House of Eratosthenes

Linked here…and I don’t have time at the moment, but I do think I can find an additional ten jewels in The Empire Strikes Back, alone. But it’s a good start.

George Lucas does have a hidden talent, here. The fact that he did a much better job of it back in the olden days when he was still struggling somewhat, suggests strongly that it isn’t all his. And as we all saw in The Phantom Menace, his presentation of these lessons can be stilted, awkward, cringe-inducing as he commits the cardinal sin of storytelling, which is to fail to connect with his audience.

But some of this, although it comes straight from cookie-cutter eastern-religious tenets, has been molded and decorated gracefully by someone who truly believes in it, which results in some truly deep stuff. Not complicated, just deep. The result is great artwork, on par with some of the most notable tragedies from Shakespeare and ancient Greek storytellers. The music and the lightsabers, just those two alone, would never have made Star Wars what it has, in fact, become.

As far as complexity goes, I think all we’re really dealing with is some thoughts about preparing for death, tossed in a stewpot with Things I Know #111, 115 and 228.

Morgan, thanks for linking to it.

I breezed through it, and you’ll be slightly disappointed in some of the lessons drawn by the daily mind guy.

In fact, the stuff he’s picking out of the movies to bolster his obviously liberal principles is making me like the movies less.

But, you’re right: there are so many timeless themes that Lucas uses in his movies. And as long as the general public ignores the classics, the easier it is to borrow from them and cash in.

Maybe I’m on to something here…..
- wch | 05/01/2009 @ 16:00
Lucas still gets a lot of credit for not being too preachy. Lord knows I have my opinions about how the galaxy should work…and if they were my movies, believe me, we wouldn’t have any vagueness or uncertainty about what the lessons are supposed to be. “Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our point of view” is elegant in what it leaves unsaid. I like his way better.

Lucas came out swinging last summer in favor of Obama, and to me this is a direct contradiction to what seemed to be expressed in the Yoda movies: Keep a low profile, render judgment not upon one’s size (said profile), don’t be flashy, to thine own self be true. Only GL himself can say for sure if something had to be torn down and rebuilt there, but cut him some slack because it’s been over thirty years. I think, back in the ’70’s, he was just another long-haired hippy trying to find truth in the eastern religions, hemp shirts, eschewing materialism, and all that, whereas now the flabbier older version of Lucas is more interested in making the right friends and getting into paradise. If he does think these core ideals have remained consistent, and Obama is in some way a manifestation of the message the shorter and less articulate Yoda was trying to get out…then, as Obi-Wan would say, he is truly lost. That would mean he has run the entire gauntlet between classic liberalism, and the bastardization of it that enshrouds us now.
- mkfreeberg | 05/01/2009 @ 16:30
Welll…

I’ve just been having this discussion with a friend, who coincidentally lives close enough to George Lucas (a notable leftie, of course) to occasionally see him from her deck.

My take on this for 30 years or so has been that several generations have increasingly taken fantasy movies as somehow based in “Hope,” and as a possible alternative to facing reality. Beginning with the fascination with childrens’ stories (Hobbits, etc) and continuing through the various Star Wars, Treks, etc, millions have swallowed this stuff whole without your understanding of universal themes, and come to believe that “Step Two” (“Then a miracle happens”) is not only likely but inevitable. The thing that was truly inevitable is illustrated in the link you cited the other day:

http://obamaisnotthemessiah.blogspot.com/

As I said to my friend, imagine growing up in the ’50s, like we did, only with adolescents who refused to grow up, all the while assuming the identity of characters in Alice Through the Looking Glass (like Trekkies, role-playing gamers, etc.) Absolutely every one of the people quoted on this site is convinced of the possibility of supernatural intervention, and in a way that will make his own eventual toilet-training unnecessary and somehow avoidable. No wonder they project such rabid insanity on Christians.

I’m absolutely certain that someday it will be apparent, in retrospect, that an entire society willfully infantilized itself to the point where the new Goebbels had a ready-made audience for the most outrageous bullshit ever conceived. I want to have faith in the outcome, but this can only be compared to the fall of Rome. (Note, btw, the picture with Soros gloating over the chumps in the NY townhouse while the One stands on the steps, slightly, uh, elevated under a sky light.)

Just an old guy’s perspective, FWIW.
- rob | 05/01/2009 @ 16:42
Sorry…

The link I intended was the original:

http://obamamessiah.blogspot.com/

Duh.
- rob | 05/01/2009 @ 16:44
No, I think that’s awesome — that those two sites are paired up. I had no idea.

