Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
I'm not a big Star Wars fanboy, though I like giant cgi explosion spectacles as much as the next person. I'll go see the last installment once the lines die down and I'll enjoy it for what it is. I have, however, been enjoying reading the usual humorless right-wing suspects denouncing the film as an intergalactic Fahrenheit 9/11. The crème de la crème was penned by the notoriously homophobic, right-wing, science fiction writer, Orson Scott Card (a North Carolinian, I'm sorry to admit). Card apparently believes that the Jedi are a bunch of atheistic, aristocratic liberal elites - clutch the pearls! - who "have way too much power."
If you haven't read it yet, you should, just to get a flavor of the overwrought projection that passes for conservative "thought" in 21st century America. I'll not bother dissecting it, since I'm already late to this game and others have done a fine job of it so far. Lance Mannion and Jaquandor have a couple of the best explanations of how Card and others manage to miss, oh, pretty much every point that could be missed. However, for the real "sheesh" kabobbing, we turn to PZ Myers:
I've liked a few of Card's books, but his commentaries convince me that I would not want to be in the same room with the guy, not without an emergency chemical shower and the possibility of a rapid, rocket assisted exit. This time, he is irate that people would actually like the Jedi religion.
It's one thing to put your faith in a religion founded by a real person who claimed divine revelation, but it's something else entirely to have, as the scripture of your religion, a storyline that you know was made up by a very nonprophetic human being.
Wha...? Your irony meters may have been spared if you didn't already know that Card is devoutly religious. Your meters are glowing heaps of radioactive slag right now if you knew that Card is a devout Mormon. [link added -'r]
Ha! See, Orson, with the exception of the random oddballs, the folks claiming Jedi as their religion on census forms generally do so as a joke, or at least fully cognizant that it's a movie. Swallowing Joseph Smith's bizarro "revelations," though, takes a very special sort of suspension of basic logic disbelief. I mean, once you get past the squeaky clean exterior, the LDS just believe the damnedest things and not, let's be clear, in any sort of kitschy, tongue-in-cheek manner.
Anyhow, the cherry atop Card's Oblivious Sundae is this:
It's a terrible thing, I suppose, for a writer to invent a religion and then discover that he and all his friends are on the wrong side of it.
You should ask that pacifist hippie Jesus about that one.
TrackBackWhat a bummer. I really like a lot of Card's books, and though I knew he was a Mormon, my take on the LDS folk has always been: Hey, they're a young religion, give 'em a chance to grow for a millenia or two. But homophobic right-wing personalities who read too much into Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc really annoy me. Sigh. As a writer - a fantasy writer no less, who's invented his own cultures and quasi-religions - you'd think he'd know better. Maybe he's just annoyed because Speaker-for-the-Dead-ism hasn't caught on.
Posted by: Dug Steen at May 25, 2005 10:10 AMThe thing is, Lucas' ideas about "the force" are so insipid and vague, you can pretty much read anything you want into them. It's probably more a comment on Card than Lucas that he looks at the movie screen and sees liberal aristocrats (just as it probably says something about me that I look at them and see a theocratic cabal of unelected devotees of an esoteric religion with a prediliction for creepy guru-devotee relationships and a yin for blood purity.)
Anyway, what I want to know is, do the Jedi have their own underwear? 'Cause just like Mormons, they seem to have some weird issues with repression of sexual desires going on... And let's face it, without special underwear, those lose robes are pretty easy-access...
Posted by: Jake at May 25, 2005 11:38 AMAnd, of course, Lucas is the only person to have ever imagined a universal, um, "force" that ties together and perhaps oversees all living things and with proper training can be sensed, accessed, influenced, felt and/or manipulated by adherents to the religion.
Holy Ghost much, Orson?
From where I'm sitting, The Force is a pretty generic summation of the points largely in common among all world religions. Hello, it's called making the story accessible. Name one person you know who doesn't get the idea of The Force. Every culture has somewhere in its present or its past a mystic tradition. It's all part of Lucas' ability (gift?) to boil down his setting to the bare essentials: Good vs. Evil, the Light Side and the Dark Side, Dudes With Swords & Dudes With Guns, The Force, etc. Orson Scott Card looks at the Jedi and sees atheistic elites, but The Force itself is obviously a product of reducing many (if not all) world religions into their base essence: the magic juice that comes from Beyond. Card's problem with the whole deal smells an awful lot like that tape I've got laying around somewhere of selections from Python's Holy Grail dubbed into Japanese and then subtitled back into English, you know? The framework is left intact but the jokes just don't fly.
Jesus H. in Sith armor. What a jackass.
I should note that I say all this as someone whose religion is considered by many to be among the "fruitier" varieties, and that Card would almost certainly find me an unbelievably effete liberal heathen and that's long before he got around to the gay sex.
That has nothing to do with his own being an asshole, though. When Card looks at the Jedi, I suspect, he sees a band of (short term, anyway) doomed mystics whose adherence to their rules and standards has left them out-of-step with the rest of society. Their effort to re-assert control and maintain their definition of "order" is what, in the end, seals their own death sentences. I wonder what on Earth he could find bothersome about that idea?
Posted by: Robust McManlyPants at May 25, 2005 12:45 PMHoly Ghost much, Orson?
Hehe. Between this and the underwear thing, you've saved me from my utter dismay and disappointment in Card. Now I just have to clean up the coffee spray.
Posted by: Ru at May 27, 2005 04:30 PMWell if he got that bent out of shape by the Jedi religion I'm sure that he'll go bonkers when he finds out that a religion has been made out of The Matrix trilogy.
http://www.geocities.com/matrixism2069
Posted by: Peaches at August 13, 2006 02:27 AM