PatchWork | Personal

The Empire in "Star Wars" is bad because they created a weapon entirely for the purpose of annihilating entire populated planets and killing billions of people. The original trilogy has a very black and white Saturday-morning cartoon morality. It was only when Lucas came back to it as an older man and actually started thinking about the question of why Anakin Skywalker would abandon the Jedi to join the Dark Side that he really began to add complexity to it. And considering the OT was made by a boomer white guy lefty who was slyly suggesting in the 1970s that the Vietcong were the good guys, the prequels function as a pretty sharp critique of democracy. The Republic is completely paralyzed by competing factions trying to extract rents for their constituents at everyone else's expense, and anyone trying to get anything productive done has to do complex horse-trading involving paying wasteful graft to these interests in order to build a coalition for their policies. This is what all the Trade Federation nonsense in Phantom Menace is about. And while the Republic was trying to keep all these disparate interests united by paying off special interests, its entire structure got turned inside out by Palpatine. And the Jedi were too preoccupied with running nonsense errands on behalf of the Republic Senate and being sent around the galaxy like rent-a-cops to solve problems for the various factions that they didn't notice any of this happening. And the reason that Anakin was susceptible to corruption by Palpatine is that the Jedi and the Republic didn't offer him any possibility of a good life. They bound him to a code of celibacy and service to these grubby little factions and their dysfunctional, wasteful, corrupt government. And that's supposed to be good, because, what, democracy? Honestly I can see how a politician like Palpatine who spent his career in Republic institutions might reasonably decide that fascism enforced with a planet-destroying space laser would be a superior system. Of course, Palpatine sucked too. Anakin didn't get anything he was promised in exchange for betraying the Jedi. He still lost his family and he got turned into a cyborg terminator, and it didn't even work out that well for Palpatine, whose engagement with the dark side of the Force turned him into a cryptkeeper. But things didn't go much better for Obi Wan, who spent the rest of his life squatting in a hut in the desert. And even the sequel trilogy (if you consider that canon), the galaxy immediately turned into a mess after the Empire fell, the new Republic had all the same problems the old one did and Luke's commitment to the Jedi ideals got him the same crappy life Obi Wan had. "Star Wars" ended up being about how everything is terrible no matter what you do.