Regarding the “Fall of Rome,” that pulls us once again to that favorite of 2009 debates: Is there any reason for people who believe in reality to sustain any hope? The reverse of which, i envision as follows: Does reality, itself, have an “escape velocity”? Can people who put a little bit too much stock in hobbits, goblins, lightworkers, hope & change eventually become intoxicated on their own elixir that they can sever the bonds between a society, and reality itself, and thus doom that society?

And it is my contention that if reality did indeed have an escape velocity, there would be nothing sacred or special about it. It is the ultimate Black Hole. This enchantment with Obama…these real life “Stan’s Dad” folks who are telling their bosses “I don’t have to take your crap anymore, Obama’s in charge now!”…these dimbulbs who think The One will pay their mortgages and put gas in their cars…they’re just on a brief sojourn. Nothing more. It is, strictly, a pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later doctrine. And regarding this unfortunate revolution taking place in the here & now? There isn’t even anything extraordinary about it. It happens every sixteen years, like clockwork, and it’s over in a flash. In 2024-25 we’ll be doing it all over again.
- mkfreeberg | 05/01/2009 @ 16:53
mkfreeberg | May 1, 2009 @ 4:53 pm

Man, I hope you’re right. As I’ve said before, your optimism re our country is a tonic.

What gives me nightmares is how quickly, and with what powerful support, the lunatics have taken over the asylum, as exemplified by the public statements of Holder, Napolitano, Clinton et al.

Certainly it’s dangerous to draw too many historical parallels, but I can’t help noting the similarity to the only clear message of Marxism, i.e. “The proletariat will take over the means of production, and then…a miracle will occur.”

There has never been, as there isn’t now, any mention of how the world will improve, merely that unicorns are nicer, somehow. Scares the crap outta me
- rob | 05/01/2009 @ 17:17
Well …. of course there is some truth to the fact that what we often take as truth isn’t necessarily true in an absolute sense.

As a matter of fact, in my brilliant book which I have not yet written, I think of truth as an asymptotic curve as far as our brains’ ability to model what is concrete. Literary “truths” in general apply very well within certain parameters, but break down when moved to a different context — which is what that whole Yoda thing was getting at. Is light a wave or a particle? Neither, really. In some ways it behaves like waves and in some ways it behaves like particles. But it doesn’t mean it isn’t instructive and useful to treat it one way or the other depending on what properties of light we’d like to analyze or harness.

Many of my liberal friends are surprised to hear that I am a big fan of the books “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and “The Dancing Wu Li Masters”. I’ve also read an entire metric shit-ton of Alan Watts, and I like it.

~~The~~ One problem with Progressives is that they have taken the leap from “we can’t really know the absolute truth” to “there is no truth”.

Of course, when one of them tells me there is no truth I like to ask them “are you sure about that”?

It really gets amusing (in a pathetic and dangerous sense) when they insist that we believe that there is no truth… in an attempt to get the rest of us to behave according to what they believe is true, but won’t admit that they believe it’s true, because there is no truth. Dangerous because when people refuse to go along with their truth they get really frustrated and start systematically killing off those who disagree with them in massive numbers. (Which is why all the Jack Booted Thugs have been one variant or another of Socialist enforcers).

George Turner at the Rottweiler (ancient but classic post) has a whole different take on who the good guys and bad guys are in the Star Wars series, and it is compelling to think about at a certain level. In other words, there is truth to his point of view. There are varying degrees of truth in many things depending on the context. It’s “We Are Sith” Part I and Part II.

Like, say, for instance, “waterboarding is torture” or “torture is wrong”. Torture is usually wrong, no doubt. And the word “torture” gets used awfully freely in our affluent, posh, comfy society. Where one draws the line may very well depend on how one political party can use their definition to attack another political party.
- philmon | 05/01/2009 @ 20:56
I guess a shorter way of saying some of what I was getting at with the Progressive “there is no truth” meme is that they have abandoned the nugget of truth in that statement in an act of self-contradiction, and it has become merely a Progressive tool to get people to drop their own “truths” so that they [the Progressives] can then swoop in and fill the vacuum with their version.
- philmon | 05/01/2009 @ 21:01
This is idiotic. It’s a hamhanded attempt to take the beauty that is “Star Wars” and try to find ways to criticize the “stilted” thinking of people of faith. It tries to debunk the idea that there is no such thing as truth, right and wrong, and so on.

Frankly, it reminds me of how irritated I got back in 2005 when Revenge of the Sith was released. I didn’t appreciate all the comparisons of Bush to Palpatine – with Bush’s statement that you’re with us or with the terrorists. Or how the Patriot Act was somehow comparable to Palpatine’s dissolving of the Republic Senate “to cheers” as Padme put it.

Hogwash. Utter and complete bullshit. I regret even the 2 minutes I spent skimming the article.
- cylarz | 05/02/2009 @ 22:50

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