7/21/2023 0 Comments Struggle session star warsAnother strain of conservative thought beginning around the time of the prequels held that maybe the Empire wasn’t so bad after all. “Both Skywalker and the AMT started off with great intentions, but eventually they went astray,” he said.įrom Lucas’ perspective, at least Baucus was acknowledging that Anakin Skywalker erred in becoming Darth Vader. Max Baucus once argued on the floor of the world’s greatest deliberative body, is like Anakin Skywalker. (President Obama famously mangled the “Jedi mind trick.”) And analogies are stretched beyond all recognition: The alternative minimum tax, Sen. Quotes from the movie are repeated and garbled. You can’t trademark a political argument, or sue to keep a metaphor in check, and so it proliferates.įrom the 1980s on, the Congressional Record is littered with references to Skywalkers and Yodas, Death Stars and Darth Vaders. But the lawsuit was doomed because politics is so often thinly veiled plagiarism. It was telling that Lucas only tried to enforce his trademark when it was used to defend SDI. By 1985, even a group supporting the Strategic Defense Initiative was using the name in its ads - leading to an unsuccessful lawsuit on trademark infringement from Lucasfilm Ltd. When he gave a second speech a few weeks later calling for a space-based missile defense system, critics dubbed it “Star Wars,” and the name stuck. The Soviets decried the “Evil Empire speech,” as it came to be known, and Reagan himself walked the phrase back in a 1988 meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, arguing it came “from another time, another era.”īut the association was hard to shake, especially since Reagan was a former actor who was known to be influenced by watching movies. Dolan, who wrote that paragraph, later denied that the term “Evil Empire” was inspired by the Galactic Empire in “Star Wars,” but the image stuck in large part because of that resonance. “I urge you to beware the temptation of pride-the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil,” he said. One section of the speech ended up defining Reagan’s combative approach to the USSR: The White House’s conservatives struck back, taking some of the harsher lines from that speech and adding new jabs to one set to be delivered before the National Association of Evangelicals, an address that the foreign policy gurus would overlook. One speech at the British House of Commons in particular had been watered down. The political history of “Star Wars” began hopefully enough with Jimmy Carter - like Luke Skywalker a farmboy who went on to bigger things - watching “Episode IV: A New Hope” at Camp David in 1978 with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat as they held a secret strategy session for the historic Camp David Accords.īut the real breakthrough came in 1983, the same year as “Return of the Jedi.” President Reagan had been lobbing rhetorical attacks at the Soviet Union throughout his first term, but he’d faced pushback from the more Establishment foreign policy types in the White House.
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