attackers) the reasons behind the attack by responding to it, that America has enough problems to deal with in its own country and that America will continue to try its best to take care of those need in its own country because that's what America does, it doesn't respond to people who are just trying to get a rise out of us for reasons that nobody understands but them. Instead, Bush chalked it up to them being evil and America having to waste money, time, lives and resources to kick the ass of people who may or may not be similar to those who attacked.

But that's the dominant culture for ya. Something tragic happens and we demand some explanation. They must be evil! They must be evil-doers who we, as good-doers will exact our vengeance upon! What if, tomorrow morning, every other country in the world attacked America with some sort of 9/11. Does that mean America should respond to every single threat? And is the answer: no because ya can't respond to everything. Well what is America obligated to respond to? Moral wars? Did America care much about the Rwandan Genocide? So then does America only care about reacting to attacks on its soil? What about all the hate crimes that happen each year. Does America focus all its media on asking tough questions about what in the American culture is causing these hate crimes to come about? No, because it already knows the answers: movies are to blame of course! And bad parenting as in not taking your kids to church where they would learn that marriage is a sacred institution and that somehow means gays can't be married, which Bush seemed to agree with, in fact, as Chris Rock points out, it was the one question he could consistently answer during his Presidency.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sKWo3Q-UZ8

To me, hurricane Katrina said it all and Bush, as devoutly religious, should have read that as a sign from God that he had seriously f'd up and now The Lord was showing him how exactly he f'd up by throwing him 'the last f'in thing he needed' (to quote a segment from The Daily Show) when the bulk of his army is overseas. If he reads 9/11 as a sign from God to respond, why was he slow to read Katrina as a holy crisis that needed to be dealt with? Because it's all about ideology and business folks. There was an ideological and financial reason to go to war in the middle East and so his administration saw a reason to respond to it. Their game plan had no stakes in the New Orleans situation so focused response was not necessary. Or Bush was, once again, too oblivious to know he needed to respond. Or a combination of both. Cheney and Rove saw no financial, ideological or political reason to respond and Dubya... was being Dubya. All and all it adds up to the worst administration in American history and you're left with an economic crisis (that they ignored) to boot.

But, ya know what, thank goodness they responded to that attack. Cause that solved everything. I mean, it subverted the constitution to take away people's rights, encouraged fear and paranoia, and bred hatredtism mistaken as patriotism but... alls well that ends well and thank goodness they did respond because nobody got hurt for no reason and we're all doing just fine and dandy now. Right?

Maybe Darth Vader should be Lee Atwater, as they both did the Emperor's dirty work and both had deathbed conversions.

Karlos,

...it doesn't respond to people who are just trying to get a rise out of us for reasons that nobody understands but them.

I don't know whether this is just part of your theoretical description of an ideal U.S.A., or whether you genuinely believe the reasons behind the attack were inexplicable, but anyone who identifies with this statement (the bolded part, that is) needs to do a little more reading about just what exactly the World Trade Organization does; how it and other global institutions (like the World Bank) "help" third-world nations find their feet in the capitalist global market. It might give you a better notion of just what the World Trade Center represented in the minds of the hijackers (and millions of others, in all parts of the world).

There was an ideological and financial reason to go to war in the middle East and so his administration saw a reason to respond to it.

Absolutely (if broadly) correct. Not only was the U.S. defending its land, its people and (especially) its economic interests in the Middle East, it was defending itself from a massive ideological assault on its capitalist, neoliberal approach to globalization.

What this discussion needs is Lucas's thinly veiled criticism of President Bush from Episode III.

Anakin: If you're not with me, then you're my enemy.
Obi Wan: Only a Sith deals in absolutes!

Anakin: If you're not with me, then you're my enemy.
Obi Wan: Only a Sith deals in absolutes!

Only a Sith...and, apparently, Obi-wan, who is unaware of "irony".

Perhaps this was Lucas' thinly veiled criticism of republican and democrat demogogues?