Response to Conservative Critique of BSG
M, my coworker, has recently become addicted to Battlestar Galactica and forwarded me this article by Jonah Goldberg, which offers a conservative's eye view of the purported liberal shark-jumping of BSG (with additional references to several other series). I wanted to comment on a few of its points.
Star Wars:
Goldberg argues that, in Revenge of the Sith, having Obi-Wan tell Anakin that only a Sith thinks in terms of absolutes undermined the Star Wars universe for the sake of a cheap dig at Bush. He's right. Jedi philosophy is precisely the opposite. Jedi think in absolutes. They are Manicheans. Once one starts down the path of the Dark Side, forever will it dominate one's destiny. The ones who shun absolutes are the (incipient) Sith: they think that sometimes it's okay to dip a toe in the Dark Side; it needn't lead to Dark Side addiction. That doesn't mean that Bush is on the Light Side; it just means that Lucas' analogy was inappropriate and made no in-universe sense (unless it be that the Jedi at the tail end of the Old Republic were really confused, hence their obliteration).
X-Files:
Goldberg argues, similarly that the 2008 X-Files movie sacrificed narrative art to the cheap dig of visually comparing Bush to J. Edgar Hoover. Here he's wrong. This comparison is artistically appropriate for The X-Files. The entire story from episode 1 in 1992 has been about the tension of working for a Federal agency under a Federal regime one cannot trust. If standing in the halls of said agency pondering the troublingly dictatorial powers of the president is not in keeping with that theme, I'm not sure what would be.
Boston Legal
... gets thrown in there as an example of a biased liberal show that makes cheap digs at conservatives in an artistically trashy way. It certainly has a liberal bias; it takes no pains to hide it. But it also often treats conservatism seriously. Sometimes the liberals are wrong; sometimes the conservatives make very good points. And I'd just like to point out that the primary theme of the series is a liberal and a conservative falling in love and getting married (platonically).
BSG
I've only watched the whole series through once, and while I like it a lot, I'm not a rabid fan, so I really haven't tracked all the plot holes and inconsistencies. Thus, I'm not going to comment on Goldberg's arguments about when the plot ceases to make sense. I will make some points about his general ideological arguments.
He compares the Cylon invasion to 9/11. He's far from the only one, and the echo of 9/11 fears is undeniable, yet I find the comparison unapt. The Cylons were a vastly superior military force that drove the humans almost to extinction. The 9/11 attackers were a vastly inferior military force that committed a heartbreaking assault that, nonetheless, did very, very little to threaten the basic fabric of American society (unless indirectly by panicking the Americans into undermining their own economy, rights, and military personnel in their attempts to "fight back"). To compare the Cylons to the 9/11 attackers is so overblown that I can only see it as symptomatic of that panic.
Goldberg faults Ron Moore for not acknowledging "questioning" as an "ideology." Questioning is an ideology, he argues. Of course, he's right. BSG's problematizing of Cylon and human morality, justification, etc. is absolutely ideological: questioning is a political philosophy in itself.
Questioning is an ideology, moreover, with which Goldberg will have no truck. He likens BSG's moral relativism to denying the Holocaust: “'I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen, I’m just raising important questions.'”
Questioning the relative morality of one's allies and enemies, all good people must agree, is pernicious. After all, what led to the Holocaust in the first place if not all that Nazi propaganda about how maybe the Nazi project wasn't as self-evidently righteous as it seemed and maybe not all Jews were troublemakers but, on the contrary, maybe they could have feelings and contribute to society just like everyone else? When you start stepping down that slippery slope, the gas chambers can't be far behind (am being ironic, in case that's not clear).
Star Wars:
Goldberg argues that, in Revenge of the Sith, having Obi-Wan tell Anakin that only a Sith thinks in terms of absolutes undermined the Star Wars universe for the sake of a cheap dig at Bush. He's right. Jedi philosophy is precisely the opposite. Jedi think in absolutes. They are Manicheans. Once one starts down the path of the Dark Side, forever will it dominate one's destiny. The ones who shun absolutes are the (incipient) Sith: they think that sometimes it's okay to dip a toe in the Dark Side; it needn't lead to Dark Side addiction. That doesn't mean that Bush is on the Light Side; it just means that Lucas' analogy was inappropriate and made no in-universe sense (unless it be that the Jedi at the tail end of the Old Republic were really confused, hence their obliteration).
X-Files:
Goldberg argues, similarly that the 2008 X-Files movie sacrificed narrative art to the cheap dig of visually comparing Bush to J. Edgar Hoover. Here he's wrong. This comparison is artistically appropriate for The X-Files. The entire story from episode 1 in 1992 has been about the tension of working for a Federal agency under a Federal regime one cannot trust. If standing in the halls of said agency pondering the troublingly dictatorial powers of the president is not in keeping with that theme, I'm not sure what would be.
Boston Legal
... gets thrown in there as an example of a biased liberal show that makes cheap digs at conservatives in an artistically trashy way. It certainly has a liberal bias; it takes no pains to hide it. But it also often treats conservatism seriously. Sometimes the liberals are wrong; sometimes the conservatives make very good points. And I'd just like to point out that the primary theme of the series is a liberal and a conservative falling in love and getting married (platonically).
BSG
I've only watched the whole series through once, and while I like it a lot, I'm not a rabid fan, so I really haven't tracked all the plot holes and inconsistencies. Thus, I'm not going to comment on Goldberg's arguments about when the plot ceases to make sense. I will make some points about his general ideological arguments.
He compares the Cylon invasion to 9/11. He's far from the only one, and the echo of 9/11 fears is undeniable, yet I find the comparison unapt. The Cylons were a vastly superior military force that drove the humans almost to extinction. The 9/11 attackers were a vastly inferior military force that committed a heartbreaking assault that, nonetheless, did very, very little to threaten the basic fabric of American society (unless indirectly by panicking the Americans into undermining their own economy, rights, and military personnel in their attempts to "fight back"). To compare the Cylons to the 9/11 attackers is so overblown that I can only see it as symptomatic of that panic.
Goldberg faults Ron Moore for not acknowledging "questioning" as an "ideology." Questioning is an ideology, he argues. Of course, he's right. BSG's problematizing of Cylon and human morality, justification, etc. is absolutely ideological: questioning is a political philosophy in itself.
Questioning is an ideology, moreover, with which Goldberg will have no truck. He likens BSG's moral relativism to denying the Holocaust: “'I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen, I’m just raising important questions.'”
Questioning the relative morality of one's allies and enemies, all good people must agree, is pernicious. After all, what led to the Holocaust in the first place if not all that Nazi propaganda about how maybe the Nazi project wasn't as self-evidently righteous as it seemed and maybe not all Jews were troublemakers but, on the contrary, maybe they could have feelings and contribute to society just like everyone else? When you start stepping down that slippery slope, the gas chambers can't be far behind (am being ironic, in case that's not clear).