> star wars!?!
>
> i don't know about this... as weird as it may sound
> to some here, nearly all
> of the radicals and revolutionaries i am close to
> (and who grew up post-star
> wars) were first radicalized by star wars.
No, I dont think that is weird and, anyway, no one can doubt Star Wars as a source of inspiration for you and other people, if that was your "reading" (or in this case "viewing") of it.
I also dont doubt that George Lucas sees himself as a Left Democrat, though I personally dont know that to be a fact.
That said, I am going to go off on a tangent here and bring up an aspect of the movie that might very well go unnoticed. Lucas has admitted his debt to the jungian mythologist, Joseph Campbell, in particular Campbell's "Hero With a Thousdand Faces",which he claims inspired "Star Wars". In fact we can identify several jungian archetypes in the movie, Darth Vader (shadow), Princess Lea (the anima), etc. Now the reactionary aspect of all of this is that it sees human life sort of as an epiphemomenon of these cosmic, transcendental forces inherent in our psyche and by extension in the world. A life is just an instance of the perennial dance of these archetypes.
This view of the world diminishes to some extent the realm of human freedom. As part and partial of that,it also can lead to a sort of passive acceptance towards what is wrong in the world: since evil in the world is a result of humanity's failure to integrate its dark side, the best thing we could do to make the world a better place would be to put ourselves in jungian therapy. That's how the thinking goes, only it would be interesting to ask a Jungian what the chances would be of everyone doing that, since such a thing falls outside of the financial possibilities of 99 percent of humanity. Anyway, this response to life is sort of a modern reworking of the Book of Job.
Anyway, I think it is important to bring up this aspect of Star Wars which appeared on the scene about the time the "New Age" scene was starting to spawn. The New Age crowd is very aware of this aspect of the movie. Anyway, this touting of transcendentalism is what I find most reactionary in the movie.
Thomas
===== "The tradition of all the dead generations
weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living"
-Karl Marx
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